Mrs. PAINE. In terms of what I saw.
Mr. JENNER. That Lee Oswald would have done, is that correct?
Mrs. PAINE. As a child.
I did feel that very likely he took fewer and fewer risks making
friends as he grew up than he perhaps had as a child, but I was
guessing at that, the risk of being close, in other words.
Mr. JENNER. Took fewer and fewer risks?
Mrs. PAINE. I think he was fearful of being close to anyone.
Mr. JENNER. Or being hurt?
Mrs. PAINE. Because he could, therefore, be hurt, right.
Mr. JENNER. Not being accepted?
Mrs. PAINE. If he allowed himself to be friends or be close, then
he opened the possibility of the friend hurting him, and I had this
feeling about him, that he couldn't permit or stand such hurt.
Mr. JENNER. Would you tell us of your feelings toward Marina? You liked
her? That is what I am getting at.
Mrs. PAINE. Yes; I like her very much. I felt always that what I wanted
to say and what I was able to understand of what she said was hampered
by my poor Russian. It improved a good deal while with her, and we did
have very personal talks about our respective marriages.
But I felt this was just a developing friendship, not one in full
bloom, by any means. I respected what I saw in her, her pride, her wish
to be independent, her habit of hard work, and expecting to work, her
devotion to her children, first to June and then to both of the little
girls, and the concentration of her attention upon this job of mother,
and of raising these children.
I also respected her willingness and effort to get on with Lee, and to
try to make the best of what apparently was not a particularly good
marriage, but yet she had made that commitment and she expected to do
her best for it.
Mr. JENNER. What is your present reaction, and even as you went along,
of her feeling or regard for or with respect to you?
Mrs. PAINE. I felt she liked me. I felt she tended to put me in a
position of Aunt Ruth, as she called me, I have already said, to Junie,
almost as aunt to her rather than a mother as she was equal, in other
words, she was a young mother and I was a young mother equal in age and
stage in life.
Mr. JENNER. By the way, you were of her age, were you?
Mrs. PAINE. No; I am older than she. I am 31.
Mr. JENNER. You are 31 and she is what?
Mrs. PAINE. Twenty-two. But our children were fairly close in age, and
our immediate problems were fairly similar therefore.
Mr. JENNER. Now; would you give me your reaction to Robert?
Mrs. PAINE. I have very little reaction to Robert, of course, having
met him only at the police station and said very little to him there,
and equally little when he came with Mr. Thorne and Mr. Martin to pick
up Marina's things at my house a few weeks after the assassination.
That is the sum total of my contact, so that what impressions I have
have been formed from what people said and not directly formed.
Mr. JENNER. In other words, you had so little contact with him that you
really have formed no particular opinion with respect to him?
Mrs. PAINE. That is right.
Mr. JENNER. Do you have any impression at all or any knowledge, if you
have knowledge, of his impressions of you and of your husband?
Mrs. PAINE. No; I have no knowledge of his impressions of me or my
husband.
Mr. JENNER. And do you have any impressions apart from knowledge?
Mrs. PAINE. No; I have some impressions about what Mr. Thorne and Mr.
Martin are.
Mr. JENNER. What are they? Who are the two men you mentioned--Mr.
Martin?
Mrs. PAINE. Mr. Martin acted as business advisor for Marina and she
lived at his home for some time after the assassination.
Mr. JENNER. Did you have some contact with him?
Mrs. PAINE. I met him on the 21st of December at his home, came to the
door and he recognized and asked me in. I don't know I had met him
before because I didn't know he had been one of the men who had come
with Robert to pick up the things for Marina, but he said he had been
on that occasion.
(Brief recess.)
Mr. JENNER. We were talking about Mr. Martin. Go ahead.
Mrs. PAINE. We had a short but fairly cordial talk and I left with him
a package of letters that had come to my address but were really for
Marina, containing notes and checks of donations.
Mr. JENNER. How did you become aware of what the contents of those were?
Mrs. PAINE. They were addressed to me in my name, so that I opened
them and then these were enclosing a check asking me to deliver it to
Marina, this sort of thing.
And also brought, I can't remember, some items, things I found in the
house that belonged to her very probably that we hadn't noticed when
Robert had come to get the remaining items.
From a call to the Secret Service headquarters in Dallas I had gained
the impression that I shouldn't try to see Marina Oswald at that time,
and while I was under the impression that she was at Mr. Martin's home
it was not my particular intention to see her.
I wanted to meet him if I could and learn anything that would give me
some more impression of how things were going for her at that time, and
with this small collection of donations for her that I was taking, I
wrote a short note to her, a Christmas greeting, and returned home.