Watch This New Documentary — The Truth Will Set You Free
I just had the chance to view Max Good's new documentary, The Assassination & Mrs. Paine, and I highly recommend it to anyone who cares about the tragic trajectory of this country over the past six decades. No one did more to implicate Lee Harvey Oswald in the murder of President Kennedy than Ruth Paine, supposedly a good friend of Oswald's wife, Marina. But Ruth and her husband Michael -- both of whom I interviewed for The Devil's Chessboard -- had strong family ties to the U.S. national security world. And both Paines were the type of naive, liberal do-gooders whom CIA spymaster Allen Dulles was in the habit of cynically manipulating.
I found Michael, in old age (he died in 2018), to be wooly-headed and passive, an eccentric observer of his own life. I found Ruth to be more calculated -- arrogant in her own ignorance. CIA-friendly authors like Max Holland, Thomas Mallon and Gerald Posner find the Paines to be truthful because they seemed so ingenuous. But the Paines were useful idiots, who allowed themselves to become agents of dark history.
At first I thought Max Good's documentary was going to be another maddening "we'll never know" whodunnit. It's far far too late for that kind of "on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand" bullshit. The country is going down in flames. Where are our truth-tellers? But fortunately, Good's documentary -- which includes the deeply knowledgable Peter Dale Scott, JimDiEugenio, Bill Simpich and Gary Aguilar (as well as disinformation artist Holland -- is much more definitive than that.
Good, whom I met several years ago when he was first setting out on his project as an MFA student at Stanford, had the courage to seek answers. Good's unsettling line of questions, that he poses to Ruth near the end of his film, shed a harsh light on this self-righteous Quaker woman.
Watch The Assassination & Mrs. Paine -- now available on Amazon and iTunes. Dare to know.
