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MRS. PAINE'S GARAGE: A WORK OF
DECEPTION FROM BEGINNING TO END
James H. Fetzer
The
DULUTH NEWS TRIBUNE (10 March 2002), p. 6F, has published a review of a book by
one Thomas Mallon, Mrs. Paine's Garage
(Pantheon Books, 2002), written by George Bennett of Cox News Service. Bennett's fawning praise provides conclusive
proof that he knows no more about the assassination of John F. Kennedy than
does Mallon himself. Most Americans today, alas!, the majority of whom were not
even alive at the time of his death, are sufficiently ignorant about the
history of this case to be easily deceived. Those who know more will recognize
it as a work of deception from beginning to end. Interest
in this slender volume implicitly emanates from the proposition that Ruth H. Paine
assisted Lee Oswald, the alleged assassin, obtain a position at the Texas
School Book Depository PRIOR TO public knowledge that the President was coming
to Dallas. Since the extraordinarily vague affidavit she submitted on 22
November 1963, with which this book begins, implies this occurred in
mid-October, while announcements of the trip appeared NO LATER than 13
September, such a contention is simply false. Once
recognizing that there was ample time to bring the patsy to the President, the
entire Paine affair begins to assume an ominous visage. Interest in Paine's garage, for example,
derives from Oswald having stored his Mannlicher-Carcano, wrapped in a blanket,
in that place. But no remnants of
having been wrapped in a blanket were ever discovered on the alleged
assassination weapon--not the least hairs or fibers--which is very curious,
indeed, had the weapon actually been stored there. The
alleged instrument, a cheap, mass-produced World War II Italian carbine, has a
muzzle velocity of around 2,000 fps, which means that it is not a high-velocity
weapon. Since the President's death
certificates (1963), The Warren Report
(1964), and even more recent articles
in The Journal of the American Medical
Association (1992) report that JFK was killed by high velocity bullets, it
follows that he was not killed by Oswald's weapon, thereby greatly reducing
interest in Mrs. Paine's garage. Indeed,
though it may come as news to the author, many other students of the case,
including Harold Weisberg, Whitewash
(1965), Peter Model and Robert Groden, JFK:
The Case for Conspiracy (1976), and
Robert Groden and Harrison Livingstone, High
Treason (1989), have also made the
same observation. These are not books
cited in this study, however, which raises rather serious questions as to why
someone whose knowledge of the assassination appears to be so meager would
write a book about it. He
does not know that Oswald had a history with American intelligence; that Oswald
was being "sheep dipped" in New Orleans; that Oswald was an informant
for the FBI; that the "paper bag" story is a fabrication; that Oswald
was in the lunch room on the second floor having a coke during the shooting;
that Oswald passed a paraffin test; and on and on. A weightly body of evidence substantiates all of these
discoveries, but none of them is even mentioned, much less disputed, by the
author of this book. The
sources he does cite, moreover, are far from reassuring. His Acknowledgements, for example, lists six
persons, including Mrs. Paine and her former husband, Michael, Priscilla
Johnson McMillan and John McAdams.
McAdams has gained a certain degree of notoriety for his one-sided
defense of the "lone nut" hypothesis, which disregards overwhelming
contradictory evidence, including proof that the "magic bullet"
theory is not only false but anatomically impossible
(http://www.assassinationscience.com). Priscilla
Johnson McMillan, however, is the most intriguing name on this list. It was she who "interviewed"
Oswald on the occasion of his pseudo-defection to the Soviet Union; it was she
who was selected by the United States government to accompany Stalin's
daughter, Sevetlana, when she defected to the United States; and it was she who
was chosen to "baby sit" Marina during those turbulent times in the
aftermath of the assassination. Her CIA
connections virtually qualify as "common knowledge". As
Noel Twyman, Bloody Treason (1997),
has observed, the Paines were introduced to the Oswalds by George de
Mohrenschildt, a member of the Dallas Petrolium Club, a friend of H.L. Hunt, an
ex-Nazi spy, and a CIA operative who would commit suicide when he was about to
be interviewed for the HSCA reinvestigation in 1977-78. The connections between de Mohrenschildt and
George Herbert Walker Bush have been extensively explored by Bruce Campbell
Adamson, Oswald's Closest Friend
(1996). Any other author might have wanted to follow these leads, but not
Thomas Mallon. The
book abounds with faulty comparisons and incomplete reports. Mallon remarks that Lee and Ruth were alike
because they both had fathers in insurance, but does not observe that, unlike
Lee, she did not have an uncle, Charles "Dutz" Murret, who worked for
a Mafia chieftain, Carlos Marcello. And
he belittles Marina's conclusion that Lee was framed, which diverged from her
original position, without admitting she now knows vastly more about the
assassination than was available to her then. The
skimpy information this book purports to provide that might be relevant to the
assassination tends to exonerate Oswald.
