"The Assassination & Mrs. Paine" is a well-crafted documentary about a figure who has not received enough attention of students of the JFK assassination: Ruth Hyde Paine. The evidence in the film suggests that while not a conspirator, Ruth Paine was likely an unwitting collaborator as a baby sitter for Lee Harvey Oswald in the month leading up to the assassination. In this regard, Paine's role was not insignificant in the framing of Oswald as the patsy.
Marina Oswald and her baby June moved in with Ruth in her home in Irving, Texas, and Lee listed the Paine address and phone number on his job applications. It is correctly pointed out in the film that it was Ruth Paine who conveniently provided the lead for Oswald's job at the Texas School Book Depository building overlooking the upcoming parade route for Kennedy in Dallas. However, the filmmakers could have probed deeper into this key moment.
Inexplicably, Oswald was hired at the Texas School Book Depository building without a substantial check of his background that would have disclosed that he had defected to the Soviet Union in 1959. One of the local employment counselors had worked for years with the TSDB personnel and was shocked that Oswald had been hired. She recalled the following:
"They check.... If in past years, when I had been sending them applicants, I had sent them anyone who was not a 100% red-blooded, true-blue, American, I would have heard about it, plenty!....I only knew that they were terribly finicky about the people they hired."
Why was Oswald an apparent exception to the "finicky" hiring standards of the TSBD? He submitted his application on October 15 and was apparently on the job the very next day.
The filmmakers clearly wanted to present the Ruth Paine narrative objectively, enlisting a balance of Warren Commission apologists in opposition to those who firmly believe in conspiracy. But in so doing, there is the impression that viewers can make up their own minds about a topic in which we will likely never know the truth. The best segment of the film was the closing section where Ruth is confronted with tough questions and key pieces of evidence, which she casually brushed off.
It is the preponderance of evidence gathered over the years by the researchers appearing in this program that points to Ruth Paine, her husband Michael, and other family members working within the intelligence network at the height of the Cold War. A careful study of the actions of Ruth Paine inevitably arrives at the conclusion that her involvement in crafting the legend of Lee Harvey Oswald is highly suspicious!
