See - http://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/8118362-181/michael-paine-debated-politics-with
Michael Paine of Sebastopol
was a civil libertarian and retired aeronautical engineer who, while living
outside of Dallas in 1963, engaged in occasional political discussions with a
self-identified Marxist named Lee Harvey Oswald.
When Paine heard of the assassination
of President John F. Kennedy, he thought immediately of Oswald “but dismissed
him because I didn’t think he was that irrational,” Paine later told an
interviewer.
In testimony
before the Warren Commission, created to investigate the assassination of JFK,
Paine said he did not regard Oswald as someone likely to kill a president.
“I saw he was a
bitter person … very little charity in his view toward anybody, but I thought
he was harmless,” he told the commission.
Through much of the 55 years since JFK’s murder, some conspiracy
narratives have alleged that both Paine and his former wife, Santa Rosa
resident Ruth Paine, were CIA operatives and framed Oswald.
Both rejected the
scenario as ridiculous, declaring that their observations and knowledge of
Oswald persuaded them that the killing of Kennedy was the work of him alone.
Michael Paine told
an interviewer not long after the shooting, “I think it’s a lone wolf thing.
The opportunity presented itself to him and he probably wanted to make a mark
on society.”
Paine died March 1
in Sebastopol, where he had lived with or near his son the past 14 years. He
was 89.
He was born in New
York City on June 25, 1928, to architect and left-wing activist G. Lyman Paine
and Ruth Forbes Young, founder of the International Peace Academy.
Michael Paine
studied at Harvard and Swarthmore and was living in Pennsylvania when, in 1957,
he married Ruth Avery Hyde. Two years later, Michael Paine took a job with Bell
Helicopter that required a relocation to Texas.
The couple settled
in Irving, a suburb of Dallas. They had two children, Tamarin and Chris, when
they separated amicably in the fall of 1962, then continued to spend time
together as a family.
The children lived
with Ruth Paine, a Quaker who has said she studied the Russian language in
order to counter Cold War tensions by seeking out dialogue with Russian people.
In February 1963,
she heard of a Russian woman who spoke no English, having recently moved to the
U.S. with her young daughter and her husband, Lee Harvey Oswald. Ruth, now a
retired teacher and school counselor living in Rincon Valley, has said she
liked the idea of having someone with whom to practice her Russian.
So she reached out
to the Oswalds. She invited her ex-husband, too, when she had 21-year-old Marina
and Lee Oswald, 23, and baby June over for dinner. Ruth and Marina became
friends.
That friendship on
occasion brought Michael Paine and Lee Oswald together, and three or four times
they engaged in political discussions. Paine, a liberal and longtime member of
the American Civil Liberties Union, would later describe Oswald as a
“pipsqueak,” but one whose politics he tried to understand.
“He told me he
became a Marxist in this country by reading books and without having ever
having met a communist,” Paine said in an interview following the
assassination.
“With me he spoke very
freely and he complained that with other people he couldn’t … they wouldn’t
talk about political subjects. He would talk about nothing else.”
In interviews and in testimony
before the Warren Commission, Paine described Oswald as a lonely man who seemed
to like very few people. But in their conversations Oswald never revealed
hostility toward Kennedy.
“I expressed my
appreciation of President Kennedy and he didn’t ever argue with me on that
point,” Paine said in an interview.
In a 2013 essay he
titled, “My Experience with Lee Harvey Oswald,” Paine recalled that Oswald once
declared emphatically that “change only comes through violence.”
“I’d also heard
him say that President Kennedy was the best president he had in his lifetime.
Looking back on what happened, these two statements seem impossibly
contradictory … how could a man want to kill a president whom he thought was
the best president he’d had in his lifetime?”
Though Michael Paine
remained no more than an acquaintance to the Oswalds, Ruth took Marina Oswald
under her wing and tried to be helpful to her struggling family.
Ruth, who became a
key witness to the Warren Commission, has said she was hoping to bring a degree
of stability to the Oswalds when, in the fall of 1963, she told Lee Oswald
about a job opening she’d heard of — at the Texas School Book Depository in
Dallas.
Oswald was hired.
He rented a room near the job. In late September, Marina accepted an invitation
by Ruth to live with her and her children in Irving, about a 20-minute drive
from Dallas.
Ruth Paine allowed
the Oswalds to store most of their belongings in her garage. For weeks while
working at the book depository, Lee Oswald, who had no car or drivers license,
hitched a ride to Ruth’s house after work on Fridays, then spent the weekend
there with his family.
It surprised Ruth
Paine when Oswald appeared at her home unannounced on a Thursday — Nov. 21,
1963. Later that night, she walked into the garage and found the light was on,
causing her to wonder who’d been in there.
When she arose the
next morning, Lee Oswald was already up and gone. He’d left a coffee cup in the
kitchen sink.
At 12:30 that
afternoon, gunshots killed JFK as he sat beside his wife, Jacqueline, in the
back of a Lincoln Continental convertible just after the presidential motorcade
passed by the book depository.
It would soon dawn
on the Paines that Lee Harvey Oswald had hidden his scoped, bolt-action rifle
in Ruth’s garage.
In the 9,400-word
“My Experience with Lee Harvey Oswald,” Michael Paine wrote that he believed
the assassin acted alone and decided only shortly before Nov. 22, 1963, to do
something that would make himself infamous.
“The nation would
remember him as the one who had shot the president of the strongest capitalist
nation of the world,” Paine wrote. “He wanted to be important — not
inconsequential. He would be in the history books now, and that is what he
wanted.”
Both of the Paines
testified before the Warren Commission in 1964, Ruth more extensively because
of her nearly yearlong friendship with Marina Oswald and her many encounters
with Marina’s controlling husband.
In time, the Paines both
left Texas. Michael Paine lived and worked in Concord, Massachusetts, and was
active in coastal conservation and supported Planned Parenthood and the ACLU.
He moved to Sonoma County in 2004.
He and his son, Chris Panym,
founded near Sebastopol a “multi-household, multi-age, multi-enterprise
community” they called Green Valley Village. They were unable to bring it to
fruition.
Chris Panym said
that as his father approached aged 90 he lost his memory but all his life was
committed to championing the environment and civil liberty.
In addition to his
son in Sebastopol and his former wife in Santa Rosa, Paine is survived by his
daughter, Tamarin Laurel-Paine of Middlefield, Massachusetts.
There will be a
memorial service at 1 p.m. on April 14 in the library at Friends House in
Rincon Valley. Panym asks people interested in attending to RSVP to him at
707-861-1169.
Editor’s note:
This version of the story corrects an error on the make of the car in which the
Kennedy’s rode in Dallas.
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