New Dallas Morning News Interview with Ruth Paine

[Max Good]

A new interview with Ruth Paine was just published in the Dallas Morning News.  She even talks about the film...

 

https://www.dallasnews.com/arts-entertainment/2022/11/17/ruth-paine-who-lent-a-helping-hand-to-lee-and-marina-oswald-looks-back-at-nov-22-1963/

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SANTA ROSA, Calif. — The words that come to mind are peace, serenity and beauty. It is here, in the foothills of California wine country, that Ruth Paine has chosen to make her home, in a Quaker retirement community, far from the sound and fury of Nov. 22, 1963.

Almost 59 years have passed since a sniper, firing from a sixth-floor window in Dealey Plaza, killed America’s 35th president, John F. Kennedy. Paine, who recently turned 90, voted for Kennedy, but for her, the news of his murder was deeply personal.

 

At the time, Paine was living in a small suburban home in Irving. Estranged from her husband, she and her son and daughter were sharing the two-bedroom, one-bath house with a 22-year-old mother of two girls, a toddler and infant. The young mother, a Soviet émigré named Marina Oswald, was, because of money woes, apart from her husband, who in more ways than one was struggling.

Paine had gone out of her way to help the couple she met at a party in February 1963. She reached out to Marina, Paine says, “because she was new in the country, and I wanted to learn to speak Russian.”

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And yet, the shadow of the assassination is never far away.

“I don’t get phone calls much,” she says, sitting at a table on the patio of her Santa Rosa home. “But recently I got one. There’s a guy who has done a video. He’s been working on it for a long time. I usually qualify people before I talk to them, by asking who they thought did it. Because I don’t have any doubts about who did it.”

 

Paine fears that her vetting process didn’t work, saying of the filmmaker, “For some reason, he slipped through my question.

The result is a newly released documentary, The Assassination and Mrs. Paine, which will have its theatrical premiere in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 22, the 59th anniversary of the president’s death.

On Amazon Prime Video, the film is described as follows: “According to her detractors, Ruth Paine is a government agent who helped frame Lee Harvey Oswald as the assassin of the president. But to her defenders, she is simply an innocent bystander caught up in history.”

Paine has seen the movie, which she calls “fairly professionally done.”

“But it began with the wrong premises,” she continues, “and didn’t even acknowledge the attempt on Gen. [Edwin] Walker” — whom Oswald tried to kill barely seven months before the Kennedy assassination.

 

 

“Which is,” Paine says, “very significant.”

Conspiracy chatter never goes away, of course, as evidenced by the hundreds of QAnon followers who convened at Dealey Plaza in the fall of 2021, believing that John F. Kennedy Jr. would reappear and become vice president once Donald Trump was reinstated as president.

Thomas Mallon is also quoted:

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Although Mrs. Paine’s Garage was published in 2003, Thomas Mallon keeps in touch with Paine, about whom he says: “Ruth is an especially interesting figure at this moment in our history, when fewer people seem to believe in the literal truth, as opposed to what they like to call ‘my’ truth. I have lately found myself wondering if the dangerous fact-free business of election denial doesn’t have some of its origin in the more fantastical theories that grew up around the assassination decades ago.

“What’s increasingly remarkable to me about Ruth is how this deeply spiritual woman, who believes in the highly personal ‘inner light’ of Quakerism, has such respect for the blunt facts of the brutal world. For more than a half-century, she has patiently answered questions — some of them probing, some of them preposterous — about the worst thing that ever happened to her. To me, she represents a commitment to truth and history that I hope isn’t vanishing from American life.”

 

[James DiEugenio]

I love this one about Oswald's motive in both the Walker shooting and the assassination:

“I think he wanted to make a splash,” she says. “It didn’t matter who it was, except that it had to be somebody prominent.”

[Paul Cummings]

1 hour ago, James DiEugenio said:

I love this one about Oswald's motive in both the Walker shooting and the assassination:

“I think he wanted to make a splash,” she says. “It didn’t matter who it was, except that it had to be somebody prominent.”

He missed a golden opportunity with Stevenson in town the previous month. What a sloppy assassin.

[Matthew Koch]

1 hour ago, James DiEugenio said:

I love this one about Oswald's motive in both the Walker shooting and the assassination:

“I think he wanted to make a splash,” she says. “It didn’t matter who it was, except that it had to be somebody prominent.”