When Marina tells him in Russian that the President is coming, for
example, he responds "with no more than an uninflected 'Da', a sort of
verbal shrug most accurately translated as 'Uh, yeah.'" Taken at face
value, that his hardly the type of response that one would expect from an
ideologue whose strong beliefs would lead him to commit assassination. Mallon
reports that, on 21 November 1963, Lee tried to convince Marina that she should
move back with him as early as tomorrow.
That he should have worried about such things at this late date--the
evening before the assassination!—does not harmonize with a man intent upon a
capital crime from which he was most unlikely to emerge alive. And the very idea that he should have
formulated the intention to commit such a monstrous deed on his way to work defies credulity! The
book to which it bears closest comparison appears to be Oswald's Tale (1995) Norman Mailer's unfortunate descent into
psychobabble. Following Mailer's lead,
Mallon takes massive liberties with conjectured reconstructions of the thoughts
of Ruth, Marina, and even Lee, even when they were never expressed in English
or in Russian. Mallon may have received
Rockefeller and Guggenheim fellowships in the past, but--if there is any justice in academia!--that should never happen
again. Mallon
predictably makes a point of introducing the alleged "backyard
photographs" of Lee with his trusty Mannlicher-Carcano in one hand and
Communist newspapers in the other, wearing the revolver with which he is
alleged to have shot J.D. Tippit. Robert Groden, The Search for Lee Harvey Oswald (1995), pp. 90-95, offers a nice
review of evidence that those photographs were faked, which has been confirmed
in a study by Jack White. Using the
known dimensions of the newspapers, White has proven the person shown in the
photographs is too short to have been Oswald. The
book endorses the idea that Oswald was responsible for an alleged attempt on
the life of Major General Edwin Walker that occurred on 10 April 1963. But there are many reasons to doubt it. The situations were very different: a high-powered 30.06 rifle versus a
medium-to-low powered 6.5 mm carbine; a stationary versus moving target; a miss
versus two hits out of three. It is
difficult to imagine how their varied circumstances could have been less suggestive
of a common shooter! Unless,
of course, their politics were similar--but Walker was a right-wing general,
while Kennedy was a left-wing president.
Kennedy had even relieved Walker of his command in Germany! It doesn't take a rocket scientist to
conclude that these shootings were not performed by the same shooter. It does provide an opportunity for Thomas
Mallon to compose another book. If Lee
also had a 30.06, then he had to have stored it somewhere. We can now look forward to a sequel, Mrs. Paine's Attic. Mallon
also asserts that, "Oswald took a bus and taxi back to his rooming house
in Oak Cliffs, where he picked up the pistol that he used minutes later to kill
the patrolman, J. D. Tippit, who stopped him at the corner of Tenth and
Patton". If he were correct about
this--Mallon offers no reason for thinking so!--then Oswald must have been the
only assassin in history to make his escape by public transportation. He also ignores evidence that Tippit was
shot with automatic(s) when Oswald was packing a revolver. Readers
may have difficulty reconciling how an author of a book published in 2002 could
be so abysmally ignorant of the current state of knowledge about this case as
published, for example, in Assassination
Science (1998) and in Murder in
Dealey Plaza (2000), both of
which bring together the work of leading experts on various aspects of this
case. Indeed, the evidence that the
author was not dedicated to the search for truth becomes nowhere more evident
than in trashing current research. Surprisingly,
the book contains so much filler that can only be properly described as complete drivel as to raise questions
about the author's motivation. Examples
abound, including Ruth Paine's extended prayer early on, which ends with her
entreaty, "Dear God. Guide
me. Oh, guide me.", to which the
only appropriate response must be, "Dear God. Spare me. Oh, spare
me!" Which causes a serious
student of the case to speculate as to precisely what Mallon thought he was
doing. He
concludes his work by attempting to ridicule presentations at JFK Lancer's NID
2000 Conference, which featured many of the contributors to these books. Mallon's attacks on this conference, which I
co-chaired, are so selective, so biased and unfair that they remove any
lingering shreds of credibility that this work might still retain. They
establish conclusive evidence that his book abounds with deceptive falsehoods
and that its true purpose appears to have been to assassinate assassination
research. Mallon
even tries to discredit eyewitness Jean Hill, to whose memory this meeting was
dedicated, by observing that, in addition to reporting sensing a shot from the
grassy knoll, she claimed to have seen "a little dog" in the backseat
with Jackie and Jack. Mallon implies that she is not credible, no doubt
ignorant of the fact that photos have shown that Jackie had a small stuffed dog
that was given her by a spectator! He
attacks Ian Griggs, Executive Secretary of the Dealey Plaza/United Kingdom
Society, even though his report--that Oswald had stayed at an expensive hotel
en route to the Soviet Union, a very odd aspect of the government’s
story--provides another small piece to a puzzle that suggests the alleged
assassin was working as an intelligence operative for the United States at the
time. Mallon displays arrogance in
passing such judgments given his own extremely modest knowledge. He
belittles other contributors to the conference--including, for example, Anna
Marie-Walko, Larry Hancock, and Craig Roberts—but tells his readers nothing
about the quality of their findings or other contributions, including that
Roberts has authored an important book about the assassination, Kill Zone (1994), based upon knowledge
he acquired as a military sniper, which led him to conclude that the official
account could not be correct. This is a
book that Mallon ought to read. The
author does not even describe the most important symposia held at this meeting,
involving some of the leading experts on the assassination. He does not mention the contributions from
Peter Dale Scott, David W. Mantik, Noel Twyman, Jim Marrs, and Stewart Galanor,
among others. He thereby deceives his
readers, who would not know of these omissions unless they had been there. This is a familiar fallacy that is known as special
pleading, which serious scholars are taught to avoid. But not Thomas Mallon. Stewart
Galanor, for example, discussed several of the paradoxes of the assassination,
among which is that, since there exists extensive evidence of a shot to the
throat from in front, yet the official inquiry concluded all the shots had been
fired from behind, how could JFK have been shot from in front from behind? Moreover, since the head shot trajectory
advanced by the Warren Commission, when properly oriented to correspond to the
position of his head at the time of the shot as the Zapruder film displays, has
an upward direction, how could JFK have been shot from below from above?
