The timing and content of the "we both know who was responsible" phone call of Ruth and Michael Paine

[Joe Bauer]

One thing no one disputes:

Ruth Paine disliked Lee H. Oswald.

I believe much more deeply than she has ever admitted in public.

Probably even despised him.

Ruth Paine was 110% in when it came to looking out for Marina. Definitely protectively but also I believe even possessively so.

She felt Oswald abused Marina. And that he was also a no-count yet arrogant little loser and a xxxx to boot!

Good riddance!

I don't think RP had any feelings of sorrow or sympathy when Lee was picked up and killed just two days later.

I believe RP looked at this situation as a release for Marina more than any other.

A release from the chaos and abuse RP felt Marina endured with Lee.

I think RP may have also thought she now had Marina all to herself. She could take care of and be close to her indefinitely.

"I love you Marina. I want to live with you."

Edited December 9, 2023 by Joe Bauer

[Gene Kelly]

3 hours ago, Greg Doudna said:

I would just like to point out Max Good, that none of the items you mention logically indicate Ruth perjured or framed Oswald, and your setup is unfair and prejudicial. 

Of course no one claims Ruth or anyone else cannot perjure because they are a member of any religion. Everybody knows that is a non sequitur, nobody claims that. The issue is not whether someone can perjure (anyone can), but whether she did.

And you don’t just call her identifying as Quaker but a “pious” Quaker. The adjective is disparaging and prejudicial. Ruth never claimed to be pious. Didn’t come across as any more pious than anyone else. You use the term as a disparaging or mocking term setting up a straw man. Even if the adjective was fair, which it isn’t, it would be irrelevant, personality is irrelevant to proving or suggesting perjury or forgery of physical evidence as Ruth is baselessly accused. 

Gene Kelly, Salandria wanted Garrison to indict Ruth right up there along with Clay Shaw for willful conspiracy to assassinate JFK. Garrison’s staff thought Salandria was raving and nuts, reminding him that prosecutors need evidence to file charges.

I cannot believe how a total lack of evidence is in people’s minds equated with certainty that Ruth was planting and forging physical evidence, perjuring, framing Oswald, conspiring to assassinate a president she loved, all over the map according to taste, in between caring for two toddlers as a single mom in a ranch house in Irving, and sharing a household with Marina.

She was caught up in proximity. “No good deed goes unpunished”—Burt Griffin of Ruth.

Her sister’s cia employment in DC has no more to do with Ruth assassinating JFK than my sister-in-law being a nurse in the US Air Force at a base in Germany makes me guilty of DOD war crimes done in Southeast Asia. 

Same logic. 

To me, this is like trying to talk to an Obama “birther” convinced Obama was secretly born in Kenya, not US born. There is nothing to it in terms of evidence but ones who believe it will never change. They know. People who think Ruth Paine was fabricating and forging evidence and maliciously knowingly giving false testimony to frame Oswald and conspiring to assassinate JFK as Salandria thought, will never change.

A film could be made, talking heads expressing suspicions of Oswald born in Kenya, not a real American. Obama denies the charges. Neutral moderator presents both sides, suspicions and the denials, leaves viewer to decide…  

Same thing. 

What could Ruth do differently which would prove her innocence to these people. Think about it. If you were in Ruth’s shoes and innocent, what would, what could, you do that would change anything to these people, prove your innocence? Think about it.

Greg

I am from Philadelphia, and have seen Vincent Salandria speak in person.  I can assure you that he was not "raving and nuts".  That's a rather cruel thing to insinuate.  

Gene

[Greg Doudna]

 

3 hours ago, Gene Kelly said:

Greg

I am from Philadelphia, and have seen Vincent Salandria speak in person.  I can assure you that he was not "raving and nuts".  That's a rather cruel thing to insinuate.  

