Scroll down to read Michel's review of
Josiah "Tink" Thompson's Last Second In Dallas (U P Kansas, 2021)
ATTACK OF THE INVISIBLE MAN
Or
The Conspiracy Theory Nobody Wanted:
The Controversial Conclusions of the House Select Committee On Assassinations
(Paranoid Planet, Episode 7.9B, Chapter 2)
This essay is an edited excerpt of Chapter 3: “Case Never Closed: The Evolving Conspiracy Narrative,” from my book Thinking Critically About the Kennedy Assassination: Debunking the Myths and Conspiracy Theories (Routledge, 2022).
HSCA Commission session (c.1976)
The 1970s began as a period of great pessimism for many Americans, especially the thousands of frustrated left-leaning idealists who rejected the conclusions of the 1964 Warren Report, which argued that President Kennedy had been murdered by a single sociopathic Marxist assassin. For many of them, the only acceptable explanation was that JFK had been killed by a massive conspiracy involving the CIA, the Military Industrial Complex, Anti-Castro Cubans, and organized crime syndicates. The Johnson administration’s expansion of the War in Vietnam, the 1968 assassinations of Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King and Presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy, the landslide election of Republican Richard Nixon, and the exhaustion of the New Left and counterculture protest movements, all fed the widespread belief that the United States had been hijacked by a right-wing cabal of greedy warmongers.
But this pessimism would not last long. When President Nixon shamefully resigned from office in 1974 over the Watergate Scandal—a series of investigations that exposed many criminal acts committed by members of his administration—timid optimism began to flow through the ranks of JFK conspiracy believers, who until then had entertained little hope that Kennedy’s death would ever be solved to their satisfaction. Although newly acting President Ford’s reputation was tainted, in their view, by his past involvement in the Warren Commission and his controversial pardon of President Nixon, his promise to open the books on the federal government was counterbalanced by a withdrawal of the rest of American troops from Vietnam, a limited amnesty for draft dodgers, and attempts to atone for the abuses of federal intelligence agencies. The exposure and arrest of Kennedy’s killers, or so it seemed at the time, was only of matter of allowing the wheels of justice to turn.
Gerald Ford, 38th President of the U.S.A., being sworn-in (1974)
During Ford’s brief 2½-year tenure in the White House, no less than three separate public inquiries were established to investigate reports of malfeasance by the CIA and other agencies. In 1975, Ford set up the United States President’s Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States (better known as the Rockefeller Commission, chaired by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller) which investigated allegations that CIA agents had illegally spied on thousands of American citizens.[1] The Rockefeller Report, published later that year, exposed several illegal acts performed by the Agency, including MKULTRA, an abandoned psychological warfare (or “mind control”) program directed by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, through which the CIA drugged unwitting Americans with LSD, some of whom died as a result.[2] This commission also confirmed that the CIA partnered with organized criminals during the early Sixties to try to assassinate Fidel Castro. It also examined the claims of Robert Groden, Jack White, Michael Canfield, Allan Weberman and others who argued that the Agency had been involved in Kennedy’s murder. To the disappointment of many, the Rockefeller Report concluded that the evidence offered by these authors were either debunked or unfounded, and that Oswald likely acted alone.[3]
However, the shocking revelations of the Rockefeller Commission provoked the Senate to set up its own inquest, the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, which sat in 1975-76 and was chaired by Senator Frank Church. The Church Committee, as it soon became known, exposed several illegal activities committed by the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency, Internal Revenue Service, and several military intelligence agencies. It revealed, for instance, that the CIA had not only conspired to murder Castro, it had also run Operation Mongoose, a secret terrorism campaign against Cuba, had facilitated the assassinations of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, and supported the 1973 overthrow of Salvador Allende, the democratically-elected socialist president of Chile, by his own military brass. The Church Committee also revealed that the CIA and FBI illegally opened the mail of thousands of U.S. citizens and that the FBI had spied on and harassed civil rights, New Left, and Black Panther activists.
