Well-Intentioned Woman Has a Brush With the Infamous

MRS. PAINE’S GARAGE

And the Murder

of John F. Kennedy

By Thomas Mallon

Pantheon

212 pages; $22

In the spring of 1963, Ruth Hyde Paine, a mother of two in her early 30s in a Dallas suburb, befriended a young Russian woman married to an American by the name of Lee Harvey Oswald. Paine, a committed Quaker, liked helping people and, in this case, she was also happy to have met in Marina Oswald a native speaker of Russian, a language she was studying. Marina’s husband, Lee, an unsettled, unreliable sort, traveled a lot. Recently separated from her husband, Michael, Paine invited a pregnant Marina and her child to share her small house.

Later, Paine helped Lee find a job at the Texas School Book Depository. On Nov. 22, 1963, nine months after Paine first met the Oswalds, all their lives would be changed--all their lives and all of ours--by the assassination of President Kennedy.

Thomas Mallon is fascinated by the incidental characters in history’s dramas, ordinary people suddenly thrust into the limelight. This led him to get in touch with Paine, in whose garage, unbeknownst to her, Lee Harvey Oswald had stored the rifle that would deliver those fateful shots.

Interviewing Paine in 1999, Mallon found the same candor and helpfulness that had made this witness the darling of the Warren Commission. In turn, the prominent part her testimony played in the famous report made her an object of suspicion to at least some conspiracy theorists. Mallon was not only charmed by Paine but filled with admiration for her sheer goodness of character.

From her Ohio girlhood on, Paine was eager to lead a life of service. She attended Antioch College, a bastion of progressive thinking and social awareness, which, as Mallon puts it, “met no more than half of Ruth’s moral needs.” She found sustenance for her more spiritual side in the Society of Friends, becoming a Quaker in 1951. Although Michael, whom she married in 1957, shared many of her convictions, his emotionally distant personality was not conducive to the kind of passion and intimacy Paine had hoped for. The couple split up, albeit amicably. (The Oswalds, in contrast, stuck together even though Lee was a bad provider, an uninterested father and a wife-beater.) Marina was the one Paine cared about. Surly Lee was someone she tried not to offend, for Marina’s sake.

Indeed, Paine’s immediate reaction to the national tragedy was to worry about how it would affect Marina. Paine’s mother-in-law wrote her a letter warning her that her concern for Marina was getting out of hand: “I feel you are being carried along on a kind of idealism that is beyond common sense,” she cautioned her, noting that some of the newspaper interviews were leaving people with the mistaken impression that Paine cared less about “the enormity of the loss of Kennedy” than about Marina’s plight.

Taken into Secret Service custody, the widowed Marina pretty much turned her back on Paine, even as she wrote Marina pathetic letters pleading for their friendship.

Mallon succeeds admirably, not only at portraying Paine in depth and with sympathy, but at managing to make her goodness genuinely interesting. But line-by-line he is not a very good writer, and too much of the book is taken up with drawing farfetched parallels, and pointing out what Mallon believes are pointless coincidences.

Years after the tragedy, for instance, Paine donated her old manual typewriter to a Nicaraguan charity. Here’s Mallon’s riff on that bit of trivia: “The same thrifty generosity that had once made her send old copies of Reader’s Digest to a young man in India--and had made Alger Hiss and his Quaker wife, Priscilla, give a more famous typewriter, the Woodstock 230009, to their maid--now assures that, when the lights go out in the Nicaraguan capital, someone is still using the machine on which Lee Harvey Oswald, devoted to the same masters as Hiss, tried to hatch his next-to-last exploit.” Huh?

Despite his fascination with minutiae, however, Mallon does not tackle the various loose ends that have kept conspiracy theorists wondering. Indeed, his contempt for any and all conspiracy theorists is, frankly, a little surprising. In his view, they are part of what historian Richard Hofstadter dubbed “the paranoid style in American politics,” a style exemplified in films such as Oliver Stone’s “JFK” that take liberties with the truth yet pass for history in the minds of uninformed audiences.

But Mallon also recognizes the opposite problem: “If one is going to deplore the paranoid style in American political character,” he writes, “... one also needs to contemplate the nation’s transcendent and optimistic strain, whose evasions have sometimes led it down garden paths when night was falling.”

Mallon interviewed Michael Paine as well as Ruth, and discovered a startling discrepancy between what Michael told the Warren Commission and something he mentioned in a 1993 television interview: Michael had known that Lee had a rifle, but he had somehow failed to inform Ruth--or anyone else--of that fact. Mallon quotes Michael’s reaction to seeing a photo of Oswald, rifle in hand: “I wasn’t offended by it, but I was thinking, ‘Oh, that’s [got an] awfully remote chance of having any value or purpose in our society.’ I could see he wanted to be a guerrilla, in the revolution which should come, or that’s what struck me ... and I didn’t mind that.”

“[E]ven today,” suggests Mallon, “one doesn’t sink into the paranoid style by concluding that, sometimes, a refusal to think the worst of people is precisely what brings it out in them.”

Exactly what conclusions, if any, Mallon draws or would have us draw from his fuzzy line of argument are hard to see. By the time readers have pored over Mallon’s meandering melange of the intriguing and the inconsequential, they may well conclude that “Mrs. Paine’s Garage” turns out to be less interesting than at first glance it promises to be.