"The Assassination & Mrs. Paine" comes out this month

[James DiEugenio]

Makes you wonder Sandy, how many people here have actually watched the film?

[Joe Bauer]

As much Quaker minded humanitarian good deed credit I assign to Ruth Paine regards her providing for Marina and her children's most basic needs for 2 months (including taking them into her own home when they truly needed this kind of help) I still acknowledged her obvious loathing of Lee Oswald.

Loathing to a degree that you sensed she really didn't feel very much honest and sincere Quaker compassion and sympathy for him when he was so brutally and painfully killed.

An obvious and unsettling Quaker principle dichotomy for sure.

The Ruth Paine interview Jim Di referenced which quoted RP ( "I was glad he was killed" ) along with other interviews where she never expressed much sympathy for Lee's death except for saying something like and not much more than "it was tragic" bolsters this sense of her Lee loathing imo.

In the "Trial Of Lee Harvey Oswald" Oswald defense attorney Gerry Spence really pulled out of Ruth her true level of animosity toward and dislike of Lee.

RP: "I didn't like him very well." 

Now THAT'S an understatement.

She cited many negative takes on Lee including his cynical and self-important attitude and really went off on his lying in a letter draft to the Russian Embassy she found laying out in the open on her typewriter desk!

And that he even had the gall to use her typewriter to do so and without asking her first! 

RP: "And that offended me deeply!"

Ruth found jailed Lee's "detachedness" in his desperate calls to her home looking for Marina as appalling.

Attorney Spence had to remind RP of the obvious strain and stress someone in Oswald's situation ( He had been beaten, kept up for hours and hours with intense interrogation and was fighting for his life!) and how that "might" make them somewhat less than normally engaging in a more appropriately concerned and considerate feeling tone and manner acceptable to Ruth. 

Ruth P. embarrassingly had to admit Spence's more reasonable and logical take on Lee's tone and manner regards those calls.

I said I believe Ruth looked at Lee Oswald's death as a relief for Marina Oswald.

That's a cold non-Quaker view obviously. 

 

"ON TRIAL: LEE HARVEY OSWALD" (PART 15) (RUTH PAINE)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pwBSL2-1rc

Sep 02, 2013 · Part 15 of 23.http://On-Trial-LHO.blogspot.com

 

 

Edited June 23, 2022 by Joe Bauer

[Sandy Larsen]

2 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

Makes you wonder Sandy, how many people here have actually watched the film?

 

Exactly!

(Thanks for the words of support, Jim and Denny.)

 

Edited June 20, 2022 by Sandy Larsen

[James DiEugenio]

Welcome Sandy.

But i have to say, in reply to Mr. Cohen, even though I was just a kid when Ruby shot Oswald, that is not the way I felt at all. Because I did not automatically assume Oswald was guilty. 

My first reaction was shock that something like that could happen amid all those cops, detectives and media guys. 

My next reaction was that something was really weird about this case.

My third and culminating reaction was this: maybe someone did not want Oswald to talk?

 

Edited June 20, 2022 by James DiEugenio

[Sandy Larsen]

1 hour ago, James DiEugenio said:

My third and culminating reaction was this: maybe someone did not want Oswald to talk?

 

That's the first thing I thought when I heard a few years later that Oswald had been shot while being escorted by the police. (I didn't see it on TV and was too young to understand at the time it happened.)

 

[James DiEugenio]

Well, you were two steps ahead of me.

 

I thought Bobby Kennedy did a nice job on this in the long version:  Did Ruby just love our family so much that he would do this in public?  No, I later found out he was a mobster.

[Joseph McBride]

I'm with Jim in having been appalled by the

shooting of Oswald at the time. Millions

of people felt that way. Even J. D. Tippit's father,

Edgar Tippit, told me he felt so bad about it,

because he wanted the truth to be known. (I

did not see it live on TV because my mother

made me go to work as a vendor at a Green Bay Packers

game despite my protest. But it was the only

time I saw news strike like a wave, as people

were listening to it on their portable radios

before the game.)

By the evening of Friday the 22nd I was not believing

the official line and was believing Oswald's

protestations of innocence. I lay out in my book

INTO THE NIGHTMARE how I came to that

conclusion. Many people around the world, as

well as in the US, immediately recognized the Oswald

hit by Ruby as part of the coverup.

For someone to say he doesn't care about that one way or another

is a confession that he doesn't care what the Kennedy

assassination or the trampling over the rule of law

in the Oswald case did to our country. That is revealing,

like Ruth's admission, "I was glad."

Edited June 20, 2022 by Joseph McBride

[Sandy Larsen]

50 minutes ago, James DiEugenio said:

Well, you were two steps ahead of me.

