Henry Wade

Henry Menasco Wade (November 11, 1914—March 1, 2001), was a Texas lawyer who participated in two of the most notable US court cases of the 20th century, the prosecution of Jack Ruby for killing Lee Harvey Oswald and the US Supreme Court's decision legalizing abortion, Roe v. Wade.

Wade and the Kennedy Assassination

In 1947, Wade joined the Dallas County District Attorney's Office. He won election to the top job only four years later, a position he would hold for thirty-six years straight, from 1951 until his voluntary retirement in 1987. In the early afternoon hours of November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in downtown Dallas, just blocks from Wade's headquarters in the Dallas County Courthouse. Wade recounted that Cliff Carter, a member of newly sworn-in President Lyndon B. Johnson's staff, telephoned him three times that night. According to Wade, Johnson wanted any evidence of a potential conspiracy suppressed, lest the stability of the nation or its foreign relations be put in jeopardy. Wade asserted that Johnson essentially ordered him to "charge Oswald with plain murder." In point of fact, that was actually the only available option, because in 1963 there was no federal law concerning assassination of the president: technically, the JFK assassination was a conventional murder case over which only Dallas County held jurisdiction.

Related Topics:
Dallas County - District Attorney - November 22, 1963 - John F. Kennedy - Cliff Carter - Lyndon B. Johnson

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Wade lost the opportunity to try Lee Harvey Oswald for JFK's murder when Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot the suspect just two days later. Nonetheless, Wade became nationally recognized for prosecuting Ruby himself for Oswald's murder. An aura of mystery still surrounds these proceedings; many writers claim that Oswald and Ruby had in fact been acquainted. In that celebrated trial, Wade went hand-to-hand against the famed San Francisco attorney Melvin Belli. Legend has it that Wade, in an effort to ridicule his opponent and possibly to play to anti-ethnic prejudices, deliberately mispronounced Belli's name as "Belly". When Belli politely corrected Wade, the latter acquiesced; a short time later, Wade moved that the court adjourn for the lunch hour so that he and his staff could have some "spaghet-tye." Ruby, for his part, died while waiting for an appeal; he claimed that various entities were trying to poison him.

Related Topics:
Lee Harvey Oswald - Jack Ruby - Melvin Belli

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