Customer Reviews

Mrs. Paine's Garage : and the Murder of John F. Kennedy

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1 star:		(10)

 

 

As stated by a previous reviewer, this book reveals the author to have a near zero grasp on even the basic details of the JFK assassination- yet there are numerous rather mocking and sarcastic references to "buffs, theorists, assassinologists etc" with no basis of reference for why he dismisses all of them out of hand. Short on facts and long on psychoanalysis, the book is nearly painful to read- especially the post assassination world of Ruth Paine which takes up the final few chapters. In the end this woman, who lived a simple Quaker lifestyle, was uninteresting. The afternoon of the assassination police removed "file cabinets full" of letters and collected data... what was in there, who did it belong to? Why the author never asked the question is beyond me- and so is this book.

A brilliant book; this has stayed with me in the weeks since I read it. I'm not an assassination buff, and if you'd asked me, I would have said I wasn't that interested in the subject. But the New Yorker piece was so good I HAD to read the book--and the book was even more remarkable. In the life of Mrs. Paine, Mallon has found the perfect vessel to explore the coincidences that haunt every life, the huge resonances one seemingly small choice--befriending a stranger, offering succor to someone in need--can have, and the unintended horrors the best-intentioned acts can wreak. That the book is so elegantly economical, and so beautifully written, makes it that much easier to see the deep story running just below the story of Mrs. Paine's life. Truly this has changed the way I think about innocence and evil.

If you've wondered where Mrs. Paine has been, and what she has been thinking since that tragic week in her life and in the life of the Country, you will be fascinated. If you are looking for some small detail to inspire new research on 11-22-63, you will enjoy this book, but you will probably consider donating it to the Library.

The writer is not out the analyze the events at Dealey Plaza, just to study the effect on one very prominent individual, a quiet, studious person of Quaker descent, who met her husband at a folk dance in 1955.

The back jacket panel states affirnatively that Lee Harvey Oswald *was* the assailant that Friday; the text states that he *was* the indivudal who plotted and attempted the assassination of General Walker, months before. In 2011, even the most casual JFK researcher is not 100% convinced of either occurence. So the "Conspiracy" side won't gain much more than a light poolside read.

One bit which jumped out at me: Oswald's note with instructions if he persihes or is away for awhile, mentions that the Red Cross can help Marina and child. Did LHO or the CIA actually *contact* said organization, prior to 11-22-63?

Disappointing lack of time-line photos of the book's subject.

For those of us who lived through the assassination of John Kennedy and/or have lived in the Dallas metroplex, the few nuggets of linking information in this work are enlightening and result in an additional degree of closure on the whole event of John Kennedy's murder. Much of the non-substantive "fluff" that is sandwiched into latter chapters however was distracting and has the appearance of having been inserted to fill space. Mallon is a skilled writer in those areas where his focus is evident, and even with the flaws, this book was an interesting read.

This book has stayed with me a long time. I first read it four years ago and I've recently reread it. It is written in an intelligent and unassuming manner, with great insight, and its thoughtful observation and dramatic restraint portrays the tragedy of JFK's assassination in a much deeper way than narratives that are big on drama and short on observation. There are those who will say that Mallon has it wrong and that the Paines were part of a conspiracy. I will not attempt to argue one way or another here -- or at least I will not attempt to argue much; I will say that this book brings home the realization that JFK's assassination, as big as it was for the world, may have been almost tangential in the mind of the person who assassinated him; that President Kennedy may have been merely the means to very personal ends. This, of course, is hard to take. One wants there to have been damn better reasons for what happened, even though they are terrible and wrong, than the way this may have actually unfolded. This book brings the awfulness of the assassination home in a way that books filled with lists and references calling out inconsistencies in the various testimonies and hearings do not. That is not to say that those attempts are not worthwhile; but this book's approach is also worthwhile. Mallon begins with an essential, compelling point -- an unexpected visit Lee Harvey Oswald made on a weeknight to the home where his wife was staying. Mallon builds the story from that point and limits his scope to the few characters who were closest in proximity to Oswald in the last months of his life. By chance, one of these was Ruth Paine, unless you are among those who believe she was involved in a conspiracy; then you would regard her part in the story as calculated. But that is rather a matter of faith since there is little evidence for it, and one must at least give a fair hearing to events that point to chance and coincidence and ironically, to the goodness of Ruth Paine's character. I think Mallon makes an astute point when he writes: "The letters [between Ruth Paine and Jessamyn West] make one consider how goodness is not only rare, but also unsettling. The truth is we are less likely to think about it than to 'wrestle' with evil, as we claim to do all the time, in literature and on the op-ed page and on the split-screens of cable TV. We are less troubled by one person's malevolence than by another's kindness. To feel oneself less bad than somebody else is a relief, a pleasure to prolong; to judge oneself less good is an upsetting experience, a realization one prefers bringing to a quick close."