I'm sure I had a good deal of help with whoever it was that produced the expose. I'm sure he wasn't a WC apologist.

 

I think it was great to have Bobby Kennedy in the documentary. (Though I didn't realize that he's not in the short version.) Not only to show that even (some) Kennedys don't buy the Warren Report, including RFK (!), but also to show the audience that WC critics are serious and not just fringe loonies.

 

[Paul Brancato]

37 minutes ago, Joseph McBride said:

I'm with Jim in having been appalled by the

shooting of Oswald. Even J. D. Tippit's father,

Edgar Tippit, told me he felt so bad about it,

because he wanted the truth to be known. By the

evening of Friday the 22nd I was not believing

the official line and was believing Oswald's

protestations of innocence. I lay out in my book

INTO THE NIGHTMARE how I came to that

conclusion. Many people around the world, as

well as in the US, immediately recognized the Oswald

hit by Ruby as part of the coverup. For someone

to say he doesn't care about that one way or another

is a confession that he doesn't care what the Kennedy

assassination or the trampling over the rule of law

in the Oswald case did to our country. That is revealing,

like Ruth's admission, "I was glad."

Ruby’s killing of Oswald convinced me there was a coverup, and I was 15 at the time. I went to three events over the next few years to hear Mark Lane speak, and to debate Melvin Belli. Ruth’s admission is absolutely shocking. 

[James DiEugenio]

Sandy:  Bobby is in the short version, but only near the end.  he introduced the part about the dedications and tributes to JFK  around the world as a comparison of his stature with other presidents.

[W. Tracy Parnell]

On 6/18/2022 at 6:40 PM, W. Tracy Parnell said:

"One of the most interesting parts of the film is that it appears that Ruth has employed, or is good friends with, a veteran of the Defense Intelligence Service."

More progress. Jim D. has now corrected his "mistake" and changed the name of the agency that Joe Alesi worked for to the correct one-Defense Investigative Service.

[James DiEugenio]

This is the extended series that I have been talking about, led by the Florida attorney Carol Hewett, but also featuring work by Steve Jones and Barbara LaMonica.

It was published in the mid nineties at Probe, which I edited at that time.  IMO, it constituted a milestone in the literature. It would have been even better, and longer, but Carol was stricken with cancer, although she did eventually recover. Carol was an aces researcher who never got the credit she deserved.

Thomas Mallon wrote his book about the Paines in part as a reaction to this work.  Which tells you something.

https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/carol-hewett-steve-jones-and-barbara-la-monica-dissect-the-paines

 

 

[Joe Bauer]

Seems I am in a small, privileged circle here on the forum with my actual watching Ruby shoot Oswald on live national TV.

My guess is that maybe 5% of us here actually did?

I was 12.

I had been glued to this old black and white grainy picture TV my brother and I had at the end of our shared bedroom twin beds since Friday afternoon.

When I first saw Oswald come into view at the beginning of the hallway walk toward the basement press crowd I instantly felt an uneasiness. To me , even at my young age, Oswald seemed so wide open!

Only one escort on each side and even they seemed barely even with Oswald.

I think I expected Oswald to have front protection as well as side protection.

Then, soon enough "BOOM!"

At that exact same time my body involuntarily sprung off my bed like a wound up spring.

And I also unthinkingly shouted "NO WAY" "NO WAY" " NO WAY" over and over.

My young but innocently pure gut instincts instantly told me this scene was so improbable it was contrived in a suspicious way. 

Watching Jack Ruby shoot Oswald in the Dallas PD basement crawling with security that morning is still the single most personally compelling and suspicion birthing event in my entire life long JFK truth seeking quest.

 

 

 

Edited June 22, 2022 by Joe Bauer

[Joe Bauer]

Today, I watched and listened to Ruth Paine's testimony in "The Trial Of Lee Harvey Oswald" video I linked earlier, more than I had in the past.

I had always kind of passed over Vincent Bugliosi's questioning of Ruth, figuring his goal was simply to portray her as a sympathetic well intentioned figure innocently caught up in the larger picture of Oswald's guilt.

However, by listening to her answers to Bugliosi's soft ball questions I realized with more understanding the first origins and true depth of Ruth's repugnant feelings toward Lee Harvey Oswald.

Since Ruth first met the Oswald's in February 1963, she described observing what she described as Oswald's overbearing and selfish controlling behavior towards Marina.

RP chronicles so many aspects of Lee's treatment of Marina that were bad in her mind, she obviously couldn't stand him beginning as far back as their first meeting.