Senators Frank Church (L) and John Tower (R) present a CIA poison-dart weapon (1975)
In regards to JFK’s murder, the Church Committee chastised the CIA for having withheld crucial information from the Warren Commission concerning its plots to murder Castro and about Oswald’s movements in Mexico City—both of which, they presumed, might have influenced its conclusions. The Committee also scolded the FBI for hiding the fact that it had been keeping tabs on Lee Oswald’s movements several weeks before the assassination, had known of his pro-Castro activities in New Orleans, and yet had failed to inform the Dallas police and Secret Service of this. However, it found no evidence that any government agent or agency intentionally caused Kennedy’s death.[4]
The third—and most comprehensive—of these inquiries, and by far the most eager to expose a conspiracy, was the House of Representatives’ Select Committee on Assassinations (better known as the HSCA). Made up of twelve Congressional members and a large team of lawyers, investigators, and panels of experts, the HSCA sat from 1976 to 1979 to investigate the murders of President Kennedy and of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.[5] The HSCA initially struggled to resolve various personal and methodological conflicts between its members, which forced it to cycle through three different chairmen—Congressmen Thomas Downing, Henry Gonzales, and Louis Stokes—all of whom clashed with each other or the Committee’s original lead counsel, Richard A. Sprague. Sprague was therefore replaced by G. Robert Blakey, a young Cornell law professor who had previously worked in the Justice Department, prosecuting organized criminals on behalf of Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Blakey had strong feelings that the mafia was somehow responsible for JFK’s murder and hoped that the HSCA would be able to prove it.[6]
Budgetary concerns and the recognition that witness memories are often dulled or corrupted by time, the HSCA’s work largely focused on re-examining the physical evidence of the assassination, using improved forensic technologies that had not been available to the Warren Commission. Panels of experts inspected photos, films, handwriting samples and fingerprints, studied the physics and chemistry of bullets and fragments, and used forensic pathology and acoustics to reconstruct the assassination sequence. They examined the claims made by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who in 1969 failed to convict Louisiana businessman Clay Shaw for the JFK assassination, as well as the claims of other conspiracy researchers like Robert Groden and Jack White.
HSCA Commissioners and staffers (1978),
including Commission Chairman Louis Stokes (L) and Chief Counsel Robert Blakey (C).
In the end, The HSCA agreed with Warren Commission that Lee Oswald was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of firing three shots at President Kennedy using a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, missing once and striking JFK twice. All evidence, it asserted, pointed to Oswald being the sole cause of all of President Kennedy’s and Governor Connally’s wounds. Indeed, the HSCA ended up corroborating almost all of the Warren Commission’s conclusions, including the much-loathed single-bullet theory, the reliability of the autopsy report—with minor corrections—and the authenticity of Lee Oswald’s controversial backyard photos, in which he can be seen posing with the murder weapon.[7] The HSCA also reported that the Warren Commission, despite making a few errors, had operated in good faith and reached reasonable conclusions. (Similar conclusions were reached concerning Martin Luther King Jr.'s convicted assassin, James Earl Ray).
A Dictaphone-brand Dictabelt device like the one used by Dallas Police Department dispatcher to record Chanel 1 police chatter (i.e., regular communications) on 11/22/1963.
This was surprising to many—including several of the Committee’s congressional members, legal counsels, and investigators who had set out hoping to expose a massive conspiracy. The Committee did, however, scold the FBI and CIA for not pursuing some leads that could have exposed possible collaborators, and harshly blame the Secret Service for failing to protect Kennedy adequately. But it nevertheless exonerated these agencies, as well as the White House, Pentagon, Soviets, Communist Cuba, anti-Castro Cubans (“as a group”) and organized crime syndicates (also, “as a group”).[8] All in all, the HSCA was ready to conclude as it reached the end of its investigation, that it had found no trace of a conspiracy to murder John Kennedy. In fact, a preliminary draft of its final report claimed just that. But things ended up taking a different turn.
