Historians are apt to be wary of fictive questions. What if the
South had won the Civil War? How would the American West have
developed without the railroads? What if Dewey really had defeated
Truman?
The trouble with such questions is that every ounce of data
available to mull over has already been shaped, minutely and
irreversibly, by occurrences opposite to the ones dreamed up. Yet
history is often more art than science. Even the most hidebound
empirical analyst —try as he might to skirt moral reflection and
reduce history to a social science — is likely to pose a fictive
question or two in a day’s work. Was Thomas Jefferson’s presidency
indispensable to the Louisiana Purchase?
Or try this one. What if Michael Paine had been more alert to
the safety of his family in the fall of 1963?
Paine was the estranged husband of Ruth Hyde Paine, a nice
Quaker housewife who invited Marina Oswald and her two small
children to stay at the Paines’ home in a Dallas suburb while
Marina’s husband, Lee Harvey Oswald, looked for work. Among the
Oswald possessions stored in Mrs. Paine’s garage was a $20
mail-ordered bolt-action Mannlicher-Carcano rifle tied securely in
a green-and-brown blanket roll.
Michael Paine recalls thinking vaguely that the blanket roll was
camping gear. His separation from Ruth the previous September had
been enlightened and amicable; no hard feelings. He would come home
frequently to have dinner with Ruth and their two kids, and putter
with his drill press and table saw in the garage.
But in April of 1963, seven months after Ruth and Michael had
split and five months before Marina Oswald was to move in, Michael
saw the now familiar photograph of Lee Oswald brandishing a
rifle.
Lonely after her separation from Michael, Ruth Paine had met the
Oswalds at a party. Lee seemed a little odd, what with his weird
insistence that his Russian wife not learn English. But Marina was
nice, and Ruth wanted to improve the Russian she had been dabbling
with for some years.
At Ruth’s request before one of his family visits, Michael Paine
had stopped at the Oswalds’ apartment to meet the couple and to
drive them home for dinner. The photograph was conspicuous on a
table.
“I had expected,” Paine recalls, “to find a theoretician, you
know, somebody who was interested in philosophy or politics or
something like that. But he was obviously, clearly, proud of this
picture, and I came to think it was a true icon he had of
himself.”
In Mrs. Paine’s Garage and the Murder of John F.
Kennedy (Pantheon, 209 pages, $22; click
here to order), Thomas Mallon wonders at many what-ifs,
including the horrific consequences of Mr. and Mrs. Paine’s
latitudinarian do-goodism. Now in his early 70s and living alone in
Boston, Michael Paine is still resolutely non-judgmental.
His family roots go back to the Revolution, and he is a
great-great grandson of Ralph Waldo Emerson. His father was George
Lyman Paine, who combined family wealth and progressivist
politics.
“I grew up,” he tells Mallon in an interview, “feeling that
dedicating one’s life to trying to make a better world was a very
good and valuable thing to do. And raising babies shouldn’t
interfere too much with it. So I had that feeling with regard to
Lee…I didn’t find fault with the way he spent his life.”
So Michael Paine — separated in 1962 from his wife of four
years (approximately: he could never quite remember the exact year
of his marriage to Ruth) and not hugely attentive to his own two
young kids — could sympathize with a 23-year-old loser already
saddled by two children.
On weekends, during the time Marina was staying with Ruth Paine,
Lee Oswald would visit. Ruth gave him driving lessons and made the
connection that landed him a job at the Texas Book Depository. A
month after the murder of John F. Kennedy, Ruth remarked to a
journalist that she would “forever have to live with my regrets
that I did not perceive this incompetent yet striving man as a
dangerous person.”
Yes — and sometimes, as Mallon reflects near the end of his
brilliantly coalescing what-ifs, “a refusal to think the worst of
people is precisely what brings it out.”
Mallon glances over “the paranoid style in America’s political
character” as displayed by conspiracy buffs who stretch out the
Kennedy assassination’s agony on the Internet. But his real
interest is “the nation’s transcendent and optimistic strain, whose
evasions have sometimes led it down garden paths when night was
falling.”
What if a capacious love of humanity were less often tied up in
a colossal indifference to the human condition?
