SANTA ROSA, Calif. — The words that come to mind are peace, serenity and beauty. It is here, in the foothills of California wine country, that Ruth Paine has chosen to make her home, in a Quaker retirement community, far from the sound and fury of Nov. 22, 1963.
Almost 59 years have passed since a sniper, firing from a sixth-floor window in Dealey Plaza, killed America’s 35th president, John F. Kennedy. Paine, who recently turned 90, voted for Kennedy, but for her, the news of his murder was deeply personal.
At the time, Paine was living in a small suburban home in Irving, Texas. Estranged from her husband, she and her son and daughter were sharing the two-bedroom, one-bath house with a 22-year-old mother of two girls, a toddler and infant. The young mother, a Soviet emigre named Marina Oswald, was, because of money woes, apart from her husband, who in more ways than one was struggling.
Paine had gone out of her way to help the couple she met at a party in February 1963. She reached out to Marina, Paine says, “because she was new in the country, and I wanted to learn to speak Russian.”
By November of that year, Marina’s husband — Lee Harvey Oswald — was living in a rooming house at 1026 N. Beckley Ave. in Dallas' Oak Cliff neighborhood. Hoping to help the couple, Paine told a neighbor that Oswald was looking for work, and soon, aided by that connection, he was hired at the Texas School Book Depository.
Within hours of Kennedy’s death, police arrested a belligerent Oswald in the Texas Theatre, where he came close to killing a second police officer. Minutes earlier, he had killed Dallas police Officer J.D. Tippit at the corner of 10th and Patton, shooting him three times at point-blank range with a .38-caliber revolver.
Before she went to bed that night, Paine endured yet another shock. Law enforcement officers descended on her home and entered the garage, where Marina directed them to a limp, cylindrical blanket. There, she told them, was where Lee kept his rifle — a revelation that did far more than surprise the owner of the home. Paine describes it as a cataclysmic shock, given that it had the effect of ending one life and changing hers forever.
Then 31, her life was bifurcated, she says. Ripped in two.
Life was one way before learning what the blanket concealed — in her garage — and quite another in the nearly six decades since. Although Paine is the last person on Earth to see herself as a victim. In the years since, she has worked as a psychologist and educator and has a passion for such pastimes as folk-dancing and playing the guitar.
And yet, the shadow of the assassination is never far away.
“I don’t get phone calls much,” she says, sitting at a table on the patio of her Santa Rosa home. “But recently I got one. There’s a guy who has done a video. He’s been working on it for a long time. I usually qualify people before I talk to them, by asking who they thought did it. Because I don’t have any doubts about who did it.”
Paine fears that her vetting process didn’t work, saying of the filmmaker, “For some reason, he slipped through my question.”
The result is a newly released documentary, "The Assassination & Mrs. Paine," which will have its theatrical premiere in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, the 59th anniversary of the president’s death.
On Prime Video, the film is described as follows: “According to her detractors, Ruth Paine is a government agent who helped frame Lee Harvey Oswald as the assassin of the president. But to her defenders, she is simply an innocent bystander caught up in history.”
Paine has seen the movie, which she calls “fairly professionally done.”
“But it began with the wrong premises,” she continues, “and didn’t even acknowledge the attempt on Gen. [Edwin] Walker” — whom Oswald tried to kill barely seven months before the Kennedy assassination.
“Which is,” Paine says, “very significant.”
Conspiracy chatter never goes away, of course, as evidenced by the hundreds of QAnon followers who convened at Dealey Plaza in the fall of 2021, believing that John F. Kennedy Jr. would reappear and become vice president once Donald Trump was reinstated as president.
Because she knew Oswald, and listened to his wife’s sad, scary stories about the man who whisked her away from the Soviet Union, Paine sees him as being eerily similar to dozens of other young men guilty, in the decades since, of high-profile murders and mass shootings.
On Nov. 22, 1963, Oswald was 24, as was James Holmes, who in 2012 killed 12 people, including a 6-year-old girl, and injured 70 others in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado.
When he attempted to kill President Ronald Reagan, John Hinckley Jr. was 25, as was Mark David Chapman, who murdered John Lennon.
“I guess my strongest thought is that we’re not doing very well at limiting the kinds of guns that are sold,” says Paine, who after Kennedy’s death became the subject of a poignant biography by Thomas Mallon titled "Mrs. Paine’s Garage" and whose 1963 home was bought in 2009 by the city of Irving, which in 2013 created a museum called The Ruth Paine House.
“Of course, that wasn’t Lee’s problem,” Paine says. “He just bought a normal rifle” — a 6.5-millimeter Mannlicher-Carcano, which he ordered through the mail. It didn’t take long for Oswald to use it.