The HSCA was compelled to change its conclusions at the eleventh hour when its panel of three acoustics experts—James Barger, Mark Weiss, and Ernest Aschkenasy—wowed them with statistical charts and annotated maps of Dealey Plaza suggesting that a fourth shot was fired at Kennedy. The sound of this shot, which they said originated from a different location and different rifle than Oswald’s, was captured by a Dallas police Dictabelt recording when a motorcycle patrolman escorting the motorcade, or so they concluded, accidentally left his two-way radio stuck in the open position. Because these four shots appeared to align with events on the silent Zapruder film, and because the suspicious fourth shot was believed to have come from the infamous “grassy knoll”, the Committee identified Dallas police officer H.B. McLain as the one who recorded these sounds—even though McLain would remain adamant that he was not in the stated location at the stated time, and that the recording did not correspond with his movements during the assassination sequence.[9] But to the members of the HSCA’s acoustics panel, the probabilities laid out by their computations was sufficiently high to claim that a fourth shot had occurred. And since Oswald could not have fired four shots, there had to have been a second shooter on the “grassy knoll” who fired one shot, struck nothing, left no trace of his act, and was never photographed, filmed, or otherwise identified. Despite its controversial nature, the HSCA’s acoustic proof of a second gunman was welcomed by lead counsel Blakey and many others who remained convinced, despite the rest of their findings, that Oswald had not acted alone, and that a conspiracy, however small, had in fact occurred.[10]
CUNY Profs. Mark R. Weiss (R) and Ernest Aschkenasy (L) testify before the HSCA (Feb. 1979)
This alleged two-man conspiracy involving Lee Oswald and one other elusive, invisible, and incompetent accomplice, was a far cry from the ambitious government plots described by Mark Lane, Jim Garrison, Robert Groden, and many others, but it was enough to convince many of their readers, if they ignored the rest of the Committee’s findings, that they had been right all along. However, it is rarely acknowledged by conspiracy believers that the HSCA’s acoustic evidence—the only thing it could produce to assert the existence of a conspiracy—was impeached almost immediately by other expert studies. In 1982, for instance, the National Research Council’s Committee on Ballistic Acoustics—better known as the Ramsey Panel—concluded that the Dictabelt’s “acoustic impulses were recorded […] approximately one minute after the assassination.”[11] In 1988, the Department of Justice produced a rejoinder to the HSCA Report which stated that the four “shots” on the Dictabelt did not occur in Dealey Plaza at 12:30 pm. Independent investigations by computer programmer Dale Myers, the Forensic Science Society, and the Sonalysts engineering firm later concluded the same.[12]
Paper record published by Gallery Magazine in 1979 with the Dictabelt recording, on which Stephan Barber discovered the "cross talk" phenomenon
The HSCA’s two-man assassination theory drew flak from both sides of the debate. To those in the media, academia, and government who continued to endorse the lone gunman theory, the HSCA’s claim that one of JFK’s killers got away was no less offensive than if the Committee had blamed half the country for it. The Committee’s shaky evidence of a phantom second shooter would inevitably lead most skeptics to reject the HSCA’s most controversial conclusion.[13] Defenders of the Warren Commission would henceforth speak of the HSCA with mixed feelings, disagreeing staunchly with its Final Report while simultaneously embracing the work and conclusions of most of its panels of experts.
But the toothpaste, as they say, was already out of the tube. Now that a government body had endorsed the idea of a conspiracy—no matter how small and poorly corroborated—many conspiracists hailed the HSCA as a victory, all the while ignoring much of the rest of its findings.[14] Others, like former HSCA staffers Gaeton Fonzi and Robert Tanenbaum, whose pet conspiracy theories had been rejected by the Committee, dismissed the whole thing as a poisoned apple.[15]
A scene from Oliver Stone's JFK, featuring the elusive "grassy knoll shooter" (in a police uniform) taking aim at President Kennedy
There were two reasons for major disagreements to cause a rift between conspiracists. First, accepting all of the HSCA’s conclusions entailed that, although they might have been right about the existence of a grassy knoll shooter, that most of the “proofs” they produced to support it were false, and this smacked of admitting their own incompetence. Second, accepting that Oswald was a wilful participant in the affair was even more problematic because it attacked the very core of their beliefs, which is that JFK died at the hands of a massive right-wing coup d’état. To incriminate Oswald as the only successful sniper in the attack—a man conspiracists had been depicting for years as a patsy set up by the establishment—required them to exonerate the “fascist” government that had—rightly, it turns out—declared Oswald guilty. In other words, the assassination of JFK had indeed been a crime of passion performed by an unhinged leftist, and not a state-sponsored act of regime change. By offering conspiracists the conclusion they sought at the cost of sacrificing the story they had produced to support it, the HSCA inadvertently robbed them of their high-minded purpose, which was not to prove any conspiracy but a particular kind of conspiracy—a right-wing coup d’état—the only kind that would vindicate their moral outrage and sense of victimhood. Predictably, the early Eighties witnessed few publications propounding to reestablish the coup d’état narrative.[16] One would need to wait another decade for the public’s memory of the HSCA to fade, and for a Hollywood director named Oliver Stone, with a budget of $40 million dollars, to make that myth the reigning dogma again.
