Behind the Book- Assassin at the Dinner Table; At the Center of a National Tragedy

By Nathan Ward -- Library Journal, 12/15/2001

In February 1963, Ruth Paine, a young mother living in Irving, TX, and newly separated from her husband, met Lee and Marina Oswald at a local party. The Oswalds had recently arrived from Russia, which made them exotic figures in the Dallas suburbs. Feeling lonely and eager to improve her own Russian skills, Paine eventually invited the young couple to share her modest ranch house, an offer they accepted. But, as Thomas Mallon makes clear in Mrs. Paine's Garage and the Murder of John F. Kennedy, the new arrangement would unwittingly bring this good-hearted Quaker woman into the center of a national tragedy.

Of Paine's friendship with Marina, Mallon explains, 'There was something about this girl that appealed to her-her Russianness, the language, Ruth's natural desire to help.' She also tried to accommodate Marina's moody and erratic husband, when he wasn't living in nearby boarding houses under heroic aliases. Paine gave Lee driving lessons and even helped get him his job at the Texas School Book Depository, from whose window, on November 22, 1963, he fired a $20 rifle he had kept wrapped up in her garage and killed the President of the United States.

Down through the years, Paine has been tirelessly cooperative with writers and documentarians-both 'Lone Nutters' and Conspiracists-and with the Warren Commission and later Congressional investigators, even when the loopy New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison hauled her into his assassination kangaroo court. But, despite a longtime cottage industry of assassination works, Paine's own story had never been the subject of a book when Mallon first queried her in 1995.

'I proposed writing an essay about her and how one survives this sort of experience,' he recalls. 'I don't think she understood why her story, in and of itself, was interesting, and that was of course what I wanted to do.' Once he got to know her, Mallon realized that Ruth 'is a sterling person. She would have been a very interesting person had she never gone to that party in February of 1963 and met Marina and Lee.'

Paine and Mallon corresponded for four years before she agreed to the project. The story of Lee and Marina, of Lee's act of murder and own violent death on national television, and of Marina's subsequent rejection of her friend Ruth Paine, was still 'emotionally very fresh,' Ruth told him. But, Mallon remembers, 'She called me one Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1999, and it appeared that she might be ready. I don't know what the change was. I was struck by the proximity of her phone call in 1999 to John Kennedy Jr.'s death, which she had taken kind of hard.' The two began their interviews in June 2000. 'Once she said she would do this, she put nothing in my way,' sharing personal papers, giving him permission to talk to family members 'and basically to put up with my being around there day after day.'

Although Mallon is a writer of such respected historical novels as Dewey Defeats Truman, he never considered fictionalizing Ruth Paine's story, despite Ruth's initial suspicions that he would. Although he respects some assassination fiction, he argues that 'the actual story of Oswald and Kennedy is more peculiar than a lot of the novels that have been written about it.' But fiction still had an impact. 'In some ways, this book grew out of a novel of mine called Henry and Clara, about the couple with the Lincolns at Ford's Theatre. There's an obvious connection there; a lot of my novels have been about bystanders to American historical events-the 1948 election, the discovery of the moons of Mars, and the space flight of Aurora 7.'

Mallon's new work (reviewed in this issue) sensitively evokes Ruth's experience, but it's also 'a book about what you might call the culture of the Kennedy assassination, the way it's extended itself into the 21st century,' he observes. 'One of the reasons the book ended up being called Mrs. Paine's Garage was that the very personal papers-her writings, her essays, reflections on her marriage, a prayer that she wrote, lots of very personal letters-all of that stuff that she was very kind to let me quote and which was illegally seized by the Dallas Police on November 22, 1963-was all in this metal file box that was in that garage with the Oswald rifle.'

Mallon goes on to explain that he thought the key to both Paine and Oswald was housed in that garage. 'The essence of Ruth is in many ways in these personal writings she did, and the essential thing about Oswald is that he was the keeper of this gigantic fantasy that he was going to turn into reality the next day. The single moment that I knew from the Warren Commission Report and various books I'd read over the years was that terrible, poignant moment of her going into the garage the night before the assassination and realizing that [Oswald] had left a light on and of course never realizing what that meant. I feel to a certainty that he was out there wrapping up the gun in brown paper.'

How did her part in this shattering national event-playing host to a Presidential assassin and his family-not crush a conscientious, spiritual woman like Ruth Paine for the rest of her life? 'I think it's still a terrible burden to her,' says Mallon, 'and I would never say that she is over this. When she says, 'It has influenced my life, but it has not determined my life,' there's an extent to which that's true, but there's also a certain willfulness. But one of the things that has saved her is her own good character and most certainly her Quaker faith.'

Many of us, Mallon is sure, would not have held up anywhere near as well under such a burden. 'If this had happened to me, if I shuffled the pack and switched experiences, I do not think I would have survived. I certainly don't think I would still be there listed in the phone book, and I don't think I would have been welcoming of visiting writers all those years later. I don't think I would have cooperated as Ruth did, and for that, I am terribly grateful to her.'