The Assassination and Mrs. Paine

A Review Essay of Max Good’s documentary film

Human duplicity is a marvel to contemplate.  This riveting documentary is an excellent example of such cunning in action, not on the part of the filmmaker who is eminently fair, perhaps overly so, but on the part of some of those who appear in the film.  It demands that viewers use every skill in their possession to determine who is lying and who is telling the truth about the involvement of a woman named Ruth Paine (and her husband Michael) in the assassination of President Kennedy.  In many ways, it is akin to sitting in a jury box, listening to trial testimony from witnesses for the defense and prosecution and from a few whose slippery words seem meant to create uncertainty and never-ending debate about Paine’s innocence or guilt in the president’s murder.

The film will be an eye-opener for anyone unfamiliar with Mrs. Ruth Paine’s fundamental role at the heart of the president’s murder; and for those knowledgeable about her, it will be greeted as an important contribution to the case.  I believe it is not just a must watch for those interested in JFK’s assassination, which is the key to all subsequent American history, but for anyone trying to unravel today’s tapestry of lies and propaganda spewing out from the mainstream media (MSM) that go by different names – CBS, ABC, the Washington Post, etc. – but all of whom speak for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The basic equation is: CIA = MSM.

Since many people are adept at lying, they think they are good at sniffing out lies in others.  This is highly questionable.  We live in a country of lies, from the top down and the bottom up; propaganda and the everyday lies that grease the skids of social intercourse. Deceptions that deceive no one. Lying is the leading cause of spiritual death in the United States, even as devotion to truth is embraced as a national platitude.  Even when such fealty to truthfulness isn’t professed or implied and the lying is admitted, as with ex-CIA Director Mike Pompeo’s 2019 remark about the CIA at Texas A&M university – “We lied, we cheated, we stole” – such treachery is uttered proudly and with a chuckle. It’s what everybody knows and pretends they don’t.

There are some intellectuals, like Noam Chomsky, who likes to say that many who lie believe their own stories because of their institutional affiliations – e.g. journalists for the BBC, The New York Times, CBS, etc. (but not the Defense Department-funded MIT where he spent his career) – because such institutions require that the employees they hire have internalized the script in advance.  But they don’t call it lying, for it is built into the socialization process that leads to positions within such institutions. So they are only doing their jobs and lack awareness of any duplicity. They are innocent of their own complicity in censorship and propaganda in stories they report.  They have no knowledge of the fact that their mainstream employers have long been proven to be mouthpieces for the CIA, M-16, etc.

Focused exclusively on institutional analyses, Chomsky denies these people a place for individual freedom and consciousness, as he does with his long-held absurd assertion that JFK’s assassination is of little importance and his denial of the clearly documented facts about how Kennedy took a radical turn toward peacemaking in the last year of his life, a metanoia that led directly to his death.

He is correct, however, that such MSM people don’t need to self-censor, for their jobs require them to play the game according to the censorship rules under which they were hired, but he is very wrong to claim they therefore believe what they say. That assumes these people are very ignorant, which they are not; that they just obliviously do their jobs and collect their pay.  He fails to distinguish between playing dumb and being dumb.

It would be more accurate to say that they live in what Jean Paul Sartre calls “bad faith” (mauvaise foi), for “the essence of a lie implies in fact that the liar actually is in complete possession of the truth which he is hiding …. The ideal description of a liar would be a cynical consciousness, affirming truth within himself, denying it in his words, and denying the negation as such.”

You can’t lie to yourself, for that would mean you were two people.  But you can lie to others.  And you can play dumb.  It’s called acting.  And of course many journalists and academics hold dual positions, since they secretly work as assets for the intelligence services.

I begin with these thoughts about lying because a good number of the people who appear in The Assassination and Mrs. Paine have no ostensible institutional affiliation but may be working in some capacity for an invisible institutional paymaster who calls their tunes.  No names required.  They implicitly present themselves as disinterested pursuers of truth, yet viewers are forced to assess the veracity of their claims, including those of Ruth Paine who appears throughout, answering Max Good’s interview questions.

Much has been written and filmed about the JFK assassination.  Most take a broad perspective.  This film is quite different because it approaches it through a personal focus on a woman named Ruth Paine who, for those who may not have heard of her, was the key witness against Lee Harvey Oswald at the Warren Commission (WC) hearings where she was asked more than five-thousand questions (her husband Michel was asked 1,000 or so).  She is the woman who invited Marina Oswald to live with her in her home in the Dallas suburb of Irving, Texas, where Lee Harvey Oswald also spent weekends from late September 1963 up until the morning of the Assassination on November 22, 1963.  Her testimony led to the WC’s conclusion that Oswald, and Oswald alone shot, the president.

