Will Fritz slaps Michael Paine

[Gerry Down]

Apparently Michael Paine told David Lifton that Will Fritz slapped him the weekend of the assassination. I had never heard this before. Did it really happen?

LINK (1 hour 15 minutes):

[Denis Morissette]

Lifton wrote it a few months ago in this group. 

[Joe Bauer]

Trust fund baby Michael Paine took being bit## slapped by Fritz without a word or swing back.

Poor but tough country boy Buell Wesley Frazier did not.

Frazier warned Fritz...if you hits me "we's gonna have one hell of a fight!" 

Fritz backed down.

Edited March 22 by Joe Bauer

[Ron Ecker]

Frazier might have beaten Fritz with some curtain rods that Oswald had forgotten and left in Frazier's car.

 

 

[Kirk Gallaway]

Gerry, As Denis said, (though months turn into years as i was surprised to see Lifton died  in Dec. 2022!) Lifton did post this here. in May 2022.

My 1995 interview with Michael Paine

 

[Robert Morrow]

Email from David Lifton to Robert Morrow on March 16, 2018 regarding his interview of Michael Paine circa the year 1994

From: David Lifton 
Sent: Mar 16, 2018 10:30 PM 

Subject: Fw: CIA patsy Lee Harvey Oswald told Michael Paine that JFK was the best president he had seen in his lifetime! 

Friday evening, 3/16/2018 - 10:24 PM PDT

 As I'm sure know (or will soon find out) Michael Paine died.

 Please do note: that back around 1994 (plus or minus), I had a full-dress on-the-record tape recorded interview, with Michael Paine, at his home in Boxboro, Mass.  

 I have notes and transcripts, etc., and cannot today recall everything he said; but I did want to note that my questioning was good, and at one point, he got rather emotional, started trembling, and broke down and started to cry. 

 As I recall, I formed the opinion that he knew (or realized) that LHO had been framed. This is contrary to the behavior of Ruth, who carried her belief that LHO was the assassin all the way into her later years, and that is something that is quite likely her belief (still) today.

 You can share any part of this email with anyone.

 Best, DSL

[Robert Morrow]

Lee Harvey Oswald told Michael Paine that John Kennedy was the “BEST PRESIDENT” he had ever had in his lifetime.

“Michael Paine, debated politics with JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, dies at 89” by Chris Smith of the Press Democrat on March 15, 2018

http://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/8118362-181/michael-paine-debated-politics-with

Michael Paine of Sebastopol was a civil libertarian and retired aeronautical engineer who, while living outside of Dallas in 1963, engaged in occasional political discussions with a self-identified Marxist named Lee Harvey Oswald.

When Paine heard of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, he thought immediately of Oswald “but dismissed him because I didn’t think he was that irrational,” Paine later told an interviewer.

In testimony before the Warren Commission, created to investigate the assassination of JFK, Paine said he did not regard Oswald as someone likely to kill a president.

“I saw he was a bitter person … very little charity in his view toward anybody, but I thought he was harmless,” he told the commission.

Through much of the 55 years since JFK’s murder, some conspiracy narratives have alleged that both Paine and his former wife, Santa Rosa resident Ruth Paine, were CIA operatives and framed Oswald.

Both rejected the scenario as ridiculous, declaring that their observations and knowledge of Oswald persuaded them that the killing of Kennedy was the work of him alone.

Michael Paine told an interviewer not long after the shooting, “I think it’s a lone wolf thing. The opportunity presented itself to him and he probably wanted to make a mark on society.”

Paine died March 1 in Sebastopol, where he had lived with or near his son the past 14 years. He was 89.

He was born in New York City on June 25, 1928, to architect and left-wing activist G. Lyman Paine and Ruth Forbes Young, founder of the International Peace Academy.

Michael Paine studied at Harvard and Swarthmore and was living in Pennsylvania when, in 1957, he married Ruth Avery Hyde. Two years later, Michael Paine took a job with Bell Helicopter that required a relocation to Texas.

The couple settled in Irving, a suburb of Dallas. They had two children, Tamarin and Chris, when they separated amicably in the fall of 1962, then continued to spend time together as a family.

The children lived with Ruth Paine, a Quaker who has said she studied the Russian language in order to counter Cold War tensions by seeking out dialogue with Russian people.

