Josiah Thompson’s Last Second in Dallas (University
of Kansas Press, 2021) –
BK NOTES: This is a preliminary draft - not to be quoted or reproduced until it is finished. - Thank You.
Please refer to the updated version at http://JFKCountercoup.blogspot.com
Josiah Thompson’s new book Last Second in Dallas
could be a game changer, but probably won’t because of the opposition of both
dedicated lone nuts, who will brand it another conspiracy book, and silly
conspiracy theorists who will disagree with what he has to say.
Unlike
both camps Thompson doesn’t claim to know who killed the President, and doesn’t
try to pin the blame on anyone.
Instead
he tries to compile the most significant evidence, witness testimony, forensic
facts, ballistics and medical reports, acoustics, film and photos all together,
and at least try to assemble a clear and concise picture of the puzzle of what
occurred at Dealey Plaza that day.
"This book has a twofold purpose," Thompson explains. "On the one hand, it is a personal narrative of my experiences over the past five decades of trying to figure out what happened. At the same time, it is a kind of detective story that ends up disclosing what I have found."
"Before beginning to read," Thompson cautions, "the reader should be warned. This book is about the final second of John Kennedy's life. What happened in that final instant is shown in all-too-graphic detail by the Zapruder film and the autopsy photos. It is profoundly unsettling for both author and reader to examine a man's death in such graphic detail. Yet me must. For it is in that last second of the shooting that a central reality of the event is to be found. We must immerse ourselves in theses details if we are to reach that reality, unsettling and uncomfortable as it may be."
As a
first generation critic of the Warren Report conclusions, Thompson spices these
technical details and bloody facts with his own personal experiences that
explain how he got involved and still cares about this case.
From his
time at Yale, enlisting in the military as a Navy UDT (Underwater Demolition
Team) “Frogman,” graduate student in Philosophy, book on philosopher Soren
Kierkegaard, decade long professorship at Haverford College, developing
interest in the Kennedy assassination, being hired as a consultant to Life
Magazine, authorship of the landmark Six
Seconds in Dallas, more than two decades working as s PI – private
investigator in San Francisco, in the Sam Spade tradition, and authorship of
his work on hundreds of cases (including the Oklahoma City Bombing) in the book
Gumshoe.
Thompson
once said that of all the cases he worked on as a PI, there came a point in the
investigation when some new piece of evidence or witness testimony led to the
resolution of the crime, that is all of the case but one – the assassination of
President Kennedy, which has remained an enigma, and not just for him.
After working
on this book for ten years Thompson has tried to settle that issue by trying to
put all of the key pieces of the Dealey Plaza puzzle together, throwing out the
pieces that don’t fit, and aren’t even from this puzzle, and summarize what he
has learned over the years.
In his
Foreword to this book, Richard Rhodes, a former associate of Nobel laureate
Luis W. Alvarez notes that Thompson’s first serious study was on Soren
Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher and “the grandfather of the modern
philosophical movement known as existentialism,” which “is about understanding
the meaning and mystery of our existence without anchoring it in unsupported
certitudes. That seems to me what Thompson has spent his life pursing: giving
up certitude…”
Rhodes
says that he once supported Alvarez and the idea one lone nut killed the
president, but is now convinced that Thompson is right, reversing the trend of
former silly conspiracy theorist becoming dedicated lone nuts. "A careful reexamination of the forensic evidence in this book has changed my mind. I never would have imagined doing so, but for what it's worth, I now think the weight of the evidence supports Thompson's conclusions." Others should
follow.
Unlike
all dedicated lone nut advocates and most silly conspiracy theorists, Thompson
doesn’t know who killed the president, but he’s figured out the basic
forensics, at least to his own satisfaction.
And he’s
willing to admit when he’s wrong, and correct his past mistakes, as he know
recognizes that the shooting sequence wasn’t limited to six seconds, but more
like eight to nine seconds, and the two inch forward movement of the
president’s head wasn’t caused by what he initially thought.
