Pearl survivor also withstood Oswald’s shooting

James “Jim” Leavelle, 96, has a history of being at the wrong place at the wrong time but living to tell the tale.

Leavelle was just 21 when he survived the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as a young supply sailor aboard the USS Whitney. The destroyer tender wasn’t assigned to Pearl Harbor, but was there Dec. 7, 1941. While the Whitney wasn’t damaged, its crew saw the smoke rising from Ford Island and from the burning battleships that surrounded the ship.

Leavelle’s timing didn’t improve much over the decades.

Twenty-two years later, at age 43, Leavelle was the Dallas homicide detective assigned to protect Lee Harvey Oswald for his Nov. 24, 1963, jail transfer. He was handcuffed to Oswald when nightclub operator Jack Ruby fired the pistol shot that killed the suspected killer of President John F. Kennedy and gave birth to decades of conspiracy theories.

“If you survive the two, you are lucky, that’s the only thing you could say,” Leavelle said Thursday from his room at the Hilton Hawaiian Village Waikiki Beach Resort during an interview with the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. “I guess I can see why they make a hero out of me, but I was just doing my job. ”

Leavelle is in Honolulu this week with hundreds of other World War II veterans to mark the 75th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

“You ask me, what do I remember about Pearl Harbor?” Leavelle said. “Everything that happened. You figure out what that means.”

After the attack, Leavelle ended up in a convalescent facility near San Diego, where he was treated for injuries sustained during a typhoon that threw him over a ship’s rail before the Pearl Harbor attack. He didn’t break any bones, but sustained enough damage to be viewed as a combat liability when he landed knee-first on a steel deck.

Kate Griendling, Leavelle’s 30-year-old granddaughter, said this trip back to Hawaii was emotional for him.

“It was extremely important for him to see where the USS Whitney was docked during the attack,” said Griendling, who accompanied him to Hawaii. “He told the admiral at the tour that he could die in peace knowing that he had seen that spot again.”

Griendling said her grandfather often talks of Pearl Harbor, but she thinks he felt helpless because his typhoon-related injuries kept him out of most of the action.

“He was only given shore duty, and that affected him,” she said. “The thing that changed the course of his life by far was JFK. Not that he did anything different day to day, but it thrust him into a spotlight that he didn’t ask for. However, I think it gave him the purpose. He’s lived to 96 and he’s still going strong.”

In his light-colored suit and cowboy hat, Leavelle was immortalized in the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo shot by Robert Jackson for the Dallas Times Herald. The photo shows Oswald grimacing from the hit that Leavelle said also brought him “closer than I’d like to think of being shot that day.”

Leavelle said he was handcuffed to Oswald for extra security.

“I told my captain, ‘With all the threats being made, I’m going to handcuff myself to him. If they try to take him, they’ll have to take me, and I’m not going,’” he said.

As Leavelle was getting ready to transfer Oswald, he recalls telling him, “Lee, if anyone shoots at you, I hope they are as good a shot as you.”

He said Oswald laughed because the detective had praised his shooting, and he replied, “Nobody’s going to shoot me.”

Leavelle also remembers interacting with Oswald earlier when he interviewed him as a suspect in the murder of police officer J.D. Tippit, who was shot to death in a Dallas residential neighborhood the same day Kennedy was assassinated.

“He said, ‘I haven’t shot anybody,’” Leavelle said. “When I discovered that he was going to be a suspect in the presidential shooting, I realized that he was getting his denial in early.”

The day after Oswald’s assassination, Leavelle transferred Ruby. Leavelle said he told Ruby, “You didn’t do us any favors. Why did you shoot him?”

He said Ruby answered with something like, “I just wanted to be a hero, but it just looks like I screwed things up good.”

Based on his interactions with Ruby and Oswald, Leavelle said, he believes they had similarly “arrogant and egotistical” personalities. “Both of them wanted to be somebody important,” he said.

Leavelle said he’s heard a plethora of conspiracy theories, including two separate but memorable ones from a Baptist preacher and an attorney he thought were lying. “When I asked them to take a polygraph test, you never saw someone get so sick in your life,” he said.

Leavelle, who testified to the Warren Commission, which investigated Kennedy’s assassination, said he remains committed to the idea that Oswald acted alone.

“I had enough evidence. If I could have put it on trial, I could have convinced everybody. But I didn’t get to do that,” he said.