The Assassination and Mrs. Paine is Max Good’s second full-length documentary.  He came to the subject after reading a section (pp.168-172) on Ruth and Michael Paine in James W. Douglass’s JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters, a book considered by many to be the best on the JFK assassinationHe felt the Paines’ story shouted out for a documentary, and when he discovered that Ruth Paine was still alive, in her late eighties, lucid, and living near him in a Quaker retirement home in California, he contacted her and she agreed to be interviewed, something she has done for 59 years, always protesting her innocence, even though over the decades researchers have uncovered much evidence to the contrary.

Her ex-husband, Michael, also lived at the home but has since died.  There’s a brief interview of little consequence with him in the film since his memory was going, but I should note that he too is a crucial figure in the assassination story.  Both he and Ruth have always denied involvement in the plot and coverup, yet much evidence connects them to it.  Michael Paine’s involvement is artfully suggested by the film’s title – “Mrs. Paine” and not simply Ruth Paine, a woman acting alone.  The Paines, who have claimed they are pacifists, might best be superficially described as unassuming, liberal Quaker/Unitarian do-gooders, whose wealth and astounding family and intelligence connections would make heads spin, if they were known.  The film exposes many of those connections.

The fundamental undisputed facts are as follows. In February 1963, Ruth, who spoke and taught Russian, was invited to a party by George de Mohrenschildt, a White Russian CIA asset who was ‘babysitting” Lee Harvey Oswald at the request of the CIA.  There she met Oswald.  Soon de Mohrenschildt would go to Haiti and Ruth would establish a relationship with Lee and Marina Oswald.  In September, Ruth Hyde Paine visited family in eastern Massachusetts on Naushon Island, owned by the Forbes family. Michael Paine’s mother, Ruth’s mother-in-law, was Ruth Forbes Paine Young, from the blue-blood Forbes family of Boston.  She was friends with the CIA’s Allen Dulles since her best friend was Mary Bancroft who was Dulles’s mistress.  They had stayed on the island.

From Massachusetts, Ruth drove to New Orleans to pick up the Russian speaking Marina Oswald and the Oswald’s belongings to bring her back to Dallas to live with her. It’s a small, unassuming house, but there was room for Marina and her children because Michael Paine had conveniently moved out in the spring, allegedly because of marital problems, but would move back in the winter after the assassination and Marina’s departure. Ruth says she did this to help a woman in need.  On her long road trip south, she made numerous stops, including at her sister Sylvia Hyde Hoke’s house in Falls Church, Virginia.  Sylvia worked for the CIA, as documents have confirmed, and her husband worked for the agency’s front, the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID), yet to this day – and in Good’s interview in the film – she claims not to know where her sister worked.  Ruth’s father, William Avery Hyde, also worked for U.S. AID in Latin America and his reports went to the CIA. From her sister’s house, Ruth proceeded to New Orleans where she picked up Marina and took her to her house in Irving.  In mid-October, again out of alleged kindness, she got Lee a job in the Texas School Book Depository, despite calls to her house from an employment agency offering him a much higher paying job.  When asked about this by the Warren Commission, Ruth gave an evasive answer.  Then when JFK was killed, an empty blanket roll that allegedly held Oswald’s rifle was found in the Paines’ garage.  And Ruth claimed to have found a note – the ”Walker Note” that was used to show his propensity for violence – and a letter also allegedly written by Oswald to the Russian Embassy that was used as evidence of his guilt.  There is much more of a strange and suspicious nature involving Ruth and the Oswalds.

The Paines have always said that Oswald killed Kennedy to make a name for himself – the little man kills the big one syndrome.  They repeat this in the documentary.  Ruth says of Oswald, “He realized he had the opportunity to no longer be a little guy but someone extraordinary.”  But as Jim DiEugenio (one of the finest and most informed commentators in the film) says, if that were so, then why did Oswald always claim he was innocent, a patsy who didn’t shoot anyone.  Those who wish to kill to make a name for themselves obviously claim credit, but the Paines seem not to get this.  Their claim makes no sense, yet they both repeat it in the film.

And although the film’s focus is on Ruth, not Michael, there are other undisputed facts about him worth noting.  As previously mentioned, his mother was Ruth Forbes Paine Young.  After divorcing Michael’s father, Lyman Paine, his mother married a man named Arthur Young.  Among other strange facts about Young, he was the inventor of the Bell helicopter, which was the prototype for the infamous Huey helicopter used in Vietnam.  Those helicopters were produced at the defense contractor Bell Helicopter in Fort Worth, Texas where Michael, the pacifist, worked through his connection to Arthur Young.  He had a security clearance; when the Warren Commission asked him what type of clearance, he said he didn’t know.  One of his cousins, Thomas Dudley Cabot (the Boston Cabots), was a former president of the United Fruit Company, and another, John Cabot, worked for the State Department where he exchanged information about the CIA-United Fruit coup d’état against Jacobo Arbenz. Later, he was president of the CIA front company Gibraltar Steamship Corporation that leased Swan Island in the Caribbean for the CIA, where the agency set up Radio Swan that was used during the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, among other things (see pp.193-208 in James DiEugenio’s Destiny Betrayed, second edition, for important information on the Paines).