There’s
been a lot of new developments since the publication of Six Seconds in Dallas,
most notably the Church Committee and House Select Committee on Assassination
(HSCA), the latter of which commissioned a scientific study of the acoustic
evidence, a tape recording of the shots resulting from a Dallas police
motorcycle with a microphone stuck open during the assassination.
It has
been falsely stated many times, mainly by dissenting congressmen who weren’t
paying attention, that the HSCA conclusion regarding conspiracy was based
entirely on the acoustical study, that they disagreed with. Committee chief
counsel G. Robert Blakey wrote a book on the mob connections to the
assassination, based on the HSCA findings, investigator Gaeton Fonzi focused on
the CIA’s David Atlee Phillips, attorney Ed Lopez on the Mexico City charade,
attorney Dan Hardway on the false attempts to blame Castro for the
assassination, investigator Jack Moriarty on the Dallas aspects, in particular the murder of JD Tippit and the Collins Radio connections, among many other
important leads to come out of the HSCA. So it isn’t true the acoustical study
was the only basis for the HSCA conclusion regarding conspiracy.
While I
don’t pretend to understand the math or equations that make up the acoustical
study, or the government commissioned Ramsey Panel’s attempt to refute it, I
trust Drs. Barger, Weiss, Ackensasy, and now Richard Mullen’s rebuttal of the
Ramsey Panel’s refutation of the acoustic panel’s work, based entirely on Ohio
drummer Steve Barber’s discovery of cross-talk between the two police channels.
Both
Alveraz and Ramsey have discredited themselves, Alveraz for not being
forthright about the extent of his experiments attempting to prove the
so-called “Jet Effect,” with bullets forcing melons to fall back towards the
direction of the shots, while Ramsey led a previous government panel that
failed to affirm a satellite report of a joint Israel-South Africa explosion of
a nuclear bomb in the ocean, assuring that he would go with what the
government wanted rather than what was known to be true.
Led by
Dr. Barger of BBN, the HSCA acoustic study arranged for the recording of rifles
fired from both the Sixth Floor of the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD) and
from behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll at Dealey Plaza, comparing
them with the sounds of rifle fire on the DP dictabelt tapes. Then they took
the results a step further by putting the sounds on an ocelliscope and
measuring the echo patterns created by the shots.
I was in
the Congressional hearing room when the acoustic team – Drs. Barger, Weiss and
Ackensasy testified before the HSCA. When a congressman asked them what they
would say if they were told the recording was not made at Dealey Plaza at the
time of the shooting, one of them responded, “I would then ask to be taken to
that location and expect to find an exact duplicate of Dealey Plaza,” because
the echo analysis reflected on the gun reports bouncing off the buildings and
walls of the plaza that were measured and matched.
When the
Ramsey panel fell into a funk in refuting the acoustic study results they
leaned on the findings of crosstalk on the tape discovered by Ohio rock drummer
Steve Barber. While most people discarded the acoustics study completely, the
three original scientists quietly stuck to their guns, and then Don Thomas
published a refutation of the Ramsey panel’s conclusions in a British forensic
journal, reviving the debate.
Thompson
devotes more than one chapter to the acoustic issues, and includes articles by
Dr. Barger and his BBN associate Richard Mullen as detailed appendix in the
back of this book, but the issues are complex and important enough to deal with
in detail separately, and I will.
Thompson
embarrass the HSCA acoustical study however, because it just may be the missing
piece of the puzzle that fits, and together with the other forensic pieces,
lead to the clear and concise portrait of what occurred at Dealey Plaza, and
the eventual resolution of the crime. That’s because what the acoustical study
says in regards to the timing and spacing of the shots fits quite nicely over
the witness reports, and most importantly the Zapruder film.
