THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
September 20, 2019,
Ruth Hyde Paine is excited to be flying for the
first time from Santa Rosa to Dallas.
Not having to get herself to the Oakland Airport or
SFO will simplify the trip the 87-year-old will take Friday to a place that’s
been painful for her since Nov. 22, 1963.
You may recall that the resident of Santa Rosa’s
Friends House retirement community has an extraordinary linkage to
the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
As a young mother and Quaker living in the Dallas
suburb of Irving, she befriended a Russian-speaking newcomer to America named
Marina Nikolayevna Oswald. The immigrant’s husband was Lee Harvey Oswald.
It was Ruth Paine who told Lee Oswald of a seasonal
job opening she’d heard of at the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas. Paine
took Oswald’s wife and two children into her home, and she put up with having
Oswald stay there each weekend and then return to his job and boarding-house
room in Dallas.
“I didn’t want him to be there all the time,” she told me as she prepared for her journey back to Dallas, “but I did say he could come on weekends to see his wife and children.”
Oswald carpooled to Paine’s home in Irving after
work each Friday. But he appeared unannounced on Thursday, Nov. 21, 1963, and
secretly removed something from Paine’s garage before returning to Dallas early
the next morning.
Paine counts as the shock of her life the moment she
learned that Oswald had hidden in her garage the rifle he used at 12:30 p.m.
on Nov 22 to shoot the president from a window on the book storehouse’s sixth
floor.
On Sunday, Paine will be at Dallas’ landmark Texas
Theatre, where Audie Murphy’s “War Is Hell” was showing when Oswald ducked in
after he killed Kennedy and then Dallas policeman J.D. Tippit. As police rushed
Oswald inside the historic theater, he raised the pistol he’d removed from his
boarding room but failed to get off a shot.
_____
PAINE IS SET to be at the Texas Theatre at 6 p.m.
Sunday for the premiere of a documentary, “Truth is the Only Client: The
Official Investigation of the Murder of John F. Kennedy.”
The film focuses on surviving attorney/investigators
for the Warren Commission, which conducted a yearlong probe into the shooting.
It found that Oswald killed JFK and he acted alone, a conclusion since disputed
by a whole array of alternate and conspiracy scenarios.
Also featured in the documentary are surviving
witnesses to the Warren Commission. Ruth Paine’s testimony was key to the
inquiry.
She’s scheduled to answer questions at the theater
alongside former Warren Commission attorneys Howard Willens, Burt Griffin and
David Slawson, and also Bernie Weismann, who placed in the Dallas Morning News
on the morning of the assassination a John Birch Society-affiliated ad critical
of Kennedy.
_____
THE DAY BEFORE the showing and panel discussion in
Dallas, Ruth Paine will be back in her former hometown of Irving, a suburb of
Dallas, on Saturday afternoon. In a talk at the Irving public library, she’ll
recount her friendship with Marina Oswald, and how they spoke Russian together,
and all that happened to persuade her that Lee Harvey Oswald decided shortly
before JFK’s visit to Dallas that he wanted to retrieve his Italian
Mannlicher-Carcano rifle from her garage.
If time allows, she may visit her former home, now
the city of Irving’s Ruth Paine House. A museum, it carries visitors back to
the morning that Lee Harvey Oswald arose early and carried from the garage a
long, narrow package that he told his ride-share buddy contained curtain rods.
_____
GIVEN THE CHANCE,
Paine would ask this of everyone who doubts that Oswald killed President
Kennedy, or that he acted alone:
What do you make of the murder attempt in Dallas
seven months earlier on former Army Major Gen. Edwin “Ted” Walker?
[BK Notes: I intend to take Mrs. Paine up on her challenge - I will attempt to answer that question in detail, if she will answer mine - what does she know about the relationship between Michael's mother Ruth Forbes Paine Young and Mary Bancroft? -]
A decorated combat veteran
and ardent conservative,
Walker was seated at his desk the night of April 10, 1963, when a bullet
pierced a window and passed within about an inch of his head.
The attempt on Walker’s life went unsolved until
after the Kennedy assassination and the arrest and murder, by Jack Ruby, of Lee
Harvey Oswald.
An investigation concluded that it was Oswald who’d
fired at Walker. The evidence included a bombshell involving Ruth Paine. She
had at her home in Irving a book left behind by Marina Oswald, who never
returned to the house after Nov. 22, 1963. Thinking that Marina Oswald might
like to have the book, Paine asked a police officer to take it to her.
A short while later, Paine had company.
“The Secret Service came and showed me this note,”
she recalled. The agents wanted to know why she sent it to Marina Oswald.
She told them she’d never seen the note and didn’t
know it was inside the book she’d sent to her friend.
Paine agrees with the subsequent conclusion by
investigators that it was a note that Lee Harvey Oswald left for his wife
before he’d gone off to try to kill Ted Walker. The note instructed Marina
Oswald on what to do if Lee Oswald did not return from his mission.
[BK Notes: "if Lee Oswald did not return from his mission." ! Yes, thank you as it MUST be perceived as a "mission" before it can be understood. Will elaborate soon. ]
[BK Notes: "if Lee Oswald did not return from his mission." ! Yes, thank you as it MUST be perceived as a "mission" before it can be understood. Will elaborate soon. ]
For the past 56 years, Paine has contended that the
note proves that the killing of JFK was not Oswald’s first attempt at
high-profile murder. For the Santa Rosan, the note dissolves any doubt that
Oswald was a lone assassin in search of prey.
“He wanted to kill somebody,” she told me, “and he
saw an opportunity.”
________
PAINE IS HERSELF the subject of allegations of
conspiracy. There is a line of thought that in 1963 she was a CIA operative who
set up Lee Harvey Oswald.
[BK Notes: During the New Orleans trial - Garrison asked Marina why she didn't associate with Ruth Paine after the assassination and she said the Secret Service told her not to because of her association with the CIA. How is Ruth Paine associated with the CIA? The likely suspects - Antioch College, Philadelphia Quakers, Michael's Mom Ruth Forbes Paine Young - via World Federalists, Bell Helicopter and Mary Bancroft. ]
[BK Notes: During the New Orleans trial - Garrison asked Marina why she didn't associate with Ruth Paine after the assassination and she said the Secret Service told her not to because of her association with the CIA. How is Ruth Paine associated with the CIA? The likely suspects - Antioch College, Philadelphia Quakers, Michael's Mom Ruth Forbes Paine Young - via World Federalists, Bell Helicopter and Mary Bancroft. ]
She dismisses the accusations as not only false but
ridiculous.
Interviews and public appearances that take her back
to Kennedy’s murder are not pleasing to her. “There’s a lot of grief in it,”
she said.
She has said she hasn’t excused herself from the
issue but continues to argue her view because she says there’s so much false
information that she feels obligated to help to dismiss.
Fundamentally, to return to Dallas and Irving is not
what she regards as a good time. But as the trip approached, she was looking
forward to starting off at Sonoma County’s airport.
You can contact Chris Smith at 707-521-5211 and
chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.
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