The Devil's Chessboard

by David Talbot

  It was a remarkable scene at the Auchincloss mansion that spring evening in 1964. Fresh from their cowardly performance before the Warren Commission, the de Mohrenschildts were now urging JFK’s in-laws, who had never supported him politically, to show some moral courage and use their wealth to solve the crime. Despite how his wife had been rebuffed, de Mohrenschildt continued to argue the point with Mrs. Auchincloss. “Janet, you were Jack Kennedy’s mother-in-law, and I am a complete stranger. But I would spend my own money and lots of time to find out who were the real assassins or the conspirators. Don’t you want any further investigation? You have infinite resources.”

  But Mrs. Auchincloss was unmoved. “Jack is dead and nothing will bring him back.” Finally, as the discussion reached an emotional crescendo, the two women—Janet and Jeanne—fell into each other’s arms and began weeping.

  As if the evening were not unsettling enough, at some point Dulles himself showed up. The spymaster circled in on de Mohrenschildt and began asking him pointed questions about Oswald, as if they were still in the hearing room. Did the accused assassin have any reason to hate Kennedy? The “astute” Dulles, as the baron described him, knew that this was the most mixed-up part of de Mohrenschildt’s testimony and it was imperative to “fix” it, if the commission were to succeed in portraying Oswald as a lone nut. But de Mohrenschildt again frustrated Dulles, giving him the answer Dulles did not want to hear. No, he said, Oswald did not hate Kennedy—in fact, he was “an admirer” of the president. At this point, Dulles would have certainly noted that—despite his accommodating performance before the Warren inquiry—George de Mohrenschildt might pose a problem further down the line.

  Later that evening, as the de Mohrenschildts took their leave, Janet Auchincloss took the baron aside. “Incidentally,” she said in a voice now tinged with frost, “my daughter Jacqueline never wants to see you again because you were close to her husband’s assassin.”

  “It’s her privilege,” was the baron’s courtly reply.

  It was the beginning of another kind of exile for the rootless cosmopolite, who would find himself increasingly banished from the high society world that he depended on for contacts and contracts. It all seemed grossly unfair to the baron. His only sin had been to believe his CIA friend Moore when Moore told him that Oswald was merely a “harmless” eccentric who needed some friendly supervision. De Mohrenschildt prided himself on his worldliness. But in the end, he realized, he had been used—just like Oswald, who, after being taken into police custody, had shouted out frantically that he was “a patsy.” De Mohrenschildt, too, had been set up to play a role—to incriminate Oswald. And, like Oswald, he didn’t realize it until it was too late.

  In the last years of his life, de Mohrenschildt sought atonement for his sins, to make it right with the ghost of Lee Harvey Oswald. In his memoir, I Am a Patsy!—an outpouring from the heart whose raw, Russian-accented syntax de Mohrenschildt did not bother to polish—he apologized for the “damage” he had caused “to the memory of Lee, my dear friend.” He proclaimed Oswald’s innocence and took back the damning things he had told the Warren Commission. In truth, “Lee was not jealous of [the] Kennedys’ wealth,” he wrote, “and did not envy their social positions, of that I was sure. To him wealth and society were big jokes, but he did not resent them.”

  De Mohrenschildt had described Oswald to the Warren Commission as a “semi-educated hillbilly”—someone “you can’t take seriously . . . you just laugh at.” But now, he wrote of his late friend’s “original mind” and his “nonconformist” thinking. Along with the Titovets chronicle, I Am a Patsy! stands out as the most convincing portrait we have of the true Oswald. De Mohrenschildt’s manuscript, which his wife gave to the House Select Committee on Assassinations after his death, remains unpublished but is available online.

  Oswald comes across in the baron’s memoir as a budding ’60s radical—a man sensitive enough to identify with the plight of black Americans and Native Americans in a white-dominated society, and hardheaded enough to recognize the fundamental flaws of American democracy. “Under dictatorship, people are enslaved but they know it,” he told de Mohrenschildt, recalling his days in the Soviet Union. “Here, the politicians constantly lie to people and they become immune to these lies because they have the privilege of voting. But voting is rigged and democracy here is a gigantic profusion of lies and clever brainwashing.” Oswald worried about the FBI’s police-state surveillance tactics. And he believed that America was turning more “militaristic” as it increasingly interfered in the internal affairs of other countries. Someday, he predicted, there would be a coup d’état.

