I was asked by Peter Voskamp and Jefferson Morley to provide some thoughts on the passing of Ruth Paine for their upcoming piece. This is what I wrote. There is more to say, and maybe I’ll add more later…
Here are some closing thoughts on Ruth Paine:
With the passing of Ruth Paine, we lost one of the two most important living witness in the JFK assassination case, the other being Marina Oswald (still alive at age 84). Ruth was the person closest to the Oswalds in the months leading up to the assassination. She played a strangely pro-active role in getting Marina Oswald to come live with her, helping the Oswalds move back to Dallas from New Orleans, and assisting Marina in all aspects of her life—financial and personal. The Oswalds physical possessions, including the alleged murder weapons, were stored in Ruth’s garage. Ruth was instrumental in getting Oswald the job at the TSBD.
As most of us know, Ruth was also the primary witness for the Warren Commission, answering many more questions than any other witness. And she played a very active role in the media, in documentaries and news reports over the years, always telling the same story, butressing the official story of the lone gunman Oswald.
I spent seven years working on a documentary about Ruth Paine. I interviewed her several times and talked to many prominent researchers and authors about her, on both sides of the conspiracy divide. I tried to go into this process with an open mind. Everything I learned led me to a conclusion that Ruth was withholding important information. There were a few specific instances where Ruth was cagey or unclear, particularly her sister’s employment with CIA, her role in the discovery of the “Kostin Letter,” and how many times she met with George de Mohrenschildt. But her story was remarkably consistent and she was clearly very knowledgable, articulate and extremely intelligent. Some of her statements were almost lawyerly in their precision and forethought. I wasn’t surprised to learn that she sent a letter to the Warren Commission with detailed corrections on specific areas where she felt they had made errors.
We live in a nation divided into smaller and smaller niches and alienated silos. But suspicion that there is more to the JFK assassination than one lone crazed communist gunman remains a remarkably mainstream position. That simplistic conclusion, which was handed down from on high by the Dallas Police, FBI, Warren Commission, and then by the establishment media, historians, and academia, cannot withstand the light of honest scrutiny.
Ruth Paine is a Rorschach test, and people who see a conspiracy will continue to see her as a key part of a wider plot, whether witting or unwitting. Those who believe the official story will, by default, laugh off suspicions of Ruth’s dissembling as the paranoid fantasies of conspiracy freaks. In fact, defenders of the official story seemed eager to utilize Ruth’s character as a virtuous elderly Quaker woman to show the ridiculous and delusional nature of those who could suspect her.
Check out the extensive suspicious comments on any YouTube video of Ruth Paine and compare them to the quotes in the AP or New York Times obituaries. You’ll get a snapshot of the divide in this country. Most Americans, whether intellectually or just in their gut, understand that the JFK assassination is not what we’ve been told by the “authorities.” Populism can be co-opted by demagogues but democracy cannot survive if elites and authorities dictate the truth.
Ruth Paine remains an enigma. People see her in completely opposing ways depending on their perspective. I never wanted to demonize Ruth Paine, and I want to emphasize that if we think she was being less than completely honest, we must admit that we also couldn’t know all the details or her true motivations. If Ruth was keeping secrets, could she be doing it out of loyalty to an oath of service, threats of retribution, personal values, or protectiveness over the legitimacy of the government?
I had a lot of respect for Ruth’s strength of character and her willingness to speak to people with different perspectives on the assassination. As I’ve said elsewhere, I sometimes suspected that she secretly wanted the truth to come out, but she was under such a burden that she couldn’t say anything too revealing.
RIP Ruth Paine