Wit & Attitude Quote by Jack Ruby

Vigilantism rarely sounds noble when it’s phrased like a barroom toast, and Jack Ruby’s line lands with that blunt, oily certainty. “Someone had to do it” is the oldest self-exoneration in the American toolkit: a claim of necessity that skips straight past law, due process, and consequences. Ruby doesn’t argue; he deputizes himself. The sentence is engineered to make his violence feel like a civic chore, the dirty work polite society secretly wants done.

Then comes the possessive jolt: “my President.” Ruby isn’t just avenging John F. Kennedy; he’s claiming him. The subtext is emotional ownership as political legitimacy, turning a national trauma into personal mandate. It’s a rhetoric of belonging: if the President is “mine,” the killer is an intruder, and the avenger becomes an heir to the community’s grief. Ruby’s profanity does double duty, signaling authenticity (no PR varnish, just raw feeling) while also granting permission for the audience to hate without nuance. It’s not evidence; it’s catharsis.

Context makes the quote even more radioactive. Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald on live television, inside the machinery of justice itself, short-circuiting the very closure he pretends to provide. In that instant, his “someone” becomes the stand-in for a wounded public desperate for a villain and a finale. The line sells moral clarity at the price of truth, and it helped seed the American suspicion that whenever history feels too neat, somebody staged the ending.