Where's Ruth's couch?

[Ron Bulman]

On 6/2/2017 at 10:21 PM, Chris Newton said:

Actually, the key to that photo is the "little desk secretary" which allegedly gave Ruth the opportunity to steal Oswald's handwritten note. She stated that the little desk secretary and the couch switched places on Nov. 11th when she asked Lee and Michael to move them. By her account the little desk secretary had been on the north wall and the couch on the east wall and they swapped positions and that's where they stayed through the time of her testimony.

The photo on 11/23/63 proves that her story was an "invention" and that the furniture had not moved prior to 11/23/63.

If she didn't tell the truth about the provenance of the note then that is perjury.

Maybe Greg should read this thread for perspective on Ruth's involvement?

[Denny Zartman]

7 minutes ago, Ron Bulman said:

Maybe Greg should read this thread for perspective on Ruth's involvement?

Greg has made up his mind on this issue and will never deviate from his belief that Paine is innocent.

[Ron Bulman]

6 minutes ago, Denny Zartman said:

Greg has made up his mind on this issue and will never deviate from his belief that Paine is innocent.

Well, he still ought to read it to learn how reality works.

[Denny Zartman]

31 minutes ago, Ron Bulman said:

Well, he still ought to read it to learn how reality works.

I agree.

[Sandy Larsen]

I don't know why Greg (and certain others) find it offensive that Ruth worked for the CIA. Back then it was a patriotic thing to do. And anybody who knows the intelligence concepts of compartmentalization and "need to know" will understand that Ruth had no idea she was being used to kill Kennedy and frame Oswald.

Greg himself recently posted old, forgotten information that could explain why Ruth was so compliant in providing false information after the assassination. She and Michael were apparently framed by the CIA into being  assassination co-conspirators.

 

[Denny Zartman]

1 minute ago, Sandy Larsen said:

Ruth had no idea she was being used to kill Kennedy and frame Oswald.

But it seems to me that at some point very soon after the assassination Ruth must have known she was part of framing Oswald. She and her hand-picked Russian translator sat in on Marina's police interrogation, didn't they?

[James DiEugenio]

Denny :

When I told you that a new article at K and K would drive GD to take anti nausea pills, this was it. 

I have been trying to get Chris to put this material in essay form for months, maybe years.  To me its the strongest, most incriminating evidence we have of Ruth's role before the assassination.

The problem is Chris moved from Florida to California right after he stopped noting this stuff.  And it was not an easy move.  Then he got caught up in the whole pandemic thing.  But I am still trying to get him to finish it.  I really hope he does.

 

[Sandy Larsen]

2 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

Denny :

When I told you that a new article at K and K would drive GD to take anti nausea pills, this was it. 

I have been trying to get Chris to put this material in essay form for months, maybe years.  To me its the strongest, most incriminating evidence we have of Ruth's role before the assassination.

The problem is Chris moved from Florida to California right after he stopped noting this stuff.  And it was not an easy move.  Then he got caught up in the whole pandemic thing.  But I am still trying to get him to finish it.  I really hope he does.

 

 

Yeah, it's a shame that we don't have a good record of Chris's findings on this topic.

I'd also like to see a permanent record of his findings regarding Oswald's military ID that was issued upon his departure from the Marines... the one that would normally be issued to dependents. As I recall it was similar to Gary Powers' military ID (except that it wasn't laminated in plastic). Maybe it's just me, but I found it to be evidence of Oswald being employed by the CIA.

 

[Sandy Larsen]

6 hours ago, Denny Zartman said:

But it seems to me that at some point very soon after the assassination Ruth must have known she was part of framing Oswald. She and her hand-picked Russian translator sat in on Marina's police interrogation, didn't they?

 

I don't recall about Ruth sitting in on Marina's interrogation. But I think it is certain that the Paines figured out right away that they'd been used when they heard about Oswald's arrest. In a telephone conversation Michael said something to the effect that they both knew who was behind the assassination... and he didn't mean Oswald. (He may have thought that Oswald did it, but that the CIA was behind it. Something like that.)

