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The Lodger
'Mrs. Paine's Garage: And the Murder of John F. Kennedy' by Thomas Mallon
Reviewed by George Lardner Jr.
Sunday, January 27, 2002; Page BW04
MRS. PAINE'S GARAGE
And the Murder of John F. Kennedy
By Thomas Mallon
Pantheon. 212 pp. $22When Ruth Paine woke up in her Irving, Tex., home on the morning of Nov. 22, 1963, her overnight boarder, Lee Harvey Oswald, had gone for the day, leaving an empty coffee cup in the kitchen sink. She had been instrumental in getting him a job at the Texas School Book Depository, and when she got over her initial shock at the mid-day shooting of President John F. Kennedy, she told Oswald's wife, Marina, that Lee "would have quite a story to tell" when he got back that night.
Oswald, of course, never got back to Irving and never told his story. Hundreds of books have been written about what did or didn't happen that tragic day, and before and after. The Warren Commission concluded that Oswald, acting alone, murdered the president. The House Assassinations Committee, relying on acoustic evidence that appears to be solid, decided that he "probably" had help.
Now Thomas Mallon, an accomplished novelist who has often taken the bystanders at American historical events as subjects for his fiction, has produced a nonfiction account of the life of Ruth Paine and her dealings with the Oswalds before the assassination and the Oswald family thereafter. It is not a pretty picture.
In 1963, Ruth Paine, a Quaker uncomfortably transplanted to Texas, was looking to improve her Russian. She'd been studying the language for several years when she met Lee and Marina Oswald during a party at a friend's apartment in Dallas. Oswald was at his pompous best, commanding the spotlight with his criticisms of the Soviet Union, but Paine, recently separated from her husband, was taken with Marina, a lonely young woman isolated by her husband's refusal to let her learn English.
The two women became friends, and when Lee went to New Orleans in late April to look for work, Marina moved in with Ruth. Paine never liked Oswald much and would have liked him even less if she'd known he regularly battered Marina, once so badly that she tried to kill herself. Ruth drove Marina to New Orleans in May after Lee found a job, and then back again to Irving in September. Jobless again, Lee was unusually helpful in packing Ruth's station wagon. She didn't know she was bringing back a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle wrapped in a well-tied blanket, a rifle that Marina knew her husband had already used to try to kill right-wing Gen. Edwin A. Walker on April 10. It was tucked away in Mrs. Paine's garage until the morning of the assassination.
Mallon goes too far in touting Paine as the Warren Commission's "star" and "principal witness" when she wasn't even in Dealey Plaza the day Kennedy was shot, but her honest and effusive testimony, covering almost 200 pages, makes it difficult to dispute his calling her "the most precise and morally interesting person" to come before the panel. Painfully candid, she even managed to embarrass New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's minions years later when one of them asked her darkly about the Xs in her old Hallmark calendar for 1963.
"Well," Paine, now in her late sixties, says she replied, "most people keep track of their menstrual periods. . . . He flushed so red. He was sorry he asked, but as far as I was concerned, better to know than to wonder."
The book, while slender, gives us much too much trivia about Ruth Paine and her ex-husband, Michael, rambling through tiresome family histories and supposing that the reader cares what she thinks these days of "the more violent WTO protests" (they "leave her cold"). It comes almost as a relief when Mallon embarks on an engaging side tour of the unending, often paranoid Web-site battles between "Lone Nutters" who believe in Oswald's exclusive guilt and "Conspiracy Theorists" who consider him a victim. Ruth Paine pops up in these postings as an FBI informer or a CIA agent, while Michael Paine can find himself accused of having been "behind the [grassy] knoll in the parking lot."
Mallon, however, sinks into deep water when he scolds the House Assassinations Committee for failing to call Ruth as a witness. Paine herself seems to have realized that the committee's staff was satisfied with what she told the Warren Commission, but Mallon goes on to accuse the panel of sloppy work for relying on old FBI reports that contained minor errors such as misstating the name of a college she attended. Such nitpicking is undercut by Mallon's failure to spell former Texas governor John Connally's name correctly and his mistaken claim that the now defunct Assassination Records Review Board "had no investigative powers."
The book also derides the House committee's acoustic evidence of a fourth shot from the grassy knoll as though it has been definitively refuted. A special panel of the National Academy of Sciences tried to do that, but its study is the one that rests on shaky grounds. It made so many mistakes that the chances of its having been right are about 1 in 100,000.
For all that, Mallon deserves credit for bringing an honest face, that of Ruth Paine, to reflect on a tragedy that still haunts us. Even she may not have come to terms with it. She didn't know Oswald had a rifle. Marina knew. And Michael Paine says he did, too. In a 1993 interview with CBS, he declared for the first time that Oswald proudly showed him the famous picture of Oswald and his Mannlicher in early April 1963, on the night Michael Paine went to the Oswalds' Dallas apartment to pick them up for their first dinner with Ruth. Paine never told her about it. It wasn't until after the assassination, Paine told Mallon, that he realized his Quaker wife was "so allergic" to guns she would have forbidden Oswald to keep it at her house. So what if she had known of the photo? Would Oswald have been welcome at her home? Would she have helped him get his job at the Book Depository? Ruth Paine is willing to ask the question "Could it have made a difference?" but then her voice trails off. It is one that she does not want to answer. •
George Lardner Jr. has covered the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath for The Washington Post since November 1963.
© 2002 The Washington Post Company