All this factual background on the Paines doesn’t definitively prove anything about them, but it is essential to assess their credibility, and watching The Assassination and Mrs.Paine is all about doing that.

The question about Ruth that the film asks is whether she is a truthful, naïve, Quaker do-gooder or a CIA asset, a pawn, or someone in deep denial (whatever that is).

She has her defenders and they appear in the film along with well-known supporters of her and the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Oswald did the deed alone:  Max Holland, Gerald Posner, Priscilla Johnson McMillan, Jack Valenti, Michael Beschloss, and Peter Jennings.

From the so-called prosecution side we hear from: Jim DiEugenio, Dr. Gary Aquilar, Dr. Martin Schotz, Vince Salandria, and Sue Wheaton.

Paine’s defenders make sure to bash Oliver Stone and his film, JFK, and Ruth claims Stone never contacted her about her portrayal in the film.  Stone denies this and says she would not talk to him.  But she makes it clear that she is a big fan of various Network TV specials that support the WC, especially the London mock trial with Gerry Spence and Vincent Bugliosi, and a Peter Jennings ABC special.

Ruth Paine is given a lot of screen time between her defenders and accusers.  As I said, Max Good is more than fair, perhaps too fair.  Paine is a cool character who only rarely gets a bit flustered.  She’s been doing these interviews for a long time, and is either a good actor or an innocent bystander, as she says, “I’m kind of naïve …. But I think it’s a blessing.”

After giving both sides their say – and a few others, whom I won’t mention, who make lawyerly-like slippery statements – Bill Simpich interjects that there is “something about the Ruth Paine story that simply doesn’t jell.”  Good then proceeds to ask Ruth a series of hard questions that viewers will find very interesting.  But he never lets the audience know what he has concluded about her guilt or innocence.  He is impartial to the end.

I am not.  For before watching the film, I knew a great deal about the Paines and their roles in the assassination and its cover-up.  I completely agree with the Philadelphia lawyer Vince Salandria, one of the earliest and most brilliant critics of the official story, when he says “You can’t close the circle without the Paines.  There is no way they can be innocent.  No way.”

And he added the film’s penultimate statement about the assassination:

There is no mystery here.  It’s all self-evident.  It was a coup.  It was designed to be a false mystery and the debate would be eternal and why it [killing JFK] was done – forgotten. In order to commit yourself to truth here, you’re changing your real identity from a citizen of a democracy to a subject of a military empire.  A big step.

Ruth Paine, however, gets the final word.  Regarding all the claims about her involvement with the CIA and the Oswalds: “Nonsense. Absolute nonsense …. I am interested in truth …. I’m a very independent person.  Nobody tells me what to do.”

I highly recommend that people watch this important film and reach a verdict based on the evidence it provides, and if they need more, to read the works of Douglass and DiEugenio mentioned earlier, among others.  As good as a film can be, it is only as good as the sources it relies upon.

Human duplicity is a marvel to contemplate.  The Assassination and Mrs. Paine will force you to do that.  Don’t miss it.

 

 

14 thoughts on “The Assassination and Mrs. Paine”

  1. Mary Pinchot Meyer, JFK’s final girlfriend is the one who turned him from Cold Warrior into a Peace Maker.

  2. I will sadly be watching this documentary. For I was in the womb about to drop when the world was changed yet again to reward tyranny. Beginning a cancer that has spread through out my lifetime leading to the funeral we all are forced to watch today.
    Stage 1 cancer : 1964 removal of the silver standard. The main stream worker must comply
    Stage 2 : 1971 Nixon removes gold standard ..Governments must comply.
    Stage 3 : 2001 GETRID-01…. Corporations must comply
    Stage 4 : 2008… Banks must comply
    Stage 5 : 2020 …NOBID-19 t…the world’s people enter hospice as the Economic Frankenstein dies

  3. Among best lines Edward has ever written, at least for my taste. . . so simple, so obvious, yet rarely taught to anyone, save sociologists of yore: “institutions require that the employees they hire have internalized the script in advance. [note: and, as Durkheim stated, a contract is already a contract before it is signed as it requires this same internalization of values and norms; otherwise, no contract is possible, absent common internalization] But they don’t call it lying, for it is built into the socialization process that leads to positions within such institutions [pattern maintenance]. So they are only doing their jobs and lack awareness of any duplicity [and of their own social deviance]. They are innocent of their own complicity in censorship and propaganda in [cover] stories they report [this, in part, of what Barrington Moore, Jr. implies, in his last book, as the consequences of mono-theism [[run amok]] abstracted by the Christians, having taken and expanded this framework from Judaism].