  As de Mohrenschildt contemplated America in the mid-1970s, when he wrote his manuscript, he began to regard Oswald as a prophetic figure. By then, the United States was a country debased by war, assassination, government corruption, and constitutional subversion. “My wife and I spent many an agonizing moment thinking of Lee, ashamed that we did not stand up more decisively in his defense,” he wrote. “But who would have listened to us at the time and would have published anything true and favorable [about] him?”

  De Mohrenschildt’s life took on a frantic quality near the end, as he began working on his memoir and trying to make sense of his entangled relationship with Oswald. In September 1976, he mailed a distraught, handwritten letter to his old family friend, George Bush, who was then serving as CIA director in the Gerald Ford administration. De Mohrenschildt knew Bush from his prep school days at Phillips Academy, when Bush was the roommate of Dimitri von Mohrenschildt’s stepson. Now the baron was appealing to the CIA director’s sense of family and class loyalty to help him. De Mohrenschildt claimed that he and his wife were the targets of some sort of harassment. “Our phone [is] bugged, and we are being followed everywhere. . . . We are being driven to insanity by the situation.” De Mohrenschildt thought the surveillance campaign began after he suffered the death of a second child from cystic fibrosis—his daughter Nadya—a traumatic event that had made him start “behaving like a damn fool” and delving into his painful past. He began “to write, stupidly and unsuccessfully, about Lee H. Oswald,” de Mohrenschildt told Bush, “and [I] must have angered a lot of people I do not know. But to punish an elderly man like myself and my highly nervous and sick wife is really too much.”

  The baron ended with a forlorn plea, for old time’s sake. “Could you do something to remove the net around us? This will be my last request for help and I will not annoy you any more.”

  Bush sent back a sympathetic reply, assuring de Mohrenschildt that he was not the target of federal authorities and blaming his troubles on renewed media interest in the Kennedy assassination and overly inquisitive journalists.

  By the following March, the sixty-five-year-old de Mohrenschildt was separated from his wife, struggling with depression, and living with family friends in a wooden bungalow tucked between the more luxurious mansions that stretched south of Palm Beach. His testimony was once again in demand—this time from the House Select Committee on Assassinations, whose investigators were showing a keener interest in the truth than the Warren panel had. On the morning of March 29, 1977, committee investigator Gaeton Fonzi rolled up outside the dark-shingled beach house, and when told that de Mohrenschildt was not at home, the congressional staffer left his card with the baron’s daughter, Alexandra. Early that evening, after returning to his Miami motel room, Fonzi got a call from Bill O’Reilly, who was working in those days as a Dallas TV reporter. O’Reilly had some stunning news. George de Mohrenschildt had been found dead at home, his head blown apart by the blast from a 20-gauge shotgun. Fonzi’s card was found in the dead man’s pocket. (In his 2012 book, Killing Kennedy, O’Reilly exaggerated his personal involvement in the drama, placing himself on de Mohrenschildt’s doorstep as the shotgun blast rang out. As subsequent news reports pointed out, O’Reilly was actually in Dallas at the time.)

  The Palm Beach County coroner ruled de Mohrenschildt’s death a suicide, but his violen
t demise incited heated public speculation for a time. His death came amid a flurry of other sudden exits during that season of renewed congressional inquiry into the Kennedy case. Witnesses succumbed to heart attacks and suicides, or were dispatched in more dramatic ways—as in the case of Mafia-CIA go-between Johnny Rosselli, who was garroted, chopped up, stuffed into an oil drum, and dumped in Biscayne Bay. Some investigators felt the rising mortality rate of Kennedy witnesses was connected to the creeping dread in Washington that justice was finally to be done.

  Was de Mohrenschildt murdered before he could begin talking to the House Assassinations Committee? Or did he take his own life, in atonement for what he had done with it? Either way, he was one more victim of the past.