 

[Greg Doudna]

On 7/9/2020 at 11:55 PM, Greg Doudna said:

Chris Newton, you have established that Ruth Paine on March 23, 1964, testified under oath (technically, Friends' "affirmation" not oath but with the same legal force as oath) that her sofa was on the north wall of her living room on Nov 22. However the Alan Grant photo of Nov 22 shows the sofa on the east wall; your excellent analysis on that point is airtight. The suggestion is that Ruth Paine committed perjury, that she never moved her furniture on Nov 10 as she claimed, and that the motive for these multiple perjuries stemmed from an untrue invention of a claim of furniture moving on Nov 10 generated as part of her story of hiding the handwritten draft of Oswald's Russian Embassy letter. Here I propose a different interpretation of the same facts.

First, it can be established that Ruth Paine had a practice of moving that sofa between those two walls on other occasions. The evidence is that on the date of the WC testimony of March 23, 1964 held in her home, the sofa was at the north wall (https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=43#relPageId=420&tab=page). But four months earlier the sofa was on the east wall (the photo of Nov 23). At some time between November and March the sofa had been moved from east wall to north wall.

The fact of this later move of the sofa removes the need to hypothesize an extraordinary explanation to account for the claim of Ruth Paine to have moved her sofa earlier in the exact same way, if one simple explanation can be discovered that accounts for all such sofa movings, not just one.

This raises the question: why would a woman in a house move a sofa from the east wall to the north wall, or vice versa?

I think the explanation that makes the best sense is related to avoiding sun in the eyes, at the times that television is being watched.

The television is set in the southwest of the room facing northeast. Its position does not change, and faces the sofa in either position of the sofa. There is a huge picture window in the southern wall. The sun rises in the east, sets in the west, and for a picture window with southern exposure, setting in the west would be direct sun on people sitting in the sofa if it is at the east wall. (. . .)

I researched and wrote this over twenty months ago on this thread.

Edited December 1, 2022 by Greg Doudna

[Greg Doudna]

As concerns the soviet embassy letter, Oswald left his draft out in the open for over a day, never even hid it, just left it out there lying around in the open in Ruth's living room, knowing Ruth would look at it. Oswald was the operative. He intended Ruth to find it and report it. Two handwriting experts testified that handwritten draft was in Oswald's handwriting and no handwriting expert has ever said it was not, so that is settled. Whether Oswald was or was not in Mexico City is irrelevant to the fact that Oswald wrote that he was; addressed it to a Soviet official by name in Washington, D.C., who was KGB/assassinations; left it out knowing Ruth would find it and maybe report it--that letter was part of an operation done by Oswald.

What Chris Newton did in this thread was establish that the sofa was in a different position in Ruth's living room in Nov 1963 than Ruth said it was in her later testimony to the Warren Commission. That is a fact, Chris showed it from the Nov 22 Alan Grant photograph. Now, how to interpret that fact? Nobody in all the prior discussion in this thread had considered the explanation for Ruth's sofa-moving on Nov 10 that became clear to me when I studied this--that it had to do with sun in the eyes. Not considering a mundane explanation for why Ruth would possibly have men in her house switch positions of furniture in her living room on Nov 10, a complex conspiratorial explanation was manufactured in explanation of the fact shown. 

The existential question therefore to readers of this thread is: why consider a mundane innocent explanation for a fact when a vastly more complex sinister one is possible?   

[Pat Speer]

4 hours ago, Greg Doudna said:

As concerns the soviet embassy letter, Oswald left his draft out in the open for over a day, never even hid it, just left it out there lying around in the open in Ruth's living room, knowing Ruth would look at it. Oswald was the operative. He intended Ruth to find it and report it. Two handwriting experts testified that handwritten draft was in Oswald's handwriting and no handwriting expert has ever said it was not, so that is settled. Whether Oswald was or was not in Mexico City is irrelevant to the fact that Oswald wrote that he was; addressed it to a Soviet official by name in Washington, D.C., who was KGB/assassinations; left it out knowing Ruth would find it and maybe report it--that letter was part of an operation done by Oswald.

What Chris Newton did in this thread was establish that the sofa was in a different position in Ruth's living room in Nov 1963 than Ruth said it was in her later testimony to the Warren Commission. That is a fact, Chris showed it from the Nov 22 Alan Grant photograph. Now, how to interpret that fact? Nobody in all the prior discussion in this thread had considered the explanation for Ruth's sofa-moving on Nov 10 that became clear to me when I studied this--that it had to do with sun in the eyes. Not considering a mundane explanation for why Ruth would possibly have men in her house switch positions of furniture in her living room on Nov 10, a complex conspiratorial explanation was manufactured in explanation of the fact shown. 