Backtracking
a little bit, what amazes me the most, and not mentioned by Thompson, is the
fact that during his decade long tenure as a Haverford professor in
Philadelphia, he was living in very close proximation with a number of other
assassination related characters, including Warren Commission attorneys Arlen
Spector and William Coleman, Marina’s biographer Priscilla Johnson, Ruth and
Michael Paine, Michael’s mom Ruth Forbes Paine Young and her husband Arthur
Young, the inventor of the Bell Helicopter, as well as John Judge, who was
working at the Quaker Friends Peace Center. Since I lived in Camden, NJ, just
across the river, I often visited Judge, so we were there together in very
close proximity.
Priscilla
Johnson attended Bryn Mawr College, just down the road from Haverford College, where Thompson taught. And was a member of Cord Meyer Jr.’s World
Federalist organization at the same time Michael’s mom organized fund raisers
for the pro-UN group. Michael Paine went to Swarthmore College, near Haverford and Bryn Mawr, all on the Philadelphia's Main Line. Michael met Ruth H. Paine at
a folk dance. When they were married in Media, Pa., Arthur Young arranged for Michael to get a
job at Bell Helicopter in Texas, so they relocated there. Ruth H. Paine later
returned to Philadelphia and made a donation to the Quaker Friends Peace Center
when John Judge called her on the phone requesting donations.
Just around the corner from where Michael and Ruth H. Paine were married in Media, local Vietnam war activists broke into the FBI office and stole their files, later distributing them to the media and exposing operation CHAOS, the FBI's penetration and operations against the anti-war activists. Of all the assassination related individuals living in Philadelphia at the time, one was more significant than the others in terms of steering Thompson towards Dealey Plaza - and that was Vincent Salandria.
When Thompson was arrested for distributing anti-war
leaflets, he was bailed out by Salandria, an ACLU attorney as well as the
lawyer for the Philadelphia school system. Salandria wrote some of the earliest
published articles critical of the Warren Report conclusions, and turned
Thompson on to the case and its multiple mysteries. Thompson became part of
Salandria’s committee of correspondence, which included a number of key early researchers - Christoper Sharrett, E. Matin Schotz, Mary Ferrell, Penn Jones, Shirley Martin, Maggie Fields, Harold Weisberg, Ray Marcus, David Lifton, and others.
But Thompson wasn't satisfied. "As for the books already published about the assassination," he writes, "it struck me that virtually all had focused, in one way or another, on picking apart the Warren Commission's conclusions. None had looked at the core evidence in the case and tried to pull al the pieces together into a single whole. We had heard enough about how wrong the Warren Commission's reconstruction was, but was what right?"
Then Thompson and Salandria traveled to Washington DC together
to visit the National Archives and view the Z-film, met archivist Marion
Johnson, as I have, and obtained slides of the key frames of the film.
Thompson
says that despite being an early mentor to him, they had a falling out over
whether the throat wound in JFK’s neck was a bullet entry, as Salandria
believed, but Thompson was less certain. I too got to know Salandria because of
our mutual work on the Air Force One radio transmission tapes, and found him to
be easy going and congenial and believe that the “falling out,” was more over
Salandria’s belief that while the devil may be in the details, the government
wants us to waste our time micro-analyzing the evidence rather than concluding
what is quite obvious – there was a blatant conspiracy we should all just
recognize.
Salandria told Gaeton Fonzi in 1975 that, "I'm afraid we were misled. All the critics, myself included, were misled very early. I see that now. We spent too much time and effort micro-analyzing the details of the assassination when all the time it was obvious, it was blatantly obvious that it was a conspiracy. Don't you think that the men who killed Kennedy had the means to do it in the most sophisticated and subtle way? They chose not to. Instead, they picked the shooting gallery that was Dealey Plaza and did it in the most barbarous and openly arrogant manner. The cover story was transparent and designed not to hold, to fall apart at the slightest scrutiny. the forces that killed Kennedy wanted the message clear: 'We are in control and no one - not the President, nor Congress, nor any elected official - no one can do anything about it.' It was a message to the people that their Government was powerless."