Oliver Stone (R), on location during the filming of JFK (c.1990)
Endnotes:
[1] Seymour Hersh: “Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years,” The New York Times, December 22, 1974.
[2] Nicholas M. Horrock: “Destruction of LSD Data Laid to C.I.A. Aide in ‘73,” New York Times, July 18, 1975; Kim Zetter: “April 13, 1953: CIA OKs MK-Ultra Mind-Control Tests,” Wired, April 13, 2010; John D. Marks: The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control—The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences (1979).
[3] The Rockefeller Report argued (a) that conspiracy suspects Frank Sturgis and Howard Hunt had solid alibis; (b) that the three anonymous “derelicts” who were briefly detained and let go by Dallas Police had been found in a boxcar a half-mile south of Dealey Plaza and hence were not in the Plaza at the time of the shooting; (c) that suspicious silhouettes in the Zapruder and Nix films were “imaginative illusions”; and (d) that no connections were found linking Oswald or Ruby to the CIA and Watergate burglars. The Commission also offered a new revelation to account for Kennedy’s backward motion after the fatal head shot: he was wearing a back brace that impeded his forward motion. Report to the President by the Commission on CIA Activities within the United States (1975), 251-268.
[4] Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate (1976), Chapters VIII, IX and X. See also Bugliosi, 369-370.
[5] On the HSCA’s conclusions concerning King’s murder, see “Findings on MLK Assassination”, Report of the Select Committee on Assassinations of the U.S. House of Representatives (1979), National Archives: JFK Assassination Records. (Henceforth HSCA Report)
[6] Sprague, who assembled a huge staff (170 lawyers and researchers), intended to subject all suspects and witnesses to polygraph tests and voice stress evaluators, and to equip his investigators with miniature devices to secretly record their phone conversations. All this threatened to run the Committee’s budget into the tens of millions of dollars and challenged the ethical principle of informed consent. Sprague stepped down from his post to prevent the Committee from imploding. It henceforth operated on a tighter budget with more moderate objectives. This triggered the resignations of several staff members loyal to Sprague, including deputy chief counsel Robert Tanenbaum and investigator Gaeton Fonzi, both of whom held conspiracist views and became vocal critics of the HSCA’s “timid” conclusions. See Vincent Bugliosi: Reclaiming History, 370-378.
[7] “Summary of Findings and Recommendations,” HSCA Report. See Chapters 13, 15 and 16 of this book.
[8] “Summary of Findings and Recommendations”.
[9] It should be noted that this new acoustic evidence of supposed gunshots was extrapolated from a static-filled mess of noises etched on a fifteen year-old strip of vinyl, which was almost impossible to decipher without a high-quality audio mixer. For this reason, some Committee members chose to record a dissenting view. See “Separate Views of Hons. Samuel L. Devine and Robert W. Edgar,” and “Dissent and Additional Remarks of Hon. Harold S. Sawyer to the Final Report of the Select Committee on Assassinations,” in “Separate Remarks, Views and Dissent of Members of the Committee,” (Chapter IV), HSCA Report. See the lengthy 63-page (!) endnote on this matter in Bugliosi, endnotes 153-218.
[10] “Summary of Findings and Recommendations”. In using the words, “scientific evidence does not preclude the possibility of two gunmen…,” the HSCA was in fact supporting its conclusions with an argument from ignorance fallacy (i.e., claiming that something is true because it is not proven false). Critical thinkers will realize that many things are scientifically possible but not in fact true.
[11] “Since the recorded acoustic impulses are similar to static, efforts to attribute them to gunshots have depended on echo analyses; but in these analyses desirable control tests were omitted, some of the analyses depended on subjective selection of data, serious errors were made in some of the statistical calculations, incorrect statistical conclusions were drawn and the analysis methods used were novel in some aspects and were untested at such high levels of background noise. Furthermore, some of the recorded background sounds, such as the delay in the sounds of police sirens, are not what one would expect if the open microphone had been in the motorcade. For these and other reasons discussed in the report, the Committee concluded that the previous acoustic analyses do not demonstrate that there was a grassy knoll shot.” National Academy of Sciences: “Executive Summary,” Report of the Committee on Ballistic Acoustics, National Academy Press, Washington, D.C., 1982, posted at JFK Online. This research was initiated following the discovery by Steve Barber, an Ohio recording artist, that the Dictabelt recording contained the voice of Dallas sheriff Bill Decker, speaking “cross talk” over another channel (recorded on a different machine than the channel 1 Dictabelt) some time after the shooting was over. Kathryn Olmsted, interview by Barry Glasner, Book TV, CSPAN, April 25, 2009.