The existential question therefore to readers of this thread is: why consider a mundane innocent explanation for a fact when a vastly more complex sinister one is possible?   

I agree with you on most of this stuff, Greg. But I think it should be noted that officially Ruth Paine knew the Oswald letter to the embassy was important and yet, even so, failed to tell the Dallas Police about it on the day of the assassination. No, she held it to the next day to tell Hosty about it personally.

Now, she may have done this as a courtesy to Hosty. But the more likely situation in my eyes is that Ruth was excited about her place in history, and wanted to play a little spy vs spy. This cuts into her credibility in my opinion. A lot. To her credit, she has admitted she has some animosity against Lee--an animosity the supposedly peevish Lee failed to return, btw. 

And that's the best one can say about Ruth on this issue. 

At one point, I did a little digging and found that the WC claimed the U.S. government became aware of Oswald's letter when the Soviets supplied them with a copy. This hid that they'd already had a copy thanks to the top secret mail-opening program they had in place for mail sent to the Russian embassy. 

As a result, I still have the suspicion Hosty gave the letter to Ruth and told her to pretend she'd found it. That way they could use it against Lee without admitting where they got it from. I mean, think about it. If the Russians had failed to provide them with a copy were they just gonna pretend they didn't have one? Of course not. Ruth's "finding" the letter may very well have been their back-up plan. 

And now to a side subject...handwriting analysis. First of all, handwriting analysis is not exactly reliable. Second of all, the FBI had a lab of experts who not only analyzed handwriting, but were themselves expert forgers. I remember reading this in a book on the FBI crime lab published in the 50's. It was noted that these experts were sometimes used to implicate Russian agents in schemes that would get them in hot water in Moscow, in hopes of turning these agents.

The Russians, of course, had this same capability. The "Dear Mr. Hunt letter" was a KGB forgery designed to implicate H.L. Hunt. Of course, the research community took it to mean Howard Hunt (who would of course never have given Oswald his real name). In any event. I seem to remember that the HSCA took a look at this letter and couldn't determine if it was in fact a forgery. IOW, it was a successful forgery. 

 

[James DiEugenio]

I recommend everyone read what Chris wrote.

Not what someone else says he wrote.

Go to page 4 of this thread and you will see the gist of Chris' argument. IMO, it is really insightful, and penetrating.  It goes to the heart of that whole "letter to the Russian embassy" story which I have always found dubious. By exposing the whole furniture moving idea, Chris shows that this was an excuse by Ruth to disguise what she was really doing.  It is of the utmost importance. 

 

Edited April 29, 2022 by James DiEugenio

[Ron Bulman]

On 6/5/2017 at 6:13 PM, Chris Newton said:

Ruth Paine has asserted in her testimony before the Warren Commission that...

Oswald's rough draft of the alleged Soviet Embassy letter was noticed by her on the "little desk secretary" in the living room sometime on Saturday Nov. 10th.

The letter remained there untouched until Sunday morning when Ruth Paine read the letter and then copied it.

Eventually, Sunday evening she asked her husband, Michael, and Lee Oswald to move the "little desk secretary" to the east wall and the living room couch to the north wall, swapping their locations in the living room.

Moments prior to the furniture re-arranging, Ruth Paine removed Oswald's alleged rough draft from the top of the "little desk secretary" and placed it inside the "little desk secretary", hiding it from view.

She then kept the rough draft allegedly written by LHO until 11/22/63 when she gave it to FBI Agent Hosty.

She then, in a followup interview by FBI Agent Odum, supplied that Agent with her handwritten copy.

 

My assertion is that the "little desk secretary" event is an invention designed to coverup the real story about the provenance of Oswald's alleged rough draft.

The photograph taken on 11/23/63 shows the couch and "little desk secretary" in an arrangement that is impossible on that date if Ruth Paine's story is true.

 

Here it is in a nutshell.  LHO didn't write the letter, thus Ruth didn't copy it.  It was provided to her. 

[James DiEugenio]

Ron, that is what I think Chris is aiming for in the end.

And if he can prove that, its a bombshell.

Way back when he first started writing this it was driving Paine defenders wacky.

Edited April 30, 2022 by James DiEugenio