The JFK 100
"Bill and Janet Williams"
Gary Carter and Gail Cronauer as "Bill and Janet Williams,"
based on Oswald associates Ruth and Michael Paine
Gary Carter and Gail Cronauer as "Bill and Janet Williams,"
based on Oswald associates Ruth and Michael Paine
"Janet and Bill Williams," of course, are Ruth and Michael Paine, who befriended the Oswalds in Texas.
In JFK, Stone expresses all sorts of doubts about the "Williams" couple through the characters of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) and fictional investigator "Susie Cox" (Laurie Metcalf).
Let's see just how far Stone will go to cast shadows upon the Paines.
Point Number One: Oliver Stone objects to the fact that, as with every other U.S. taxpayer, the IRS will not release the tax records of Ruth and Michael Paine without their consent.SUSIE (VOICE OVER) All I can find out about the Williams' [sic] is their tax returns are classified . . .(1)
Point Number Two: Oliver Stone is suspicious of Michael Paine's relatives.SUSIE (V.O.) . . . Bill Williams, a descendant of the Cabots of Massachusetts, has links through his family and United Fruit to the CIA . . .(2)
Point Number Three: Oliver Stone objects to the fact that, like any other American, Ruth Paine may entertain any visitor she likes in her home.SUSIE (V. O.) . . . ["Bill Williams"] does classified work for Bell Helicopter which requires a security clearance -- so what is Oswald, a defector, doing visiting his wife in his house? (3)
Point Number Four: Oliver Stone is suspicious of Michael Paine's boss.SUSIE (VOICE OVER) Williams has a relationship at Bell with General Walter Dornberger, another one of the Nazis we brought in after the War for our missile program. He used slave labor to build the V-2 Rockets for Hitler before Bell needed him.(4)
This is a bizarre non sequitur. No one "called," i.e., telephoned Oswald's description to the Dallas police, and it's unclear why Stone has made this absurd leap.JIM I wonder about the Williams' [sic]. Just where did the first description of Oswald come from at 12:44? No one knows. They claimed it was Brennan's, but his description came after 1 PM. Who called? (5)
The Dallas police obtained a description of Oswald from eyewitness Howard Brennan and broadcast it at about 12:45 PM. Stone's only basis for claiming that the source of the transmission is unknown is the fact that, when asked to whom he had given the description, Brennan mistakenly named Secret Service agent Forrest Sorrels, who was not interviewing witnesses in Dealey Plaza until some ten or fifteen minutes later. Brennan actually gave the description to Dallas police inspector Herbert Sawyer.(6)
There never was any "tap" on the Paines's phone, from the FBI or anyone else. The facts are these: a Dallas police officer, Paul Barger, contacted the FBI and reported that an informant had overheard a November 23, 1963, telephone call between two particular phone numbers, BL 3-1628 in Irving, Texas (Ruth Paine's home phone number) and CR 5-5211 in Arlington, Texas (Bell Helicopter, Michael Paine's workplace), in which a male voice was heard saying "that he felt sure Lee Harvey Oswald had killed the President, but did not feel Oswald was responsible, and further stated, 'We both know who is responsible.'"(8) When contacted again, Barger was unable to recall who his source had been, blaming the volume of leads received that weekend.(9) (The source seems to have never been identified.)JIM Somehow the FBI's been tapping the Williams' [sic] and picks up a call between Bell Helicopter and Janet's phone, an unidentified voice saying "We both know who's responsible." Who called? Why's the Bureau been tapping them?(7)
In a 1999 letter to researcher Russ Burr, Ruth Paine writes:
There was a telephone call between Michael and me the afternoon of Nov. 22. It was before we had any idea that Lee was involved. We both assumed, as did much of Dallas, that someone from the radical right wing had fired at the president. I don't remember our words, just the feeling of terrible loss at the death of the president, and sharing that sense of desolation with Michael.(10)The bottom line is that, despite his desperation to smear Ruth and Michael Paine, Oliver Stone can come up with nothing but pointless "links" and obscure innuendo.