Gene

Gene that was not me but my paraphrase of what was reported by a witness in the room, quoted below. The Garrison staff consensus that Salandria “was something of a nut” is at the end. This was staff reaction to Salandria’s urging Garrison to charge Ruth and Michael Paine for having assassinated President Kennedy. I don’t think that reaction to Salandria in that context was inappropriate. From “Inside the Garrison Investigation: the Thomas Bethell Diary” (https://www.jfk-assassination.net/bethell4.htm )

“Sunday, January 28, 1968

“This afternoon there was a rather extraordinary meeting on the NOAC. It was attended by just about everybody from the DA's office who is working on the investigation -- Sciambra, Alcock, Burnes, myself, Ivon, Loisel and even Charlie Ward. We sat around a large table in a back room for some time, and then Garrison came in with Vince Salandria. Garrison said that Salandria had some remarks to address us, and introduced Salandria as an expert on the assassination etc.

"Salandria started off by telling us that we were in much better shape now than on the occasion of his earlier visit, in July. I had accompanied him around at that time, and I recall he was shown the Shaw file. He looked through it, and was rather rueful about it to me. He admitted to me that there wasn't much there. Now, however, it was a different story, or so he seemed to think. He could tell by the expressions on our faces. The case against Shaw was now looking much more solid, he told us, and we were beginning to work as a team.

“He then started to urge us that the only trouble was we weren't going far enough, and he then started to work himself up into a harangue about Michael and Ruth Paine. "They're agents," he said, "I know they're agents. I've got the proof." He went on at some length about how he had met the Paines, and he produced some quasi-evidence suggesting they were agents etc. Then he told us to go ahead and charge the Paines -- "You've got all the evidence you need." He exhorted us to charge some others too, Marina Oswald, and Allan Dulles. Don't worry about anything, just go ahead and charge them, "the evidence is THERE!"

“Garrison sat next to Salandria through all this, calmly smoking his pipe. Salandria was getting really worked up by this time, and was actually shouting at us. Someone asked him to tell us some of the evidence, and then he pulled out a few card indexes -- seemingly a little annoyed at being distracted by such trivia -- and then started off on his stuff about troop increases in Vietnam, the radio message to Airforce One, the same stuff he had shown me earlier on when he was working on the manuscript on WHY Kennedy was killed with his friend Tom Katen.

“When he finished he was fairly attacked by several members of the staff, notably Jim Alcock and Charlie Ward. He was told that he just didn't have sufficient evidence to warrant any of his conclusions, that he didn't seem to realize that we, as a DA's office must be concerned with the law and other such niceties, etc. Garrison began to get upset at these attacks, and came to Salandria's defense. Salandria even tried to tell us that Oswald was innocent, and I pointed out to him that if you believe Russo, you have just about got to believe that Oswald is guilty. I pointed out that the evidence adduced by our investigation made it more, and not less likely, that Oswald was involved. I remember Garrison gave me a look as though to say -- 'What on earth is he talking about, he still doesn't understand,' but I knew the whole office, apart from Garrison, was solidly behind me.

“Garrison was beginning to smart by this time, and he ended the meeting with an attempt to wrest back the initiative. He gave us a lecture about all having to pull together, that we couldn't afford to work against one another, etc. However, it was obvious that his major objective had not been accomplished. Evidently he had been trying to use Salandria to persuade us of a course of action which he wanted to take himself but knew that we would not endorse. Therefore he was hoping that we might accept it if it came from someone else, namely Salandria. But the ruse had not worked. It was evident that everyone there, with the possible exception of Sciambra -- who does not stick his neck out at all when he sees it means going against what Garrison wants -- thought that Salandria was something of a nut.”

Edited December 9, 2023 by Greg Doudna

[Gene Kelly]

Greg:

Not sure why you pointed this particular comment out ... other than its from the Tom Bethell Diary (a dubious source, at best).  Bethell was part of the subversion of Garrison's investigation.  Bethell thought that Clay Shaw was innocent (even though he was the archivist for Garrison’s files)  ... and that Life magazine did not suppress the Zapruder film. So forgive me if I don't put much stock in his opinion of Vincent Salandria.  Here is the rest of the story, as framed by Jim DiEugenio's March 2021 article in Kennedys and King, "Tom Bethell: A Study in Duplicity":

Bill Boxley, a CIA infiltrator, took files from Garrison's office, and Bethell was suspected to be the source for these leaked documents.  According to Joan Mellon and Jim DiEugenio, Bethell was an inveterate xxxx about his stance on Garrison and the blow up that got him fired and charged. In his 1988 book "The Electric Windmill" he stated that Garrison’s was a dubious case ... this was before his diaries became public and published in newspapers in New Orleans. 