[12] In the late Nineties, computer animator Dale Myers used the home movies taken by several bystanders to establish that patrolman McLain had not yet arrived at the required location (near the corner of Houston and Elm) to record the sounds on the Dictabelt. “Peter Jennings Reporting: The Kennedy Assassination - Beyond Conspiracy,” ABC News, 2003. In 2005, the Forensic Science Society published a peer-reviewed study that upheld the NRC’s findings. R. Linsker et al.: “Synchronization of the Acoustic Evidence in the Assassination of President Kennedy,” Science & Justice, Vol.45, No.4 (2005) 207–226. In 2013, political scientist Larry Sabato, author of The Kennedy Half Century (2013), commissioned a re-investigation of the Dictabelt recording by the media engineering firm Sonalysts Inc. By examining the two police channels recorded by the Dictabelt—only one of which (channel #2) was used for the motorcade (not channel #1, which recorded the alleged gunshots)—and the pattern of the vehicle’s acceleration and auditory Doppler effects, Sonalysts’ sound engineers concluded that the open microphone had recorded traffic noises several miles from Dealey Plaza, most likely at the Dallas Trade Mart where several other motorcycle policemen awaited Kennedy’s arrival. Charles Olsen and Scott Martin: “Analysis of the Dallas Police Department Dictabelt Recording Related to the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy,” March 25, 2013, in Larry J. Sabato: “The Kennedy Half Century: Acoustical Analysis of November 22, 1963 Dallas Police Recordings,” October 15, 2013.
[13] Posner, 235-240; Bugliosi, endnotes 153-218; Myers: “Epipolar Geometric Analysis of Amateur Films Related to Acoustics Evidence in the John F. Kennedy Assassination,” 2010, JFK Files: Secrets of a Homicide.
[14] E.g., Henry Hurt: Reasonable Doubt (1985), 33-34, 100-102; Anthony Summers: Not in Your Lifetime (1998), chap. 4 and 5; James Fetzer, ed.: Murder in Dealey Plaza (2000).
[15] Fonzi: “Who Killed JFK?” The Washingtonian, November 1980; Fonzi: The Last Investigation (1993); Groden and Livingstone: High Treason (1990); Tanenbaum: “JFK Assassination Conspiracy Theories: An Analysis of Government Misconduct: The House Select Committee on Assassinations”, Presentation given at Duquesne University, Wecht Institute of Forensic Science and Law, October 18, 2013, CSPAN.
[16] With the notable exception of David Lifton’s Best Evidence (discussed above and in Chapter 14).
* * *
Goldberg’s Pickaxe
Or
How Professor Thompson Failed Logic 101 [1]
A review of Josiah Thompson’s Last Second in Dallas (U P Kansas, 2021).
The Historian, 84(3), 539–548. Phi Alpha Theta, 2024.
The principle of simplicity, better known as Ockham’s Razor, states that "entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity".[2] This aphorism has for centuries played an important role in the field of forensic research, guiding cautious investigators to favor the most sensible and least speculative of competing theories. While there are no doubt some exceptions, it is generally understood that, all else being equal, the more a theory relies on unproven assumptions, unfalsifiable claims, untested evidence, emotional reasoning, or unrepeatable experiments, the more likely it is to reach faulty conclusions.
Pulitzer prize-winning newspaper cartoonist Reuben Goldberg (1883-1970) famously upended this principle with a series of absurd imaginary contraptions, popularly called “Rube Goldberg machines”, that turned simple tasks like wiping one’s mouth with a napkin into mindbogglingly complex operations involving strings, scissors, pulleys, balloons, alarm clocks, utensils, pendulums, matches, firecrackers, swinging boots, and exotic birds.
