Russ Tarby on Thomas Mallon’s book: Mrs. Paine’s Garage

The book, Mrs. Paine’s Garage, fails not so much for what it is but for what it is not.

Mallon's subjects, Ruth and her ex-husband, Michael Paine, were the young couple who befriended Lee and Marina Oswald in early 1963. When President John F. Kennedy's long-awaited visit to Dallas rolled around on Nov. 22, 1963, Marina was living at Ruth's house in Irving, Texas. Lee Oswald, who would eventually be charged with the president's gunshot slaying, spent the night before the assassination there at Ruth's home. When Dallas police appeared at the Irving address on that fateful Friday afternoon, Marina told them Lee’s rifle was missing from the garage.

Mallon's book could have delved deeply into the Paines' background, revealing their family's relationship, for instance, to former CIA Director Allen Dulles, who was one of the seven Warren Commissioners appointed by Lyndon Johnson to inquire into the Kennedy assassination. This was odd on its face because President Kennedy had fired Dulles—along with Deputy Director Charles Cabell, and Director of Plans Richard Bissell—over the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation of April 1961. Kennedy suspected, correctly, that they knew it was going to fail and were relying on him to send in the Navy and Marines to bail out the project. Which was something he had pledged in public previously that he was not going to do. Could someone like Dulles, who had deceived Kennedy and then been terminated from his dream job, could someone like that be trusted to look for the facts about his assassination?

To protect a Pandora's Box of CIA secrets -- including its plans to murder Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, which was also kept from the president -- Dulles worked hard to conceal and obfuscate aspects of the JFK assassination probe rather than to reveal what really happened. No one attended more meetings or asked more questions than Allen Dulles. And no one answered more questions than the Paines. Ruth herself replied to over 5,000 questions over six days. Compare that to how many questions were posed by attorney Arlen Specter and replied to by one of the autopsy doctors, Thornton Boswell. Boswell was asked 14 questions, and his testimony consumes less than one full page of the Warren Commission hearings. This is about one of the most controversial and incomplete pieces of pathology in medical history.

When the Paines each testified before the Warren Commission in 1964, Dulles oversaw their questioning. For many years, Michael's New England-based mother and stepfather, Ruth and Arthur Young, had been close friends of Mary Bancroft. Bancroft was run as an OSS agent during World War II by Dulles. She was also his mistress dating back to the time as an officer in Switzerland during the war.

If the public had known in 1964 about Dulles’ treachery and deceit, and the true reasons for his termination, would they have tolerated him on the Commission? Because it was not just over the Bay of Pigs that JFK could not live with Dulles. It was also over the CIA’s role in the murder of African leader Patrice Lumumba. Lumumba died about 72 hours before Kennedy was inaugurated. Kennedy’s predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, had ordered Dulles to kill Lumumba. Kennedy supported Lumumba as an African nationalist. Therefore, some believe his murder was timed to take place before JFK took office.

Kennedy also was upset over the Dulles opposition to France’s President Charles DeGaulle. Since 1957, when he gave a speech on Algeria in the Senate, John Kennedy had supported Algeria’s struggle to be free from French colonialism. DeGaulle was predisposed to that path. But a group of military and civilian French officials opposed Algerian independence. They were actively trying to kill DeGaulle and even tried to overthrow his government. The top level of the CIA agreed with them and offered them aid and encouragement. Kennedy told the French ambassador in the USA that he had no role in this. But he could not assure him about the CIA, because often he did not know what they were doing. So for these reasons, Kennedy decided Dulles had to go.

If all this had been out in the open, and if the idea of making the Paines the star witnesses against Oswald, along with their family ties to Dulles, the Warren Commission may have had a much rockier ride with the press and public. And this does not even include the role of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. President Lyndon Johnson and Hoover both desperately wanted the JFK hit to dissolve swiftly into history, attributed to a "lone nut," Oswald, who in turn was assassinated by another "lone nut," Dallas nightclub operator Jack Ruby.

Thomas Mallon is apparently among the shrinking number of Americans who swallow that unlikely scenario, the double-lone nut theory.

Instead of exploring the Paines' ties to Dulles in this book—a matter which Dulles himself joked about in private--Mallon wallows in Ruth's Quakerism and her worries over her lost friendship with Marina. Yet, under oath before a New Orleans grand jury, Marina stated that the Secret Service had dissolved that relationship. Why? Because they felt that Ruth had “friends over there,” meaning the Agency, and they did not want it to appear that Marina was involved in all that.

Instead of examining Michael's classified work at Bell Helicopter or his father's interest in the assassination of Leon Trotsky, he describes the husband's fascination with cabinetry and contradancing. By doing these things, Mallon effectively trivializes the JFK murder and expressly taunts those who insist that the Paines deserve more serious probing. Mallon actually mocks longtime assassination researchers by comparing them to "Trekkies," the cult-like followers of a long-ago canceled TV science fiction show.

Yet those who have actually explored these cracks and crevices in the story of the Paines include independent researchers like Carol Hewett, Steve Jones and Barbara LaMonica. Those three explored the hidden record and came up with a series of in-depth and fascinating articles which ran in Probe Magazine over a number of years. Hewett, for one, is a graduate of the University of Texas Law School and has been a practicing attorney in Florida for decades.  Having endeared himself to Ruth--courting her carefully over three years via mail and telephone in order to secure her permission to interview her at length about the murder of the president--Mallon somehow was free to evade all of the implications of their discoveries.