  If a “legend” was being woven around Lee Harvey Oswald, there was nobody who did more to move Oswald’s story along during his days in Dallas, besides George de Mohrenschildt, than a young housewife named Ruth Paine. It was Ruth Paine who took in Marina and her young children as the Oswalds’ marriage started coming apart. It was she who most closely observed the intimate details of Lee’s life. Oswald would plant clues for Ruth—like the draft of a puzzling letter to the Soviet embassy in Washington that he left on her typing desk—that made her suspect he was some sort of spy. Did he do this sort of thing on purpose? she later wondered. Was it part of the profile he was supposed to leave behind?

  Ruth was the curious type—you could say even a busybody, the sort of woman who felt she could set the world straight, and it was her obligation to do so. After her husband, Michael, took an engineering job at Bell Helicopter in Fort Worth, Ruth found herself marooned in Texas—a lonely, liberal arts–educated Quaker from up north who was stuck in a cowboy culture. Her isolation only grew when she and Michael began drifting apart and he moved out of the family house into his own apartment in September 1962.

  So when a friend invited her to a party at his house the following February, Ruth eagerly agreed to come. Among the other guests who would be there, she was told, was a young couple recently arrived from Russia. Ruth had taken up Russian several years before, and here was an opportunity to polish her skills with people more fluent than she.

  It was the de Mohrenschildts who brought the Oswalds to the party and who introduced them to Ruth. Later, JFK conspiracy researchers made much of this, suggesting that it was not just an introduction but a “hand-off” as the de Mohrenschildts prepared to leave Dallas for Haiti. But if Ruth Paine was assuming de Mohrenschildt’s role as Oswald’s monitor, she was not doing so as a witting agent. Paine would later tell the Warren Commission that she had never met Baron de Mohrenschildt before and had not seen him since that fateful evening.

  Ruth’s motives for getting tangled up in Lee and Marina’s messy lives had nothing to do with Cold War stratagems—her reasons were far more human than that. While she found Lee somewhat tedious and full of himself, she was immediately taken by Marina. “In spite of my faulty Russian, I found Marina easy to talk to and very personable,” she later recalled. Ruth got Marina’s address and wrote her soon after, asking if she could come visit her sometime. It was the beginning of a friendship that would change both women’s lives forever.

  Decades later, Paine collaborated with author Thomas Mallon on a bestselling book intended to prove that there was nothing conspiratorial about the events in Dallas, only a kind of terrible serendipity. A generous young mother takes in the family of the future assassin of President Kennedy, and her life is never the same. End of story. Except that it wasn’t—Ruth’s story was far more interesting than that.

  Paine is a woman of stubborn conviction, even in quiet retirement at a pleasant Quaker-run home in Northern California. She continues to dismiss all evidence of a conspiracy in Dallas as “nonsense” and—in contrast to de Mohrenschildt’s late-life conversion—she still insists on Oswald’s guilt as the sole assassin. She still wears the same sensible, bobbed haircut that she sported as a Dallas housewife, though now it’s snowy white. And, despite her advanced age, she holds herself erect, with the fierce determination of a woman who refuses to bend to time or to new information about her storied past.

  During a recent visit to her home, some fifty years after the assassination, there was only a fleeting moment when Ruth acknowledged that Oswald might have been a pawn in a historical drama much larger than himself. When her visitor suggested that dreamy-eyed adventurers like Oswald can become easy prey for those with cynical intentions, she quickly nodded. “My parents had a name for that: ‘shut-eyed liberals,’” she said.

  It’s a term that applies equally to Ruth Paine. In April 1963, she was thirty years old, and—like Marina—the mother of two small children and estranged from her husband, when she invited the Russian woman and her little girls to move into her modest, two-bedroom clapboard house in Irving, outside of Dallas. Paine was filled with the generosity of her faith when she took in Marina. She would grow to love Marina, she said later, “as if she were a sister.” (To some, it seemed that Ruth was also romantically infatuated with her exotic houseguest, who exuded a kind of seductive distress.) But despite Ruth’s best intentions, she helped lay waste to the Oswalds’ lives. In the end, Marina would wish she had never met her rescuer.