It is my contention that Josiah “Tink” Thompson’s most recent book, Last Second in Dallas, is a glaring example of this sort of labyrinthine logic—which I call “Goldberg’s Pickaxe”—that consists of rejecting all simple fact-based explanations that do not support the author’s desired conclusion in favor of convoluted explanations that require him to distort, shrug off, or completely ignore incompatible evidence and authoritative works of highly credible professionals (see references below). Put simply, this book disregards a surfeit of verifiable and scientifically-tested evidence that supports the 1964 Warren Commission’s conclusion that President Kennedy was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, an emotionally troubled political radical with the skill, means, opportunity, and intent to single-handedly murder the greatest symbol of American capitalism to ever cross his path, in favour of a Byzantine theory that multiple never-identified shooters simultaneously fired at Kennedy (some striking him at the very same instant) without leaving any proof of their existence, of projectiles from any weapon other than Oswald’s 6.5mm Mannlicher-Carcano, and additional entrance or exit wounds.
Thompson gleans much of his evidence from cherry-picked eye- and ear-witness reports, blowups of grainy pictures, blurry stills from amateur videos, circular interpretations of barely-perceptible “impulses” in static-filled police radio recordings (ignoring much expert research that has repeatedly shown that these were not synchronous gunshots), and the debunking of what he calls “photo illusions” that Kennedy’s head was thrust forward by a bullet that came from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository (Lee Oswald’s “sniper’s nest”), arguing instead that two bullets simultaneously struck JFK from the front and the rear during the final second of the murderous sequence (hence the book’s title). To remain plausible, this theory further rests on the presumption that hundreds of malevolent incompetents—including the team of pathologists who conducted the autopsy—banned together in an unplanned yet decades-long “complicity” of silence to hide this truth from the public, as well as many personal attacks, paranoid deductions, personal epiphanies, and logical fallacies.
Bird's eye view of Dealey Plaza. According to Thompson, 3+ shooters were located in the parking lot (lower left) behind the picket fence, in the Texas School Book Depository (left, under Hertz sign), and on top of the City Records building (top, left of center)
That being said, Thompson is no featherweight in the JFK research community. He is a veteran “JFK buff” and a quirky and charismatic crank who for over five decades made many thought-provoking contributions to the public debate over the Warren Commission’s conclusions. Some of these have even been well-received by resolute skeptics, which makes this book’s specious argument all the more underwhelming. A Yale-educated philosopher who first specialized in the existential Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (but soon grew bored with him), Thompson served a short stint researching the Kennedy assassination for Life magazine in 1966, which gave him the incentive to engage in more assassination sleuthing. After publishing Six Seconds in Dallas: A Micro-Study of the Kennedy Assassination (1967)—one of the more popular and least conjectural of the myriad conspiracy-affirming books of its genre—he left his tenured position at Haverford College to become a full-time private investigator, working for, among others, the defense team of mass murderer Timothy McVeigh. He has since contributed several articles, interviews, presentations, advising stints, and this new book to the field of JFK assassination research, sometimes supporting and sometimes upbraiding the conspiracy claims of other Warren Commission critics.
Josiah "Tink" Thompson
Unfortunately, Thompson’s latest contribution—a book he describes as “a piece of unfinished business” (278)—offers us not a stronger defense of his earlier thesis or an evolution in his thinking, but a regress into the proverbial "paranoid style", one which a trained philosopher should have been better equipped to steer clear of. A Kierkegaard scholar, furthermore, should have some greater insight into Socratic reasoning and the pitfalls of self-deception. Alas, Professor Thompson seems to have left those pages unturned.
From the outset Thompson rejects the label of conspiracy theorist (but then, who wouldn’t?). It is hard however to use another term—speaking non-pejoratively—to describe Thompson’s methods and conclusions. Though he steers clear of speculations about malicious grand schemes and evil cabals (except against the many qualified scientists he takes issue against), he nonetheless theorizes that multiple perpetrators simultaneously took shots at President Kennedy. If true, this evidently suggests a well-orchestrated conspiracy happened. He also repeatedly draws on the opinions of committed conspiracy believers like Gary Aguilar, Cyril Wecht, Sylvia Meagher, and Vincent Salandria, disregards the divergent conclusions of some of his own expert witnesses (e.g., Robert Blakey, Paul Hoch, and Michael O’Dell), cites several amateur or minority voices as if they were authoritative, and uses numerous fallacies to discredit the lone gunman “official story” (more on this below).