Sounds like the Nixon story that Chris Matthews fell for and included in his book Kennedy and Nixon but that everyone else including the Warren Commission couldn't believe, about Marina locking Oswald in the bathroom to keep him from "having a look at Nixon". It's almost humorous when people repeat that narrative like Ruth seems to be doing that Oswald was a homicidal maniac who's only care was to be infamous. 

Edited November 17, 2022 by Matthew Koch

[Sandy Larsen]

34 minutes ago, James DiEugenio said:

I love this one about Oswald's motive in both the Walker shooting and the assassination:

“I think he wanted to make a splash,” [Ruth Paine] says. “It didn’t matter who it was, except that it had to be somebody prominent.”

 

LOL, yeah. Oswald made quite a splash... it was in all the newspapers and everything... um, except that it wasn't. 

 

[Roger DeLaria]

People who do something to make a splash and become famous come out and say very proudly and matter-of-factly that they did such and such thing. They don't stand there clueless acting like a deer in the headlights. What a load of BS. 

[Ron Bulman]

31 minutes ago, Roger DeLaria said:

People who do something to make a splash and become famous come out and say very proudly and matter-of-factly that they did such and such thing. They don't stand there clueless acting like a deer in the headlights. What a load of BS. 

Or actually denying it on public TV.  "I didn't shoot anybody".  "I'm just a patsy". 

[Joe Bauer]

If Oswald did the Walker shooting and JFK one...he had an escape plan for each.

If the inference by Marina is that she feared Lee would shoot Nixon when she fought him into the bathroom and locked the door, I doubt that Lee had this in mind.

He had no planning for Nixon's visit. No escape plan.

"I am just a patsy."

I would like to ask Ruth Paine if she has an opinion as to why Oswald would say such a weirdly specific denial comment to the world press, if he wanted to make a splash?

A person seeking to make a splash would want to do this for the attention reward...correct?

In the 1950s and 60's our small town had a public pool.

I would go there every week day in the summer starting at the age of 6.

We had two diving boards. A smaller level one and a high dive one.

Every day, half a dozen jokers would jump off the high dive board and try to make as big a splash as they could, hoping to spray water on the pool side sunbathers.

One splash dive was called the "cannon ball." The diver would curl his feet and legs underneath his torso and bend his upper body and head down to meet his legs to make himself into a round cannon ball.

I'll admit, the splash from this cannon ball dive was almost always bigger than all the rest.

Sometimes a 300 to 400+ pound person would appear on the high dive and draw everyone's OMG LOOK attention and then usually belly flop into the pool. And the tsunami waves generated by this were so enormous it would lift some pool swimmers right out of the water! And flood the sunbathing area as well.

Now THOSE...were splashes!

[Jonathan Cohen]

2 hours ago, Roger DeLaria said:

People who do something to make a splash and become famous come out and say very proudly and matter-of-factly that they did such and such thing. They don't stand there clueless acting like a deer in the headlights. What a load of BS. 

This is an absurd statement. Do you suppose that if Oswald had succeeded in murdering General Walker that he would have loudly proclaimed his guilt all over the greater Dallas metropolitan area?

[Tom Gram]

The usual excuse by lone assassin advocates for Oswald denying everything is that his master plan all along was to be taken into custody and only admit to the assassination at trial. This is the guy who supposedly murdered a cop in a desperate attempt to escape being taken into custody.

So basically, over the span of a couple hours Oswald transformed from a completely irrational deranged psychopath to a man in enough control to give the greatest acting performance of all time in front of the entire world and not once break character throughout days of questioning by some of the best interrogators in the country.

Something does not compute. 

[Ron Bulman]

The title of the article is revealing, a helping hand to Lee, and Marina.  

Ruth said she wanted to learn Russian?   She had taken two college classes on the subject and taught it in Dallas.

He was close to killing a second police officer???

For some reason he slipped through my questions (Max).  Congratulations Max!

The hologram is a bit eerie, Ruth looking up to heaven, Marina looking confused, in the house I partied in.

The Dallas Morning News mentions the Washington Post notification of the Washington premiere of the film on 11/22/2022.  But not the preview in Dallas on 11/20/2022 (it's been shown in San Antonio, at the Texas Theater, and available on streaming services for a while).