In February 1963, she heard of a Russian woman who spoke no English, having recently moved to the U.S. with her young daughter and her husband, Lee Harvey Oswald. Ruth, now a retired teacher and school counselor living in Rincon Valley, has said she liked the idea of having someone with whom to practice her Russian.

So she reached out to the Oswalds. She invited her ex-husband, too, when she had 21-year-old Marina and Lee Oswald, 23, and baby June over for dinner. Ruth and Marina became friends.

That friendship on occasion brought Michael Paine and Lee Oswald together, and three or four times they engaged in political discussions. Paine, a liberal and longtime member of the American Civil Liberties Union, would later describe Oswald as a “pipsqueak,” but one whose politics he tried to understand.

“He told me he became a Marxist in this country by reading books and without having ever having met a communist,” Paine said in an interview following the assassination.

“With me he spoke very freely and he complained that with other people he couldn’t … they wouldn’t talk about political subjects. He would talk about nothing else.” 

In interviews and in testimony before the Warren Commission, Paine described Oswald as a lonely man who seemed to like very few people. But in their conversations Oswald never revealed hostility toward Kennedy.

“I expressed my appreciation of President Kennedy and he didn’t ever argue with me on that point,” Paine said in an interview.

In a 2013 essay he titled, “My Experience with Lee Harvey Oswald,” Paine recalled that Oswald once declared emphatically that “change only comes through violence.”

“I’d also heard him say that President Kennedy was the best president he had in his lifetime. Looking back on what happened, these two statements seem impossibly contradictory … how could a man want to kill a president whom he thought was the best president he’d had in his lifetime?”

Though Michael Paine remained no more than an acquaintance to the Oswalds, Ruth took Marina Oswald under her wing and tried to be helpful to her struggling family.

Ruth, who became a key witness to the Warren Commission, has said she was hoping to bring a degree of stability to the Oswalds when, in the fall of 1963, she told Lee Oswald about a job opening she’d heard of — at the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas.

Oswald was hired. He rented a room near the job. In late September, Marina accepted an invitation by Ruth to live with her and her children in Irving, about a 20-minute drive from Dallas.

Ruth Paine allowed the Oswalds to store most of their belongings in her garage. For weeks while working at the book depository, Lee Oswald, who had no car or drivers license, hitched a ride to Ruth’s house after work on Fridays, then spent the weekend there with his family.

It surprised Ruth Paine when Oswald appeared at her home unannounced on a Thursday — Nov. 21, 1963. Later that night, she walked into the garage and found the light was on, causing her to wonder who’d been in there.

When she arose the next morning, Lee Oswald was already up and gone. He’d left a coffee cup in the kitchen sink.

At 12:30 that afternoon, gunshots killed JFK as he sat beside his wife, Jacqueline, in the back of a Lincoln Continental convertible just after the presidential motorcade passed by the book depository.

It would soon dawn on the Paines that Lee Harvey Oswald had hidden his scoped, bolt-action rifle in Ruth’s garage.

In the 9,400-word “My Experience with Lee Harvey Oswald,” Michael Paine wrote that he believed the assassin acted alone and decided only shortly before Nov. 22, 1963, to do something that would make himself infamous.

“The nation would remember him as the one who had shot the president of the strongest capitalist nation of the world,” Paine wrote. “He wanted to be important — not inconsequential. He would be in the history books now, and that is what he wanted.”

Both of the Paines testified before the Warren Commission in 1964, Ruth more extensively because of her nearly yearlong friendship with Marina Oswald and her many encounters with Marina’s controlling husband.

In time, the Paines both left Texas. Michael Paine lived and worked in Concord, Massachusetts, and was active in coastal conservation and supported Planned Parenthood and the ACLU. He moved to Sonoma County in 2004.

He and his son, Chris Panym, founded near Sebastopol a “multi-household, multi-age, multi-enterprise community” they called Green Valley Village. They were unable to bring it to fruition.

Chris Panym said that as his father approached aged 90 he lost his memory but all his life was committed to championing the environment and civil liberty.

In addition to his son in Sebastopol and his former wife in Santa Rosa, Paine is survived by his daughter, Tamarin Laurel-Paine of Middlefield, Massachusetts.

There will be a memorial service at 1 p.m. on April 14 in the library at Friends House in Rincon Valley. Panym asks people interested in attending to RSVP to him at 707-861-1169.

Editor’s note: This version of the story corrects an error on the make of the car in which the Kennedy’s rode in Dallas.

