EXCLUSIVE: John Kerry's relative who was FRIENDS with Lee Harvey Oswald lashes out at Secretary of State's claims that assassin didn't act alone

Ruth Paine married John Kerry's second cousin, and also knew JFK's assassin and his Russian wife Marina



The gunman stored his rifle in her garage without her knowledge, and used it in another murder attempt seven months before Kennedy died

Ruth, a Quaker, was best friend of Oswald's wife Marina, and also got the killer his job at the School Book Depository from where he shot JFK



She's disappointed that the secretary of state is giving oxygen to conspiracy theories that dispute the official findings about Nov. 22, 1963

'To this day,' Kerry said Friday in an NBC interview, 'I have serious doubts that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone'



A relative of John Kerry who knew Lee Harvey Oswald well today lashed out at the secretary of state's belief that JFK's assassin did not act alone.

'Oh, dear. He said that?' Ruth Paine reacted when MailOnline told her Monday what Kerry said to NBC's Tom Brokaw on Friday.

'That's so disappointing,' she said. 'These conspiracy theories do a great deal of disservice to history.'

Paine married a Kerry cousin and befriended Lee Harvey's Russian wife Marina Oswald.



She also got the future killer his job at the Texas School Book Depository. Oswald shot the president from its sixth floor window.

Ruth and Michael Paine testified before the Warren Commission after the JFK assassination. The Texas couple befriended Lee Harvey Oswald and his Russian-born bride after their return form the Soviet Union in early 1962

Lee Harvey Oswald, his wife Marina Nikolayevna Prusakova, and their daughter June Lee (L) were photographed in Minsk the year before they returned to the U.S. Ruth Paine (R) let Marina and her daughters live in her house after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Now she says the Warren Commission got it right

Her husband Michael was close with Lee, and had him as a frequent house guest.

And Oswald had stored his rifle in the garage of her Irving, Texas home, she learned later. It was wrapped tightly inside a green and brown-colored blanket roll.

Just days before the 50th anniversary of the assassination, Kerry has breathed new life into the persistent buzz of naysayers.

'I'm disappointed,' Ruth Paine said. 'I really feel that people who are looking at it ought to realize that the Commission did a really excellent job.'

She was referring to the controversial and often disputed 900-page Warren Commission report published a year after the president's assassination that concluded Oswald did act alone.

The State Department didn't respond to phone calls seeking comment.

Kerry told Brokaw that 'to this day, I have serious doubts that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.'

'Really?' a surprised Brokaw asked.

'I certainly have doubts that he was motivated by himself,' Kerry replied.

Oswald held his Mannlicher-Carcano rifle in this photo, which may have been the one he showed Michael Paine. Oswald stored his gun in the Paines' garage

Doubts: Kerry told Tom Brokaw (L) that he's still not sure Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone assassin who acted alone in 1963



'I mean, I'm not sure if anybody else is involved – I won't go down that road with respect to the Grassy Knoll theory and all that – but I have serious questions about whether they got to the bottom of Lee Harvey Oswald's time and influence from Cuba and Russia,' said the secretary of state.



Michael Paine wouldn't speak to MailOnline, laughing off the idea that he was related to Secretary of State John Forbes Kerry.

But the two are second cousins through their mothers, who were first cousins, according to news reports, and his wife.

'My former husband is related to the Forbes family – one branch of the family, the less-expensive type,' Mrs Paine told MailOnline.

Her father-in-law and sister-in-law, through a sibling's marriage, both had unspecified CIA ties, according to papers released under the JFK Documents Act.

All those worlds collided with the seamy underbelly of presidential assassinations at the Paine residence, where the Oswalds were always welcome.

Marina lived there for months with her first daughter after she and her husband moved back to Dallas from New Orleans two months before the assassination.



Lee Harvey Oswald stayed in the house the night before he killed Kennedy, bringing the wrapped-up rifle to his book depository job the next morning.



The garage: Michael and Ruth Paine's home is now a museum, in which visitors can see a projected image of an actress playing Marina Oswald talk about her husband's rifle (lower right) that he stored there during 1963

Moments before the fateful shot -- or shots? -- rang out, Kennedy waved to well-wishers in Dallas

Oswald tried to kill Gen. Edwin A. Walker earlier in 1963. That fact, says Ruth Paine, points toward his guilt

Ruth Paine and Marina Oswald had a special relationship, formed when the Paines attended a dinner party hosted by friends who wanted to introduce them to other couples who were interested in Russian culture.

Ruth drove the Oswalds to New Orleans and back during their two 1963 moves. After the assassination, Marina and her two daughters stayed with Ruth briefly until the Secret Service took her into custody.

Mrs. Paine would later say her Quaker faith led her to take the woman and her children in.

'Oswald's wife was at our house a lot, and the rifle was there,' Ruth Paine told MailOnline. 'Of course, I didn't know he had a gun. I'm a Quaker. I wouldn't have wanted that in the house.'

But Michael Paine knew. 'Obviously he liked guns,' Mr. Paine said of Oswald during a 1993 interview for a CBS documentary.



'I went one afternoon to pick him up, went upstairs, and I think the first thing he did, practically, was pick up this photograph of himself – eight by ten – holding his rifle there and some papers. I was a little startled. I suppose he was looking for a big revolution.'

When Ruth learned that detail after the assassination, she also discovered that taking a shot at the president wasn't Oswald's first assassination attempt.

'Oswald tried to shoot and kill someone in April 1963,' she said on Monday. 'It was in Vincent Bugliosi's book.'



John Kerry was barely out of high school in 1963, but fancies himself a Warren Commission skeptic. His second cousin knew Lee Harvey Oswald well

The 1,600-page tome 'Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy,' was the 2007 project of Bugliosi, best known as Charles Manson's prosecutor.

'It was General Edwin A. Walker,' she recalled to MailOnline. 'Oswald left a note for Marina saying that the guy was a fascist. The shot was a near-miss, but I think he believed he'd killed him.'

Walker later said that when he heard about the 'second gunman' theory in the Kennedy case, he started believing there was a second gunman at the site of his near-death experience, too.

That would fit in with some conspiracy theorists' belief that the CIA or a Cuban conspiracy used Oswald as a patsy, since the same kind of lightning could have struck twice.

'I wish all of this were better covered,' Ruth told MailOnline. 'It's crucial. Oswald bought his gun and within days he was out shooting at someone. Someone like Kerry should know that.'