As for
Thompson, he was uncomfortable with the fact that all of the pieces to the
Dealey Plaza puzzle didn’t fit nicely together, and recognized that some of the
pieces weren’t even part of the puzzle, and threw them out.
Thompson
made a number of important determinations. Based on viewing the Z-film it is
quite clear that JFK is struck in the head from the front, as if hit by a
baseball bat. Eyewitnesses, including X and Holland, on the triple underpass,
thought the shot(s) came from behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll, and
many people and police ran there afterwards. Many ear witnesses said the first
few shots were evenly paced, but the last two shots were close together, almost
on top of each other – “Bam, Bam.”
While
interviewing witness with Life Magazine editors, Thompson followed Holland down
from the triple underpass to the area behind the picket fence, where someone
had been standing, pacing back and forth as his footprints were embedded in the
mud, and a pile of fresh cigarettes butts were left there.
At
Parkland hospital Thompson traced the origin of CE399, the so-called magic
bullet, and interviewed the orderly who found it and the hospital’s head of
security, a retired 20 year Dallas policeman. It turns out that the bullet was
found on a gurney not affiliated with either President Kennedy or Governor
Connally, but a little boy who was brought in at the same time. And the
security officer said the bullet that was turned over to him had a pointy tip,
not the one in evidence today as CE399.
Thompson
realized that the so called single bullet that supposedly hit JFK in the back,
exited his throat and went on to inflict all of the wounds on Connally, did
not kill the president, so he focused on the fatal head shot, and it’s multiple
complexities. The last second in Dallas is the moment the president is struck
in the head and thrown violently backwards, with blood spewn about, a piece of
the scull flipped on the truck that Jackie retrieved and tried to put back in
place, two other scull fragments that were later found on the ground, including the Harper fragment that came from the back of the head and has since
disappeared. And most significantly the blood and brain matter that hit Secret
Service agent Hill as he ran towards the limo and hit the motorcycle policeman
riding to the left rear of the car.
While
all of that clearly indicates a shot from the front, the clincher is the fact
that Hill, the doctors at the Parkland emergency room and a number of those at
the autopsy all describe a very clear grapefruit sized hole in the back of
JFK’s head that was clearly an exit
wound of a shot from the front.
Thompson quotes novelist Don DeLillo, who wrote about the assassination in his book Libra, as saying about the Zapruder film's key frame of the exploding head shot: "Are you seeing some distortion inherent in the film medium or in your own perception of things? Are you the willing victim of some enormous lie of the state - a lie, a wish, a dream? Or did the shot simply come from the front, as every cell in your body tells you it did?"
What
puzzled Thompson however, are the bullet fragments that created a crack in the
windshield, embedded in the chrome trim by the rearview mirror, were found on
the floor of the limo and according to the doctor who operated on Connally,
caused the wounds to his wrist. Once piece of the puzzle is the fact that full
metal jacketed bullets like CE399 and those believed to have been fired by the
sixth floor gunman, don’t fragment like the bullet that struck JFK in the head.
That must have been a different type of bullet.
"It all came down to the threshold question: Was there more than one shooter? If the answer was yes, then that fact would show itself in the details of the shooting. Finding those details - if they existed - would be the task of my book. And if they did not exist, that too would make the book worthwhile."
The
answer Thompson provides, as was presented to him by Keith Fitzgerald is that
there were two almost simultaneous shots to the head, one from the front that
killed him, as seen in Z-film frame #313,, and a second shot less than a second (.07)
later from somewhere behind, that fragmented.
Dr.
Cyril Wecht had previously speculated on two shots to the head, and wants proof
of two gunman, and this might be it – especially because such a two head shot
scenario can be seen in the Z-film and complimented by the acoustical study
results as well as earwitness reports.