When James DiEugenio interviewed Vince Salandria in February 1992, Vince  told him the contrary.  Salandria had arguments with Bethell in 1967 about not just the efficacy of Garrison’s case, but also the findings of the Warren Commission. And on the eve of the Clay Shaw trial, Bethell turned over the prosecution’s entire witness list with a summary of what each witness would testify to. Here is more of what Jim wrote in the 2021 article: 

Bethell lied about this issue. In 1991, he wrote an article timed for the release of Oliver Stone’s film JFK. (National Review, December 16, 1991) In that piece, he said that he voluntarily told Garrison about his duplicity … this was false. What really happened was this: In January of 1969, on the eve of the trial, Garrison understood that there was something going on with Shaw’s defense and their knowledge of his case. His first assistant, Lou Ivon, conducted an internal investigation. Ivon confronted Bethell with the case against him and the Englishman broke down and started weeping.Bethell was charged by Garrison, fled New Orleans, and  had to hire a lawyer. Garrison was recused and a special prosecutor took the case.

After the judge dismissed the case and the higher court refused to hear it, Bethell moved to Washington DC where he worked at The American Spectator and as a media fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University for 25 years. From about the mid-seventies onward, he spent the rest of his life ridiculing both liberals and critics of the Warren Commission.  He isn't on my list of credible sources ... but I'm sure you already know abbout Tom Bethell's credentials.

Gene

 

[Greg Doudna]

Gene, I did not know all of these allegations of Bethell though I knew he was at odds with Garrison and later some kind of right-winger. The fact that he was hostile to Garrison, was against him etc. is not so important to me in itself. What matters is whether this specific account of Salandria's presentation is true (even if from a hostile point of view), or invented. 

The point that matters: did Salandria urge in that public, witnessed setting that Garrison indict Ruth and Michael for assassinating Kennedy (charge Ruth and Michael with having met and conspired and plotted with others to murder Kennedy)? 

May I ask if you will at least agree for the record that if that did happen, no matter how good a man Salandria may have been in Philadelphia or at other times in his life, that action in that moment would fairly be characterized as "nuts"?

Do you know whether the specific claim--that Salandria urged in his presentation that Garrison indict Ruth and Michael for murdering Kennedy--was denied by any of the other attendees? Did Salandria ever deny he said that? 

Surely there were living members of that meeting present when Bethell's diary was published. If Salandria never said that, surely he or someone would have said so ("I never said that")?

Granted there is bias but there is pro-Garrison bias too, who in Garrison's circle didn't have bias or opinion for or against. Here you cite two pro-Garrison writers, whom some might unkindly call apologists, Mellen and DiEugenio, at least one of whom I don't think ever knew Bethell personally so how would he know, stating that "Bethell was an inveterate l**r".

The diary of Bethell sounds gossipy and negative toward Garrison but did Bethell fabricate what Salandria said?

(It sure sounds like Salandria, wouldn't you say?)  

Did Salandria give a talk in New Orleans on that date? Were the people present that Bethell names? Did Salandria speak negatively about the Paines? If he did, did Salandria go on to urge Garrison to indict Ruth and Michael, saying words to the effect of don't hold back, just do it, the evidence is there? And some prosecutors in the room pushed back on the issue of evidence?

Happened? Never happened? 

Here's what I think: assuming it has not been denied by Salandria or some other party who was there that day, it probably happened. Because every detail agrees with and is confirmed elsewhere from Salandria re the way he views Ruth and Michael's perfidy, save only the detail that he urged Garrison to indict.

But if he's talking at all about how guilty Ruth and Michael were, his basic spiel on their perfidy, and he's talking to Garrison and Garrison's team, sure, why wouldn't he urge Garrison to indict. That's what Salandria would do.

Its completely believable. Both that Salandria would say that and that some staff in the room might push back. 

Nothing at all unbelievable about that story that I can see. But if its confirmed or disconfirmed by someone else who was there that day, I'd like to know that. What do you think?