[Greg Doudna]

5 hours ago, Robert Morrow said:

[Quoting from a 2018 newspaper article about Michael Paine.] In a 2013 essay he titled, “My Experience with Lee Harvey Oswald,” Paine recalled that Oswald once declared emphatically that “change only comes through violence.”

“I’d also heard him say that President Kennedy was the best president he had in his lifetime. Looking back on what happened, these two statements seem impossibly contradictory … how could a man want to kill a president whom he thought was the best president he’d had in his lifetime?”

In his later years Michael Paine repeatedly claimed in interviews that he clearly remembered Oswald having said to him, "change only comes through violence".

That was probably the most central belief Michael Paine attributed to Oswald, and the most central quotation Michael Paine reported he had heard from Oswald.

I don't think there is sufficient awareness or recognition that that was literally a manufactured memory on the part of Michael Paine.

Not an intentional lie, Michael Paine thoroughly believed his own manufactured memory. But a manufactured memory nevertheless.

Michael Paine probably forgot that in his testimony in 1964 to the Warren Commission he repeatedly testified explicitly that he never heard Oswald say any such thing.

Mr. PAINE - He did not indicate or reveal to me how he thought it [economic change] would come about and I on several occasions felt by his, perceived from his attitude or felt impelled by his attitude to say that the values that I held dear were diminished in a situation of violence, to which he remained silent and I took it as disagreement. But I don't remember if he had said that.
Senator COOPER - He remained silent when you spoke about that?
Mr. PAINE - When I said I was opposed to violence or said, why, when I said that he remained silent and I took it-- 
Senator COOPER - You took it that he disagreed in any way by your statement?
Mr. PAINE - Well, just by the way he would sort of withdraw.
Senator COOPER - He did not agree with your position?
Mr. PAINE - He did not agree; no.
Senator COOPER - That violence was unacceptable as a means of change?
Mr. PAINE - That is right, and I don't think he perceived also, was a war of the kind of values that I am--tolerance, for instance seems to me disappears when strained situations--
Senator COOPER - Did you discuss at least the kind of economic changes that had occurred in Russia by means of violence?
Mr. PAINE - No; I was trying to find out whether he thought it was going to come by revolution or not and he never did say, I never got an answer as to how he thought this change was going to come. He did not reveal constructive, or from my point of view, constructive effort to make.
Senator COOPER - Did he ever discuss the revolution in Russia where by means of violence the change had come about?
Mr. PAINE - He did not. That would have been the kind of argument I would have accepted, a normal kind that you would have accepted it as evidence here is the normal way to produce it, but he never said that.
Senator COOPER - Did he ever say any way in which he was expecting Russia or any other country to indicate that he felt the use of violence had produced good?
Mr. PAINE - No. As I say he did not--I would have accepted that argument as a debating argument but he didn't bring it up.
Senator COOPER - That is all.
Mr. DULLES - Did he say or did you get the impression that he felt that violence was the only way to improve things, let's say, in the United States?
Mr. PAINE - I felt he was so disgusted with the whole system that he didn't see a way that was worthwhile fussing around trying to modify the situation.
Mr. DULLES - Other than violence or he didn't go that far?
Mr. PAINE - He didn't mention advocating violence or didn't say anything in regard to violence but he did seem to me he didn't see dismissed as trivial, no difference between the parties so why join one party or another. They were all the same. Churches--there is no avenue out that way. Education--there is nothing there. So that he never revealed to me any constructive way that wasn't violent.

Comment: because Oswald never told Michael Paine how he believed change would come about and appeared to disagree with Michael's advocacy of peaceful reforms as the way positive change would come about, Michael Paine interpreted that as Oswald believed in violence, even while repeatedly and explicitly testifying under oath that Oswald never advocated or spoke favorably of violence in Michael Paine's hearing.

And Michael Paine appears to have misunderstood Oswald's silences or body language disagreement with Michael's peaceful reforms view, which Michael Paine interpreted as: therefore, Oswald believes in violence as the only way. 

In Oswald's political writings there is nothing advocating violence, no belief that violence is the only way, no call for violent revolution, nothing in support of the belief that Michael Paine attributed to Oswald.

Oswald's political writings show Oswald's view or belief was that both Soviet and American systems would collapse on their own. Following that collapse--which would occur on its own, no role of violence by activists recommended or necessary to assist that in happening--then would be the possibility for better and more just non-oppressive economic and social systems following those collapses.