The book is divided into four sections that chronicle the author’s six decades of involvement in JFK assassination research. The first part summarizes Thompson’s brief spell as a JFK assassination investigator for Life magazine and his subsequent inquest to write Six Seconds in Dallas, in which he presented the thesis that a frontal head shot caused Kennedy’s body to move “back and to the left” (as seen on the Zapruder film). This part also introduces the author’s favorite nemesis: Nobel Prize-winning experimental physicist Luis Alvarez who, from the beginning, tried to disprove any theory that involved several assassins shooting at Kennedy, “in total opposition to common sense” (115). Alvarez serves as the book’s shadowy antagonist, not only for his inconclusive ballistic experiments involving taped melons and coconuts and his speculative “jiggle analysis” of the Zapruder film, but also for his involvement in the Manhattan Project and other nuclear research—which, of course, has no bearing whatsoever on the Kennedy assassination except to help Thompson‘s taint him as an unholy villain. By focusing most of his critique on Alvarez’s errors while ignoring his many successes, as well as almost every other scientific study that corroborated the Warren Commission’s conclusions, Thompson creates a flimsy straw man which he beats to a pulp throughout the rest of the book. He certainly convinced me that Dr. Alvarez had a prickly, proud, and impatient character, but none of this proves any kind of incompetence or wilful dishonesty.
The second section details the renewed popularity of JFK conspiracy claims following the first nationally televised broadcast of the Zapruder film by sensationalistic journalist Geraldo Rivera in 1975, obtained illegally by self-appointed Zapruder film “expert” Robert Groden, and these men’s role in eliciting the formation of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) which would conclude in 1979, based on controversial acoustic evidence that Thompson defends religiously, that Lee Oswald was not Kennedy’s only shooter. (It is worth mentioning, however, that the HSCA nonetheless concluded, contra Thompson, that Oswald caused all of the injuries suffered by Kennedy and Governor Connally).
Frames 313-316 of the Zapruder Film
(© 1967 (Renewed 1995) The Sixth Floor Museum At Dealey Plaza).
A most enlightening revelation made here is Thompson’s firsthand participation in HSCA discussions that gave birth to the allegations, first proposed by conspiracist authors Gary Shaw, Gary Mack, and Mary Ferrell, that the shots fired at Kennedy’s limousine were serendipitously recorded by an open police microphone within the motorcade, a theory that eventually provided the HSCA’s only evidence that a second shooter may have been involved in the assassination. Much of the rest of the book is dedicated to rehabilitating this controversial acoustic evidence which Alvarez and others would later reject as flawed. Thompson also spends a chapter discrediting the flawed Neutron Activation Analysis (NAA) tests that helped the Warren Commission wrongly conclude that all bullet fragments found in JFK’s body and car could be matched with the ammunition in Oswald’s rifle. However, Thompson fails to explain that, while this invalidates one of the Warren Commission’s proofs for a single shooter, it does not provide any additional proof for a second gunman either. It merely invites us to tolerate the possibility that some of the recovered bullet fragments could have originated from another weapon than Oswald’s. Nor does it invalidate the rest of the evidence used to incriminate Oswald alone.
The third part of the book finds Thompson striking back at conspiracy deniers with a conjectural “motion blurring” study of the Zapruder film that recasts the evidence for a rearward head shot as “proof” of a frontal headshot, followed by an almost simultaneous other rear shot (undetectable to all but Thompson and his sources) to account for the rear skull entrance wound identified by the autopsy pathologists. Another full chapter is dedicated to trying to prove that Kennedy suffered a massive occipital (i.e., low in the back of the head) exit wound, citing only conspiracist sources and emergency hospital staff who, being rushed, had little time to inspect the back of the President’s head, which was covered in layers of congealed blood, gore, and matted hair. No reference or response is given to numerous competent pathologists and ballistics experts (Baden, Lattimer, Sturdivan, Haag, Cummings, etc.) who studied the autopsy evidence and utterly rejected the frontal shot thesis.