I find the character of Ruth Paine compelling, not boring, as another reviewer has implied. I wonder if the charges of dullness have to do with the tendency of our dramas to make evil glamorous. I would argue that people who commit evil acts are themselves on the whole rather flat and uninteresting; it is only their acts that intrigue others. Here, I would say Mallon has made goodness haunting, and as he said, unsettling, because goodness is not supposed to bring you into proximity with the kind of events with which Ruth Paine has become associated. At any rate, I think this book holds up to the tradition of great tragedy, and it is a very human, felt story, worth reading for those things alone.

Thomas Mallon's "Mrs. Paine's Garage" is a short book (or a long essay) with a big reach. It tells the story of how Ruth Paine, a kindly, conscientious Dallas Quaker, took into her house a struggling young couple. They turned out to be Mr. and Mrs. Lee Harvey Oswald. Mallon uses Mrs. Paine's tale as a cross-section of history, a case study in the transformation of America over the last 40 years. We see how dramatically things have changed because of the unmovable guilelessness of the heroine. She was a very smart woman, but there is a sort of Forrest-Gump-like quality to her life--she manages to keep her integrity and honesty while all around her people are giving in to madness. Her goodness sets into stark relief those around her--Oswald's "hideously encumbered soul", Jim Garrison's daffiness. At one point Ruth sees a therapist in order to help her remember more facts about the case--seeking old-fashioned objectivity while the rest of the culture enthrones subjectivity as an ideal. Central to her life was her faith, the quality that allowed her to stand and live a normal life and not be consumed, as so many involved with the assassination were. This is a greatly entertaining, compassionate, and enlightening book, and one that should be read by anyone wishing to understand the differences between myth, history, and memory.

Thomas Mallon has written about Ruth Paine, the woman who found she had harboured one of the most infamous criminals of all time- Lee Harvey Oswald. Whatever you believe about the Kennedy assassination, you'll appreciate Mallon's glimpse at what it was like to be standing right next to one of the most important, disruptive, and tragic events of the twentieth century. Ruth Paine is revealed to be a woman with a very sure sense of who she is and what she stands for, a woman who- almost alone among survivors truly close to the assassination- refuses to be defined by her proximity to what happened that day in Dealey Plaza.

Mallon's skill at conveying a sense of what the world was like in 1963 is remarkable, and very welcome. In several paragraphs, he details just how un-sophisticated a planet we lived on then; it was a day of hand-typed copies instead of Xeroxes and the 8-cent stamp instead of e-mail. As someone who was around at that time, I've often wished that more authors dealing with this topic would take more care to remind readers that the world was a very different place then. Forgetting that has led many assassination researchers and theorists down many a specious and unproductive pathway. One example (which is not to be found in Mallon's work) is Michael Paine's ownership of a Minox camera. Today's researchers have made the most prodigious hay out of that, never suspecting the truth- the Minox was heavily promoted and sold in the early Sixties as a toy for the well-off (which Mr. Paine was, despite his unassuming lifestyle), advertised in 'National Geographic'. The camera- in the context of its time- was no more meaningful than possession of a laptop is today. Yes, both COULD be used for nefarious purposes, but most owners use their laptops for peaceful, private purposes, and so did most Minox buffs. Mallon's work is always scrupulous in remembering the difference between Now and Then, and it is most refreshing.

Ruth Paine seems to have given much of herself to Mallon, and therefore to us. She is revealed to have been very pained at several questions and revelations that came up both before and during the interviews for the book, but she seems never to have cut off the author's lines of inquiry, nor even to have directed them, answering frankly. Touchingly, Mallon's research revealed things to Ruth Paine even she had not known about the central event of her life, and her reactions to them are interesting indeed.

Mallon has not produced a perfect book- there does not seem to have been much direct questioning of Mrs. Paine on some of the topics that assassination researchers raise the most questions about (that Minox, for one), and so the book will give a great deal of unnecessary ammunition to those who feel that Mrs. Paine has something to hide, rather than clearing matters once and for all. And there are a few places where Mallon does not make clear that he's quoting from previously published material, giving rise to the impression that he interviewed people he did not. While a reader familiar with the subject will be able to discern immediately that, say, Robert Oswald did not grant Mallon an interview, the author waits a bit to let the average reader in on that.