What activists should do now, prior to those collapses, in Oswald's political writings, was not violent overthrow, but organize and prepare to be ready to implement better systems post-collapse.

No violent revolution of activists mentioned in this picture, for Oswald, in his writings.

Michael Paine misunderstood Oswald's silence to the "how change comes about" question and body language disagreement to Michael Paine's belief in peaceful political reforms as the way change would come about. Michael Paine was correct that Oswald did not agree, but misunderstood what Oswald actually believed. Oswald had no optimism that reforms in the existing systems would work, wasted energies so to speak from Oswald's point of view. But that did not mean Oswald was advocating violent revolution, which Michael Paine assumed was the only other possible alternative, which therefore Oswald must believe--Michael Paine interpreted wrongly with respect to Oswald's thinking. 

Then Michael Paine manufactured a memory that he had heard Oswald explicitly say that violence was the only way, even though Oswald did not.

[Robert Morrow]

Greg Doudna - furthermore, anyone can make an offhanded remark that in most political systems in the world, change only comes through violence. Most countries are not democracies. I does not mean the person saying that is ready to start tossing Molotov cocktails.That means the social order is held through violence or implied violence if you get out of line. And it seems, for the most part, only violence can "change" those social orders.

I think MIchael Paine from 1964 onward was under pressure to present Oswald in the least favorable light and only as the decades wore on did the start to say stuff like Oswald thought that JFK was the best president in his lifetime.

[Greg Doudna]

1 hour ago, Robert Morrow said:

Greg Doudna - furthermore, anyone can make an offhanded remark that in most political systems in the world, change only comes through violence. Most countries are not democracies. I does not mean the person saying that is ready to start tossing Molotov cocktails.That means the social order is held through violence or implied violence if you get out of line. And it seems, for the most part, only violence can "change" those social orders.

I think MIchael Paine from 1964 onward was under pressure to present Oswald in the least favorable light and only as the decades wore on did the start to say stuff like Oswald thought that JFK was the best president in his lifetime.

Yes it is an offhanded remark that in certain contexts practically anyone could say, true, but the point here is MIchael Paine's earliest testimony is so consistent and strong that he did not hear Oswald say that, even though decades later Michael Paine claimed he did hear Oswald say that. It is a straightforward secondary development in memory, in which what Michael believed Oswald believed though unspoken, became in his, Michael's, later memory literally though falsely remembered as if he had heard Oswald actually speak it.

I do not think it is quite correct to interpret Michael Paine's negative portrayal of Oswald and political violence as being caused by "pressure" in any overt or brute sense from other persons or officials. At least I don't see it.

My interpretation would be that Michael Paine, just like Ruth and the early Marina, believed that Lee had killed Kennedy; that belief can only have been incredibly traumatic; and as with all humans with gaps in explanation, the "why?" questions, get filled in with answers made up and generated if none already exist, because that is wired into how human minds work--if an explanation is not known, one will be made up to fill in the blanks. Lots of studies have been done on this phenomenon. 

In reading Michael Paine's Warren Commission testimony of his talks with his coworker at Bell the day of the assassination, and of the coworker, as they tell it first when Michael heard the report that the TSBD was connected to the assassination he wondered if it could have been Lee, but did not believe it could be, because it made little sense from what Michael knew of Lee. It was only when the report came in later on the news in which Oswald was named in connection with the killing of the police officer, Tippit, that tipped Michael to accept that Lee was guilty of both killings. (That account of both Michael and his coworker sounds very plausible to me as a sequence.)

The point is Michael was, so to speak, convinced or forced against his instincts concerning Oswald's guilt by the force of the evidence as he understood it. And it had to have been traumatic and he, like anyone, would struggle to understand "why". In that vacuum, that drive to understand "why", I believe is the most likely reconstruction for how Michael fixed on this idea of a political violence belief of Oswald as his reconstructed explanation.

If you mean Michael was "under pressure" in terms of the soft but powerful pressure of how others in society and peers are thinking, a human herd-think phenomenon, then yes maybe in that sense of "under pressure". I just doubt there were unseen handlers in the picture giving secret orders or threats or urgings to Michael Paine on what to say or think. Among other things, Michael Paine comes across as too independent-minded to easily allow someone else to tell him what to say or think. However, who knows for sure.