    Thomas Merton had a hand in JFK’s late coming to terms with what became his destiny, as it were.

    Camus in 1951 wrote clearly and ominously about what is now referred to as virtue signal and what that bring. . . .from “L’Homme Revolte”:
    “From the moment that eternal principals are put in doubt simultaneously with formal virtue, and when every value is discredited, reason will start to act without reference to anything but its own success. . .One day it will conquer. . .and want to make earth a kingdom where man is God [in] the nihilistic revolution. . .which denies all forms of morality and desperately attempts to achieve the unity of the human race by means of ruinous crimes and wars.

    “The sky is empty, the earth delivered into the hands of power without principles. Those who have chosen to enslave will successively occupy the front of the state, in the name of a form of rebellion which has been diverted from the path of truth.”
    -30-

    1. JFK’s turn toward peace also involved a visit from Catholic Worker Founder Dorothy Day and some Quakers who visited JFK and talked about the nuclear threat and the need to make peace with the USSR. Subsequently, it was Dorothy Day herself who directed a young James Douglass “to study the life of John Kennedy.” The result, decades later was the monumental book “JFK and the Unspeakable” (the term coined by Merton, who also influence Jim Douglass.

    1. Read through some of your critiques. How much has the Company paid you to regurgitate this thoroughly discredited tripe? A little too naked, my friend, but thanks for the laughs.

  4. Thanks for this great film review Ed. It strikes me that we now have an absolutely overwhelming amount of critical information about the various “players” in the assassination, that has never been publicly acknowledged or discussed in “CIA=MSM.” In a world interested in truth, simply the open public discussion of this information would/should be enough shatter the Warren Commission’s nonsense report and reveal that the emperor has no clothes.

    That such a discussion does not happen, and cannot happen, as it clearly cannot be allowed – speaks to the power and control over our perceptions and thoughts exercised daily by the hidden forces of oligarchy at play through the media and intelligence services. As we’ve seen clearly with the credulous acceptance by much of the public of the covid propaganda operation – a nation that can manage its own cognitive-dissonance well enough to even pretend to believe in the existence of a “magic bullet” for over 50 years can apparently accept and believe pretty much ‘anything.’

    1. Edward Bernays, perhaps more than anyone, helped establish the modern system of public manipulation. Drawing on the psychoanalytical techniques of his uncle, Sigmund Freud, Bernays became known as the father of propaganda. His low opinion of the masses is best expressed in his own words. The following is taken from his book Propaganda:

      “No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people expresses any divine or specially wise and lofty idea. The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by the group leaders…and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion.If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it? Whatever attitude one chooses toward this condition…we are dominated by the small number of persons who understand the mental processes of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind and contrive new ways to guide the world. Political campaigns today are all sideshows…A presidential candidate may be “drafted” in response to “overwhelming popular demand,” but it is well known that his name may be decided upon by half a dozen men sitting around a table in a hotel room. The conscious manipulation of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. “

  5. History proves the ruling psychos stop at nothing.
    Presidents are dispensible.

  6. Great essay! Thank you for giving the documentary a review. I think it is important to keep alive the demand for justice for the Kennedy assassination, and the others against Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, Fred Hampton, and others (some believe John Lennon was killed for what he could have contributed to the movement).

    I hope you can craft an essay that connects the impunity of the 1960’s assassinations with the September 11th event, the subsequent Anthrax and Patriot Act with the Federal Covid Response.

    I know Zelikow of the 9/11 Commission is on a committee to prepare an official Covid narrative, and that Cass Sustein is in place preparing control narratives as well.

    I like your essays, that you name names, and that you connect the dots.

    For me, the JFK assassination was a coup for sure, but a coup is a crime against democracy. We need to call out the crimes against democracy, the cover ups, and build the movement on getting real justice. I appreciate your call to resist.

  7. Excellent way of drawing me into the subject of The Assassination and Mrs. Paine. Living in a nation of lies – a problem that plagues Western nations more generally as satellites of empire – I look forward to viewing this documentary in the near future.
    I remember where I was when I was just six years old on the day JFK was shot, and walking home from elementary school before noon, after a school assembly. America, and the world, are still reeling from the coup of November 22, 1963.

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