Galanor has elaborated these points in his book, Cover-Up (1998), which Mallon also ought to read. David
W. Mantik, M.D., Ph.D., presented evidence that the official account of a shot
that passed through the back of the President's neck and exited his throat
without hitting any bony structures before impacting Governor Connally and
inflicting several wounds is not merely provably false but actually
anatomically impossible. When the path
it would have had to have taken is tracked from the official point of entry to
official point of exit on a scan of a neck with the President’s dimensions, any
such bullet would have had to impact cervical verteba. This explains why Arlen Specter did not
simply ask the physicians their observations of the wounds but hypothetical
questions that implied the official trajectory. Another
symposium with Mantik, with Noel Twyman, author of Bloody Treason (1997), and with Peter Dale Scott, Ph.D., author of Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993)
and of Cocaine Politics (1998), among
his many books, discussed the difficulty of conveying discoveries about this
event to the American people, especially via the mass media. This appears to be
due to media reluctance to come to grips with the case and the influence of
illusion and denial in presenting evidence that the American government played
a role in the death of the 35th President of the United States, a difficulty
compounded by "the silence of the historians". Mallon’s book is a stellar example. This
theme was also apparent in a symposium that included Jim Marrs, author of Crossfire (1989), a principal source for
the movie, "JFK", and Charles Drago, who is often called "the
conscience of the research community". Drago rightly asserted that anyone
sincerely interested in this case who does not conclude that JFK was killed as
the result of a conspiracy is either unfamiliar with the evidence or
cognitively impaired. Mallon
might be excused for not knowing that the autopsy X-rays have been fabricated
to conceal a massive blow-out to the back of the head caused by a shot from in
front, that other X-rays have been altered by the addition of a 6.5 mm metallic
object in an effort to implicate a 6.5 mm weapon, or that the brain shown in
diagrams and photos at the National Archives is not the brain of JFK, as
previous studies have established. If
he has never read Bloody Treason
(1997) Cover-Up (1998), Assassination Science (1998), or Murder in Dealey Plaza (2000), that
reinforces his lack of qualifications as an expert on the death of JFK. But
how can he feign ignorance of the important discoveries presented at the Lancer
Conference he attended and pretends to critique? His selective and
distorted discussion of this meeting proves that Mallon has produced a work as
deceptive about assassination research as it is about the alleged assassin. Mantik's
demonstration that the "magic bullet" theory is anatomically
impossible arguably qualifies as the most important presentation at
this conference. At a single
stroke, it pulls the rug out from under The
Warren Report (1964), The
HSCA Report (1979), and Case
Closed (1993), which are based upon it.
Yet Mallon does not even mention this development in reviewing
the very conference where it was presented! That would have contradicted
his depiction of assassination research as a sham. It
must have been ironic for Mallon to sit in the audience and listen to leading
experts on the assassination discussing the difficulties of disseminating what
we know about the death of JFK, when he himself was engaged in composing a book
with the objective of publishing false and misleading information, not only
about Oswald but about the conference itself.
This was not supposed to be a novel, but it is a work of fiction. Mallon
himself has to be either incompetent or corrupt. If he did not know the current
state of research on the assassination, then he was unqualified to write this
book. And if he wrote it in knowledge
of the current state of research on the assassination, then he is complicit in
perpetuating a fraud on the American people.
And we know by his own words that he was present for Lancer 2000. Thomas Mallon has to have known better. The
author has discredited himself with this spiteful, misleading, and disgraceful
book, which should never have been published.
Every one who wants justice for JFK has to expose charlatans of this
caliber and the myths that they perpetuate.
Mallon now joins the ranks of other authors, such as Norman Mailer and
Gerald Posner, who have also written disreputable books about JFK that are
destined for the trash bin of history. James
H. Fetzer, McKnight Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota,
Duluth, is the editor of Assassination
Science (1998) and of Murder
in Dealey Plaza (2000). His
academic web site may be found at http://www.d.umn.edu/~jfetzer/.
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