Bugliosi asked RP when her friendship with Marina and "Lee" Oswald first began and Ruth made a point of correcting him in stating her friendship was with Marina...not Lee.

She detailed such Lee abuses as refusing Marina to learn English.

Of Lee aggressively ordering Marina to return to the Soviet Union when Ruth said Marina desperately wanted to stay here in America.

We know from Jeanne DeMohernschildt about Lee berating Marina for smoking and even putting a cigarette she was smoking out by pushing it into her shoulder.

It appears obvious Ruth Paine thought Lee was a horrible husband ( even abusive ) to Marina and hated him from as far back as February 1963.

I think Ruth was hoping at some point to help free Marina from this abusive, no count loser Lee.

At the 3 minute mark in the Oswald Trial video Ruth Paine recollected an incident involving her and Lee Oswald that really raised my eye brow in thinking it surely changed Ruth's feelings toward Lee even more negatively. From not just a bad and at times abusive husband to something more nefarious.

During Ruth's August, 1963 visit to New Orleans to bring Marina and her baby ( living with Lee in a run down cockroach infested apartment ) back with her to Irving, Texas, she claimed Lee told her during this visit about his pro-Castro leaflet political activities and how he was physically confronted by some hot-headed anti-Castro Cubans and then taken to the N.O. police station afterwards. Lee told Ruth he spent the night in jail because of this incident.

One can imagine Ruth reacting to Lee's pro-Castro political activities and arrest sharing with appalled shock and even more concerned angst than she already felt toward him.

Did Ruth now view Lee Oswald as not just a poor providing wife abuser, but a Castro/commie activist to boot? 

What is Lee doing passing out pro-Castro leaflets when he is unemployed and should be making every effort to find work and provide for his wife and baby's most basic needs which he wasn't?  

What other things Ruth Paine testified Lee Oswald did to inspire her further dislike of him after he came to visit Marina later in her home during October and November was just frosting on the already baked Lee Oswald hating cake.

As much as RP was doing for Marina and her child during that time, which I still feel was admirable, she was viscerally anti-Lee Oswald.

When Ruth Paine described the neighborly cup of coffee meeting where the Texas Schoolbook Depository building job idea first came up, she went right to work trying to get Lee a job there.

Ruth claimed Lee seemed happy to have this potential job opportunity. 

I always wondered why Lee was ( according to Ruth ) so willing to take this lowest minimum wage TXSBD job that paid what ... $1.25 an hour?

He seemed more intelligent and more qualified for other higher paying jobs. After all, he was a traffic control operator in the Marines. Lot of responsibility in that position. You had to be fairly intelligent to even qualify for such a job in the military.

I just don't see Russian speaking, book and classical music loving Lee being happy with simple lowest pay book sorting work and alongside the likes of good and humble but uneducated Buell Frazier, Harold Norman, Junior Jarman, etc.

Being desperate for any work at all at that time however, I guess book sorter beat dishwasher and restroom cleaning custodial jobs?

I think Ruth's discovery of Lee's N.O. political activities back in August of 1963 ( along with his weird agenda and again frivolous money misusing trip to Mexico City ) had a much more important effect on Ruth ( and her husband later ) regards their over-all view of Lee Oswald. Making them both suspicious of Lee and who he really was on top of their intense dislike of him.

Did Ruth report her suspicion feeling knowledge of Lee's extremist political activities including his Mexico City trip to the FBI at some point before 11,22,1963?

I also wonder if by some chance, Marina may have shared with Ruth at least one or two of her deepest darkest secrets about Lee, including his admitting to taking a pot shot at General Walker, his attempt to take a gun and see Nixon speak, his idea to hijack a plane to Cuba with Marina's assistance, etc.?

Or did Marina keep all this secret from Ruth Paine?

 

Edited June 23, 2022 by Joe Bauer

[Allen Lowe]

11 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

This is the extended series that I have been talking about, led by the Florida attorney Carol Hewett, but also featuring work by Steve Jones and Barbara LaMonica.

It was published in the mid nineties at Probe, which I edited at that time.  IMO, it constituted a milestone in the literature. It would have been even better, and longer, but Carol was stricken with cancer, although she did eventually recover. Carol was an aces researcher who never got the credit she deserved.

Thomas Mallon wrote his book about the Paines in part as a reaction to this work.  Which tells you something.

https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/carol-hewett-steve-jones-and-barbara-la-monica-dissect-the-paines

 

 

Jim, isn’t it true that Ruth heard of another possible job after Oswald was already accepted at the book depository, but never told Oswald about it? I wish she had been confronted about this in the film. If it is true, it’s pretty damning, since from what I’ve heard this other job paid more.