In 1978, Dr. Cyril Wecht, a member of the HSCA Forensic Pathology Panel wrote: "In my opinion, the medical evidence and other physical evidence and investigative data in this case do not rule out the possibility of another gunshot wound of JFK's head....A soft-nosed bullet, or some other type of relatively frangible ammunition that would have disintegrated upon impact could have struck the right side of JFK's head in the parietal region. Inasmuch as there is a large defect of JFK's skull in this area, it is not possible to rule out the existence of a separate entrance wound at this site."
My own
research only concludes that the shot to the head that killed the president was
not taken by the sixth floor gunman, whoever he was, but was taken by a well
trained first class military sniper from either in front of the target or
behind it, so it didn’t appear to be moving but was approaching or moving away
from the shooter. First class snipers are trained to shoot for the head, and
their motto is “one shot one kill.”
Almost
all of what Josiah Thompson’s conclusions jive with my own, I don’t get so
engrossed in the ballistic, medical, forensic or photo analysis, but I try to
determine how the covert operation at Dealey Plaza was planned, put together and
conducted.
As Thompson puts it: "There is no more effective ambush than a crossfire. With shots coming undeniably from two locations and likely a third....This was a highly sophisticated, devastatingly effective assassination: two bullets to the head and one to the back. Its vary audacity is its most compelling feature. Any speculation as to who did it and why must at least start with that fact."
I had
know Thompson since the early 1990s from our participation at various
conferences, but except for an occasional lunch with others and drinks in the
hotel bar, I didn’t spend any considerable or quality time with him except for
one occasion. It was after an anniversary November COPA conference in Dallas,
when after the conference in the second floor ballroom of the Union train
station, while the others sat down for dinner and an awards ceremony, Thompson
and I left together to attend a media panel presentation at the Sixth Floor
Museum.
Former
Dallas mayor and TV reporter Wes Wise had invited me, as he had previously
gave me a tour of Dallas assassination hot spots and videotaped an interview with me for the Sixth Floor Museum. I had been asked to give a talk to a college law enforcement class, and
when the professor decided to take the entire class on a field trip to Dallas,
I arranged for Wes Wise to give them his tour.
[ Links to Wise Tour - JFKcountercoup: Case Study No.14 - Wes Wise - Assassin's Tour of Dallas / JFKCountercoup2: Wes Wise Tour of Dallas Hot Spots ]
So
Thompson and I left the COPA conference, walked down Houston Street, crossed
the plaza and had a short but interesting conversation along the way. There was a
classy wine and cheese reception before the panel discussion that included a
handful of former local news reporters who covered the assassination was, held
on the seventh floor, and the professor and college students were also there.
I mention
all of this because if you get through this intense and instructive book, and
the two appendixes on the acoustics, there’s fifty-six pages of footnotes and
sources. Many of these footnotes refer to specific documents and records mentioned
in the text, and notes that for the seriously curious, they can be found in the
Thompson Collection at the Sixth Floor Museum, not a bastion of silly conspiracy
theories.
Peter
Dale Scott once said at an early COPA conference that besides the usual
assassination buffs - dedicated lone
nuts who support the Warren Report conclusions, and the silly conspiracy
theorists who try to pin the assassination on a likely suspects – LBJ, CIA,
Mafia, KGB, Castro, etc., there was emerging a third class of independent
researchers who don’t believe they know who killed the president, but keep an
open mind, read all the books and records, and try to answer the outstanding
questions that can and should be answered, however difficult.
Josiah
Thompson is one of those different breeds of assassination buffs, as are a
number of others – John Newman, Bill Simpich, Jefferson Morley, Larry
Hancock, and others, as I would like to include myself in their number.
Mary
Farrell once told me that she was
convinced the assassination of President Kennedy will one day be resolved to a
legal and moral certainty, not because of any government or official
investigation, but by the joint work of independent researchers, and I believe
her.
Josiah
Thompson’s Last Second in Dallas is a foundation that can lead to a clear
outline of the ambush at Dealey Plaza, identify the gunman, and the mastermind
who planned and conducted the Dealey Plaza operation.