  Ruth Paine has always scoffed at the idea that she played an intelligence role in the Oswald story. A visitor asked her point-blank if she had any contact with the CIA. “Not that I’m aware of,” she laughed. This is true, as far as it goes. Ruth and her husband, Michael, were not the cloak-and-dagger type—they were too starry-eyed and idealistic for that. But they were the sort of people who would come to the attention of security agencies. In fact, Allen Dulles himself knew all about the unusual family backgrounds of the Paines.

  Ruth Paine’s parents, William and Carol Hyde—who met as Stanford University students in the 1920s—were dedicated foot soldiers in Norman Thomas’s Socialist Party crusade. Ruth remembered passing out Norman Thomas presidential campaign buttons at the Socialist Party convention in Washington, D.C., in 1940, when she was just eight years old. Her parents were also active members of the cooperative movement, and William went to work as an executive for Nationwide Insurance, a company that originated as a co-op. The Hydes’ involvement in the Socialist Party and co-op movement brought them into bare-knuckled conflicts with the Communist Party, which was in the habit of trying to muscle in on left-wing enterprises that had energy and promise.

  The CIA, which took a strong interest in the anti-Communist left, eventually took an interest in Ruth’s father. According to a CIA document, Hyde was considered “for a covert use” in Vietnam in 1957, but for unexplained reasons the agency decided not to utilize him. Hyde did work for a year in Peru, setting up co-op credit unions for the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID), an organization whose work was often entwined with that of the CIA. Government documents suggest that Ruth’s sister, Sylvia, later went to work for the CIA, and Sylvia’s husband, John Hoke, was employed by AID.

  In short, the young Dallas housewife who took the Oswald family into her care was not simply a Quaker do-gooder but a woman with a politically complex family history. She grew up in that strongly anti-Communist wing of the American left that overlapped with the espionage world. Ruth Paine was not an operative herself, but there was a constellation of dark stars hovering all around her, even if she chose not to pay attention.

  But it was the family background of Ruth’s husband, Michael, that most directly overlapped with Allen Dulles’s world. Mary Bancroft, Dulles’s mistress, was one of the oldest friends of Michael Paine’s mother—also named Ruth. Michael’s parents, George Lyman Paine Jr. and Ruth Forbes Paine, were the kind of odd ducks that Mary liked collecting—quirky offspring of prominent New England heritage with minds as restless as hers. Lyman was an architect and a gentleman Trotskyite whose political activities earned him a place on the FBI’s watch list. Ruth Forbes Paine hailed from a Boston blue-blood family that had made its fortune from the China tea and opium trade, and counted R
alph Waldo Emerson among its progenitors. She would give herself over to the pursuit of world peace and the exploration of human consciousness. In the 1920s, Mary was a regular at the salons presided over by Lyman and Ruth in their spacious studio apartment on the Upper East Side—gatherings that drew a colorful menagerie, including artists, trust-fund revolutionaries, truth seekers, and other devotees of the esoteric.

  Ruth Forbes Paine came from such established Yankee wealth that her family owned its own island, Naushon Island, off Cape Cod. After she and Lyman divorced, Ruth would take her sons, Michael and Cameron, to summer on the island. The Forbes family often extended invitations to their circle of friends to join them in the cottages on their private paradise. Among those invited to Naushon Island by Ruth Forbes Paine were Mary Bancroft and Allen Dulles.

  As the Warren Commission went about its business, Mary wrote Dulles chatty letters about the Forbes and Paine families, and their horrified reaction to the events in Dallas, as if she were back in wartime Switzerland and still filing espionage reports. Bancroft reminded Dulles that she had known Michael Paine’s mother “extremely well” for over forty years and had spent summers with her on Naushon Island. She enumerated the families’ many lovable oddities and their sense of grand entitlement. “I was always fascinated by those proper Boston homes—and by the Forbes family at Naushon where I spent a lot of time,” wrote Mary in a March 1964 letter to Dulles. “In those homes, anyone could say absolutely anything—everything was accepted and examined. One met labor leaders, pacifists, Negroes—everything but Catholics! Lyman Paine, Ruth’s first husband and Michael Paine’s father, came from a similar background—authentic, proper Bostonians, the kind of people who still believe today that the U.S. is their invention on lease to all the rest of us.”