Afternoon, Nov. 24, 1963, Walter Cronkite: Death to "the 24-year-old Marxist, pro-Castroite."

CBS News Live Coverage of The Assassination of President Kennedy
From The Afternoon of Sunday November 24th 1963,
58:56



start: 10:08
This is Walter Cronkite back in our CBS newsroom in New York. We shall be returning to Washington, of course, very shortly, but this is to report, again, that Lee Harvey Oswald, the 24-year-old Marxist, pro-Castroite, who Dallas police said they had a "cinched" case against as the accused assassin of President Kennedy, was himself shot to death in Dallas an hour-and-a-half ago. He was shot in the basement of the city jail, as police attempted to transfer him from that jail where he'd been held since the assassination, to the County jail a few blocks away. The police captured a man at the scene who reporters saw shoot Oswald and have booked him. Police say his name is Jack Ruby, or Rubenstein,

The police capture at man at the scene who reporters saw shoot. He is 52-years-old, a batchelor, a Dallas nightclub operator, who, as far as anyone has been able to find out, had no particular political opinions.

Rubenstein, or "Ruby" as he's known there, had been in Dallas some ten years. He left an automobile just outside the entrance to the basement, leaped a three-foot fence, and with perfect timing dashed into an open door of the basement just as Oswald was led from an elevator from the upstairs jail toward an armored car that had been brought to the jail for special precautions in moving him to the county building.

Ruby, if that---it turns out to be the man involved in the murder of Oswald, ran forward, right up to Oswald and from less than a foot away fired a small caliber pistol. The bullet did mortal damage to Oswald, who apparently never regained consciousness. He was taken to Parkland hospital and died an hour and fifteen minutes after he was shot in an emergency room just ten feet from the room where President Kennedy had dies almost exactly forty-eight hours before.
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