Still, it's a remarkable look at a remarkable witness to history, a woman who has had staggering events roll over her, and like the slender reed she resembles, has sprung back, ready for new life, ready to bend in new directions, respecting the force of the storm, but quietly, serenely confident in her ability to survive it.

I did not care for the author's writing style. It felt stilted.
His sentences are start-stop-jumbled. I don't know. It
just didn't work for me.

I found the portrayal of the women's friendship interesting.
It supports the theory that Lee Oswald acted alone in the shooting of JFK and I do believe he was ONE assassin. I think he was set up by others...that someone else "helped" to make sure Kennedy was killed, and that Oswald would
be the fall-guy because his position in the Book Repository was so high-profile.

What I found weird was the author's attempt to "clear" Ruth
Paine when I wasn't aware any of us thought she was responsible for anything in the first place. I do believe the author wrote this book because he knows Ruth Paine and/or her family, and, with his agent, realized they could milk a good celebrity book out that friendship/aquaintance.

I also found it weird that Ruth was so persistent in her pursuit of Marina Oswald, and that the author would make it seem that Paine was a good friend, caring person or at the very least sweetly naive because of this, when I see it as foolishness and co-dependency. It is just downright stupid to think that Marina Oswald was a free agent right after the assassination. She was besieged, surrounded on all sides by law enforcement of every stripe and lawyers, managers,
Oswald's family, the media, etc., etc. Why couldn't Ruth Paine understand this sea change and go with the flow? Didn't she know that she would probably be the last person in the world Marina Oswald would want to see...someone who had witnessed her shame as a poverty-striken immigrant and abused wife pre-assassination? Surely, Marina must have been feeling enraged and abandoned by Oswald. She would not want close witnesses to her betrayal as friends.

Whatever. I did not find this book as interesting as I'd hoped.

As I carried this book home from the store (while on a visit to Dallas, mind you), two people I didn't know stopped me on separate occasions to say what a great book it was. I'll agree with them. Although I don't accept Mallon's take on what happened at Dealey Plaza, that issue really isn't important to this particular study. I am thoroughly entranced by his ability to see Ruth and Michael Paine (certainly not your ordinary American couple), and their place in the public story of the assassination, through seemingly fresh and perceptive eyes. Also, Mallon's grasp and conveyance of the moral, social, and political tenor of the times is positively eerie. The first half of the book taking us up to and through the assassination was most disquieting. The second half dispersed the tension.

This excellent inquiry into good and evil in an historical context could not be more timely in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001. I just finished reading this absorbing book in a single sitting--it is both well-written and captivating enough that I hardly noticed the time passing.

As an idealist, a humanitarian, and a Quaker, Ruth Paine was in a truly unique position to relate to Marina and Lee Harvey Oswald and their children in 1963. Driven by both a desire to avail herself of an opportunity to learn Russian and an empathy for Marina's plight as an emigre with an abusive husband, Ruth Paine welcomed this troubled couple into the bosom of her family, including her two young children. To say that her trust was betrayed by both Marina and Lee is an understatement. Marina knew about Lee's attempt to murder another public official before JFK and of his possession of a powerful rifle while living in the Paine household, but never revealed either to Paine. Paine went so far as to even find a job for Oswald--with fatal implications, in the Texas School Book Depository.

Mallon presents the facts of what happened in the Paine home but also asks critical questions about what the rather naive but charitable Paines knew or should have known up to November 22, when Oswald left their home in the morning with an apparent plan to murder the President. Ruth Paine comes across as perhaps too trusting but also relatively pure of heart; asked about whether she harbors anger or resentment toward Oswald and about what she would ask him in an afterlife, she responds that she got over the anger soon after the event and would want to know "Where are you now in your learning, and your understanding of life?"

Mallon has less empathy for Paine's ex-husband Michael, who apparently knew in advance that Oswald had the rifle that would be used to kill JFK and never revealed it until 1993--30 years after the assassination. It is hard to fathom how Michael, even as Ruth's estranged husband, would have so little regard for her safety or that of his children, who lived in the house with the Oswalds--much less the safety of society in general. Mallon speculates that Michael might have succumbed to a family tradition of strangeness--his forbears include Ralph Waldo Emerson and another man intensely interested in ESP and the paranormal. But the book never explains Michael's motives as it convincingly captures Ruth's.

It is unfortunate that so many other reviews of this fine book get caught up in the never-ending disputes about whether there was a conspiracy to kill JFK or whether Oswald acted alone. Regardless of where the truth lies in these debates--and I for one believe that we will never completely know what really happened--this book warrants the consideration of thoughtful readers for its many positive attributes.