The author, graduating a Dallas HS in 1970, then SMU in 1974 spent the summer of 1973 as an intern at the Washington Post during the "Watergate Summer" as it says. 

[John Cotter]

19 hours ago, Max Good said:

Although Mrs. Paine’s Garage was published in 2003, Thomas Mallon keeps in touch with Paine, about whom he says: “Ruth is an especially interesting figure at this moment in our history, when fewer people seem to believe in the literal truth, as opposed to what they like to call ‘my’ truth. I have lately found myself wondering if the dangerous fact-free business of election denial doesn’t have some of its origin in the more fantastical theories that grew up around the assassination decades ago.

“What’s increasingly remarkable to me about Ruth is how this deeply spiritual woman, who believes in the highly personal ‘inner light’ of Quakerism, has such respect for the blunt facts of the brutal world. For more than a half-century, she has patiently answered questions — some of them probing, some of them preposterous — about the worst thing that ever happened to her. To me, she represents a commitment to truth and history that I hope isn’t vanishing from American life.”

How do Thomas Mallon and Ruth Paine – “this deeply spiritual woman” – reconcile their self-righteousness and presumed high-mindedness with their condemnation of Oswald, a man who was denied his right to a fair trial by a brutal murder facilitated by the flagrantly corrupt Dallas police force?

Anyone who rejects the presumption of innocence and natural justice principles, who effectively condones the murder of an innocent man, who blames the victim and who turns a blind eye to the true extent of the treacherously bloody events in Dallas on the 22^nd and 24^th November 1963, is beyond the moral pale and, in the case of Ms Paine, has to be considered perfectly capable of the duplicity and criminality which some ascribe to her.

Edited November 18, 2022 by John Cotter

[Joe Bauer]

7 hours ago, Jonathan Cohen said:

This is an absurd statement. Do you suppose that if Oswald had succeeded in murdering General Walker that he would have loudly proclaimed his guilt all over the greater Dallas metropolitan area?

I disagree.

What's the payback reward for making a splash, if you never let anyone know you did this or when asked, you deny you even did it at all?

So, if Oswald had killed Walker he would never want anyone to know he did this the rest of his life?   

Oswald wanted to make a splash that only he could revel in ... silently to himself?

Oswald wrote about his Russia experience. He wanted to perhaps have this made into a book? You do this for public attention.

Oswald took ridiculously incriminating pictures of himself. Known as the backyard pictures. Again, something to be shown to someone else for attention?

Oswald made himself ridiculously public visible in his New Orleans middle of downtown broad daylight leaflet passing. This splash event was meant to bring him attention. And it did. Even radio and even TV coverage.

But the JFK shooting? The biggest splash action of his life? 

No, I don't want to be known for this one.

I am just a patsy.

 

 

[Joe Bauer]

7 hours ago, Tom Gram said:

The usual excuse by lone assassin advocates for Oswald denying everything is that his master plan all along was to be taken into custody and only admit to the assassination at trial. This is the guy who supposedly murdered a cop in a desperate attempt to escape being taken into custody.

So basically, over the span of a couple hours Oswald transformed from a completely irrational deranged psychopath to a man in enough control to give the greatest acting performance of all time in front of the entire world and not once break character throughout days of questioning by some of the best interrogators in the country.

Something does not compute. 

Totally agree.

 

[Denny Zartman]

9 hours ago, Tom Gram said:

The usual excuse by lone assassin advocates for Oswald denying everything is that his master plan all along was to be taken into custody and only admit to the assassination at trial. This is the guy who supposedly murdered a cop in a desperate attempt to escape being taken into custody.

So basically, over the span of a couple hours Oswald transformed from a completely irrational deranged psychopath to a man in enough control to give the greatest acting performance of all time in front of the entire world and not once break character throughout days of questioning by some of the best interrogators in the country.

Something does not compute. 

And I always ask: when in history has any accused assassin denied any and all involvement only to dramatically reveal their guilt in a trial?

And the concept is ridiculous. All the massive pre-trial publicity that would surely have gone on before the trial of Lee Harvey Oswald for killing Kennedy sure would have prepared everyone for the shocking news - that Oswald killed Kennedy!

Let's not forget that not only was the Abraham Lincoln assassination a conspiracy, it featured an assassin that literally broke his leg in his rush to take credit for the crime.