The Warren Commission, which concluded that Oswald acted alone in killing Kennedy, also found that, in April 1963, he used the same rifle in attempting to kill right-wing firebrand Edwin Walker, firing through a window of the former general’s Turtle Creek mansion in Dallas.
Marina knew of her husband’s attempt to kill Walker and that he kept his mail-order rifle hidden in Paine’s garage — which Paine says Marina never told her.
Nor did her estranged husband, Michael Paine, think to tell Ruth about the photograph Marina took of her husband, holding the rifle in the backyard of the duplex the couple rented at 214 W. Neely St. in Oak Cliff in early 1963. Michael Paine later admitted having seen the picture, while picking up the couple to take them to dinner at Ruth’s home in Irving. Had she known any of this, Paine says, it might have changed everything — as in choosing not to help the Oswalds.
Because she did, and with seemingly boundless kindness and generosity, biographer Mallon once described the theme of his book as being, “No good deed goes unpunished.”
Paine endured more questions from the Warren Commission than any of the more than 500 witnesses. She answered more than 5,000 questions in total; the average number of questions asked for each witness was less than 300.
She, of course, had a ton of information about Oswald, who in the fall of 1963 “felt that life wasn’t going his way at all,” Paine says. “He had had a really miserable upbringing.”
Paine calls the late Priscilla Johnson McMillan’s book "Marina and Lee" “the most perceptive book about who these young people were.”
Both, Paine says, “had been abused as children.”
Oswald, she says, had been psychologically injured by a mother “who put him and his brother in an orphanage, because she didn’t want to take care of them. I only met her a couple of times, but Lee had already decided not to see his mother. He didn’t want Marina to tell his mother that they had a new baby,” born the month before the assassination.
Marina thought his not wanting to tell his mother about the baby “was dreadful, but I can see why,” Paine says. “She was not a pleasant person.”
Fellow residents in her retirement village know of Paine’s past, because, well, when a film crew shows up, she adds with a chuckle, “It’s hard not to ask questions.”
When Paine entered the home 15 years ago, she was asked, as are all the residents, to share her life story. She told them: “I will have to do two — one is about what happened as a result of the assassination. And the other is my life as a whole.”
Although "Mrs. Paine’s Garage" was published in 2003, Thomas Mallon keeps in touch with Paine, about whom he says: “Ruth is an especially interesting figure at this moment in our history, when fewer people seem to believe in the literal truth, as opposed to what they like to call ‘my’ truth. I have lately found myself wondering if the dangerous fact-free business of election denial doesn’t have some of its origin in the more fantastical theories that grew up around the assassination decades ago.
“What’s increasingly remarkable to me about Ruth is how this deeply spiritual woman, who believes in the highly personal ‘inner light’ of Quakerism, has such respect for the blunt facts of the brutal world. For more than a half-century, she has patiently answered questions — some of them probing, some of them preposterous — about the worst thing that ever happened to her. To me, she represents a commitment to truth and history that I hope isn’t vanishing from American life.”
The post-assassination phase of Paine’s life has been devoid of contact with Marina, who, despite omitting key details about her husband, “did tell me that he was crazy,” Paine says. “She was upset about his attitude about so many things.”
She last saw Marina in the fall of 1964. “She had bought a house and wanted to share with me that she was really pleased, to have a place for the kids and so on. And we tried to visit, but it was so sad.”
The emigre’s life with Oswald began on a dance floor in Minsk in 1961. Marina Prusakova locked eyes with a thin, wavy-haired young American, an ex-Marine who had garnered international attention for having defected to the Soviet Union. They were married barely a month later.
Despite sharing a wealth of information about her odd, often bitter husband, “She never told me about his trying to shoot somebody” — meaning his attempt to kill Gen. Walker.
Later, investigators determined that Marina had hidden in a book a note written by Oswald in which he gave her instructions, should he ever be arrested. But Paine didn’t know about the note until investigators asked her about it months later, she says.
After so many years, what does Paine see as Oswald’s motive in trying to kill Walker and succeeding in killing Kennedy?
“I think he wanted to make a splash,” she says. “It didn’t matter who it was, except that it had to be somebody prominent.”
Paine’s children have lived through the aftermath, though not as intensely as she has. Her son, who is 61, lives near her. Her daughter, 63, lives in Massachusetts.
Despite her children being quite young in 1963, her daughter soon came to realize that Mom was trying in vain to pretend that everything was OK.
“She was clearly noticing,” Paine says, “that things were not OK. A family with a new baby and another little girl suddenly disappeared and never came back. She had just turned 4, and I didn’t know how to explain anything.”
And in many ways, she says with a wry laugh, she still doesn’t.
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