NOTES:1. Oliver Stone and Zachary Sklar, JFK: The Book of the Film (New York: Applause, 1992), p. 55. All quotations are from the shooting script and may vary slightly from the finished motion picture.
2. Oliver Stone and Zachary Sklar, JFK: The Book of the Film (New York: Applause, 1992), p. 55. All quotations are from the shooting script and may vary slightly from the finished motion picture.
The JFK documented screenplay states, "Michael Paine was a Cabot through both parents and a second cousin of United Fruit/Gibraltar Steamship head Thomas Dudley Cabot. The cited source is Peter Dale Scott's unpublished manuscript, The Dallas Conspiracy, Part IV, pp. 2-3.
Here's what Scott says:
Michael Paine was descended from the Cabots on both his father's and his mother's side; he was thus a second cousin once removed of Thomas Dudley Cabot, the former President of United Fruit who offered another of his companies, Gibraltar Steamship, as a "cover" for the CIA during the Bay of Pigs adventure. He was also the cousin of Cabot's partner, Alexander Cochrane Forbes, a director of United Fruit and trustee of Cabot, Cabot and Forbes, was a trustee of the J. Frederick Brown Foundation, a CIA "conduit," along with G. C. Cabot. Thus the Paine family had family links with the blue-blood intelligence circles of the "Oh So Social" OSS and the CIA, though one would not guess this from their description in the Warren Report. (Scott, The Dallas Conspiracy, pp. 3-4.)Could there be a more obscure or ultimately more pointless way of "linking" someone to the Central Intelligence Agency?
3. Oliver Stone and Zachary Sklar, JFK: The Book of the Film (New York: Applause, 1992), p. 55. All quotations are from the shooting script and may vary slightly from the finished motion picture.
4. Oliver Stone and Zachary Sklar, JFK: The Book of the Film (New York: Applause, 1992), p. 55. All quotations are from the shooting script and may vary slightly from the finished motion picture. Although Stone stops short of explicitly accusing of Michael Paine of acting as a conspiratorial minion of his employer, Bell Helicopter, Stone implies, in a later scene, that Bell Helicopter was involved in JFK's death. In the famous monologue of Donald Sutherland's mystery man "X" character, the shadowy insider says to Garrison, "You know how many helicopters have been lost in Vietnam? About three thousand so far. Who makes them? Bell Helicopter. Who owns Bell? Bell was near bankruptcy when the First National Bank of Boston approached the CIA about developing the helicopter for Indochina usage." (Stone and Sklar, pp. 111-12.) Historian Larry Schweikart scoffs at this, noting that "helicopters were not used in the context of troop delivery systems for offensive military actions until late 1965. This was two years after Kennedy's assassination: no one had even conceived of choppers as the 'new cavalry' until Col. Hal Moore's Seventh Cavalry experimented with them at the battle of the Ia Drang Valley." (Larry Schweikart, 48 Liberal Lies about American History (That You Probably Learned in School) [New York: Sentinel, 2008], p. 37.) ("X" makes a similar gaffe when he continues, "How 'bout the F-111 fighters? General Dynamics in Fort Worth. Who owns that?" [Stone and Sklar, p. 112.] The F-111 fighters were not deployed until 1967.)
5. Oliver Stone and Zachary Sklar, JFK: The Book of the Film (New York: Applause, 1992), p. 56. All quotations are from the shooting script and may vary slightly from the finished motion picture.
6. Warren Commission Report, p. 144.
7. Oliver Stone and Zachary Sklar, JFK: The Book of the Film (New York: Applause, 1992), p. 56. All quotations are from the shooting script and may vary slightly from the finished motion picture.
8. FBI report of Robert C. Lish, November 26, 1963, JFK Document No. 105-82555-1437.
9. FBI report of Arthur E. Carter, January 17, 1964, JFK Document No. 105-82555-1437.
10. Russ Burr, newsgroup post of July 22, 1999.