The Westport, Connecticut writer boasts a lengthy and impressive resume, having cranked out well-received novels such as Henry and Clara and Dewey Defeats Truman, as well as a collection of essays, In Fact. But yet, here he seems to rely on his literary talents to dance around issues he should have more fully embraced. Specifically, he simply labels such facts as the Dulles connection as mere "coincidence."

In making this point, Mallon quotes two people: Ruth's mother, who blames "fate" for her daughter's unusual notoriety, and Norman Mailer, author of Oswald's Tale, a 1995 biography of the alleged assassin.

Mallon neglects to inform his readers that in Mailer’s book, he actually suggested the possibility of a second assassin. He asserted that -- given the unlikelihood of the Warren Report's single-bullet theory -- a second gunman may well have stood, completely by chance, firing at JFK from behind the stockade fence on the grassy knoll in front of the presidential limousine while Oswald fired from behind--totally oblivious to the other shooter! After reading such illogical deductions, you can see why writers such as Mailer and Mallon remain more highly admired for their fiction than for their non-fiction.

To illustrate his insistence that coincidence ruled the Paines' fate, Mallon concludes his book by relating a story about Mr. and Mrs. Raymond Entenmann, former Paine pals who happened to help stock JFK's Fort Worth Hotel room with artwork on the night of Nov. 21-22, 1963.

The Entenmanns have nothing to do with the killing of the president, of course. But Mallon seems to be saying that since the Paines knew the Entenmanns, it's also logical that they may have known Dulles or Dallas FBI agent James Hosty. And that we shouldn't be surprised that Ruth's father worked for a CIA-related development agency in South America, or that Michael happened to have a Minox camera, which the FBI used to disguise the fact that Oswald had one, which the Bureau then disappeared.

Inexplicably, although they both gave lengthy testimony before the Warren Commission in 1964, neither of the Paines were called before the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) from 1976-79. And neither were they called before the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) from 1994 to 98. And Thomas Mallon apparently agrees with all this since he does not ask them any difficult questions in his book.

Is it just a coincidence that Ruth Paine was involved in finding Lee Oswald a job about five weeks before the JFK murder? And that site just happened to be on the revised pathway for Kennedy’s motorcade. Which, according to Commission testimony, Oswald was unaware of until that morning?

Is it just a coincidence that the Paine household became a treasure trove of evidence against Oswald? Evidence that somehow the Dallas Police failed to find in their searches of the house? And it was not just one search, it was two over two days.

Was it just a coincidence that the man who first escorted the Oswalds around Dallas upon their return from Russia was George DeMohrenschildt, a White Russian who did work for the CIA? And that he then introduced them to Ruth Paine in February of 1963, before he left for Haiti on an Agency-related assignment. Or that, after Ruth Paine and Marina’s relationship dissipated, that writer Priscilla Johnson entered the picture to become Marina’s new escort? And that ARRB declassified documents reveal her to be a “witting collaborator” for the Agency?

Is it just a coincidence that Michael Paine’s family ties extend back to the wealthy first families of the USA, namely the Cabots and the Forbeses? Or that some of these relations were involved in the CIA/ United Fruit overthrow of the Arbenz regime in Guatemala in 1954?

Is it just a coincidence that Ruth's father, William Avery Hyde, worked for a CIA-front organization called the Agency for International Development in Latin America, both before and after the JFK hit?

Is it just a coincidence that Michael’s stepfather was Arthur Young, who invented certain improvements to the Bell Helicopter, which made him a rich man and also helped Michael get a job at the Bell facility near Dallas, where he was working on the day of Kennedy's murder? That Michael had a security clearance to work there, and yet he had two persons who just returned from Russia staying at his house? One being a self-proclaimed Marxist who had been arrested in New Orleans?

Is it just a coincidence that Ruth took an automobile trip to the Northeast during the summer of 1963 after she had befriended the Oswalds? And that during that timely journey, she told friends and family in advance that she was going to pick up a Russian lady eventually on her return. Which she did, and Ruth placed her in her home, thus separating Marina from her husband at the time of the JFK murder.

On the macroscopic level:

Can it just be a coincidence that Jack Ruby’s idol was Lewis McWillie, who ran one of Santo Trafficante’s casinos in Havana, and that Trafficante was one of the Mafia dons whom the CIA hired to assassinate Castro?

Is it just a coincidence that J. Edgar Hoover despised Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, and that when JFK was killed, he ripped out RFK’s private line into his office? That while doing all he could to conceal the true circumstances of the president’s death, like covering up the bullet strike to the curb that hit bystander James Tague?

Is it just a coincidence that the Commission covered up the fact that three Commissioners—Sen. Richard Russell, Sen. John Sherman Cooper, and Congressman Hale Boggs did not want to sign the Warren Report since they had reservations about the Magic Bullet theory. And that when Russell called up President Johnson after the final meeting, Johnson said he did not believe it either?

Would any objective person consider all the above, and much more, to be simply a coincidence. Probably not, which is why Lee Oswald never stood trial and why the Commission—made up almost entirely of lawyers-- never gave him a defense counsel.

(The above is a revised and expanded version of the original review, which appeared in The Citizen of Cayuga County, NY, where Russ was a copy editor and staff writer.)

For more on the Paines, see Jim DiEugenio’s substack, which is still free.

https://jamesanthonydieugenio.substack.com/p/the-passing-of-ruth-paine-pt-1

https://jamesanthonydieugenio.substack.com/p/the-passing-of-ruth-paine-pt-2