The book’s final section takes us deep into the quantum realm of garbled audio messages and “crosstalk timestamping” gleaned from a second-generation, static-filled, sixty-year-old recording. The science is sometimes obscure and sometimes simplistic, and often comes off as a clumsy attempt to shuffle the pieces around until some of them fit while whatever does not (e.g., the entire question of where the open police microphone was located) gets swatted away like a gnat. Thompson’s vitriol is once again unleashed on Luis Alvarez and his fellow physicist Norman Ramsay who were commissioned by the National Research Council (upon the request of the HSCA) to assess the credibility of the acoustic evidence, which they found lacking on numerous counts. This Ad Hoc Committee on Ballistic Acoustics (aka: the Ramsay Panel), which in 1982 published a critical report overturning the HSCA’s acoustic evidence for a second gunman (and its only “proof” of a conspiracy) is skewered by Thompson with an array of introspection, personal attacks, red herrings, circular questions, and faulty generalizations, making it appear that Alvarez, Ramsay, et al engaged in a widescale pseudo-scientific deception. Thompson further fails to acknowledge the independent investigations of Barber, The FBI, IBM, Myers, Bugliosi, Sabato & Sonalysts, Holland, O’Dell, and many others who agreed with the Ramsay Panel that the HSCA’s acoustic evidence was not only flawed, but that the open microphone was not even in Dealey Plaza during the assassination sequence (and therefore could not have recorded the gunshots fired at JFK). This section is the most misleading part of Thompson’s book, which may befuddle uninformed readers and committed conspiracists who keep to their echo chambers, but not those who understand the science and have studied the issue in depth (e.g., Sabato, 2013; O’Dell, 2014; Nalli, 2021). The “Establishment Cognoscenti” has not, as Thompson claims, ignored the acoustic evidence. On the contrary, it has given it due attention and found it to be proof of circular reasoning, nothing more.
A Gray Audograph dictation machine, used by Dallas Police Department dispatcher to record Chanel 2 police chatter, reserved for special events (i.e., the motorcade), on 11/22/1963.
The style of this book is incongruous. It combines an amateur true-crime style of forensic investigation with an introspective autobiography reminiscent of a slow-moving hard-boiled detective novel peppered with irrelevant factoids about the author’s political activism, detective jobs, road trips and vacations, mundane conversations, and choice of meals, but precious little about the usefulness of philosophy in constructing a sound argument, or the problems related to poor memory, circular reasoning, and groupthink—which this book would have done well to heed. Technical descriptions sometimes overload the reader with jargon, and at other times remain unclear, with the author repeatedly confessing his own lack of knowledge of the science involved. (This is partly remedied by two technical appendices written by Thompson’s contributors, but then printing them here allowed them to bypass the peer-review process). The lack of a bibliography also prevents the reader from knowing which sources were (or were not) consulted by the author without having to hunt through the endnotes for insight.
Reading through Last Second was onerous. Not so much because of the quality of the prose—Thompson remains a quirky, charismatic, and able storyteller—but because knowing as much as I do about the Kennedy assassination and all of the damning evidence he dismissed or ignored to build his ambitious scenario left me feeling like I’d been gaslit for hours by a loquacious barfly. Warren Commission counsel Wesley Liebeler once said of the conspiracist author Mark Lane that five minutes of Lane talking about Kennedy required an hour to set the record straight.[3] Similarly, I ended up annotating almost every page of this text with exasperated comments, questions, and references to the many other works written before Last Second was published that contradict both Thompson’s science and logic. While the burden of proof for his thesis stood lower in 1967 when his first JFK book was published, the bar has definitely been raised in the half century that followed, and this argument falls far short of the mark.
I will therefore not attempt to give a response to the many faulty scientific claims made by Thompson, which might require a few hundred pages to fix. Fortunately, this has already been done by far more able researchers in the field of ballistics, biology, and acoustics (see references below). [Author's note: For more about the science of the acoustic evidence, readers are invited to listen to my interview with IT specialist Michael O'Dell in podcast episode 7.9B] I will, however, identify some of the glaring fallacies this book contains to demonstrate that, irrespective of the truth or falsehood of the author’s scientific conclusions, that his argument fails to be logically convincing.
Firstly, the author frequently resorts to ad hominems [personal attacks] to paint his opponents—mostly Alvarez and Ramsey, but also the Bethesda Naval Hospital pathologists—as incompetent and arrogant “patriots” devoted to obfuscating the embarrassing truth about Kennedy’s assassination. This includes a long non-sequitur concerning Alavarez and Ramsey’s failure to identify a 1979 nuclear test conducted by South Africa and France in the South Atlantic. Likewise, Thompson offers fawning praise for the researchers whose position he agrees with (James Barger, Don Thomas, Gary Aguilar, and Robert Groden) in lieu of responding to their critics. He furthermore cherry-picks some of the claims of his sources (e.g., Paul Hoch, Michael O’Dell) without acknowledging their rejection of his frontal shot theory.
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis W. Alvarez, the bane of Tink Thompson's existence.
Thompson further resorts to a litany of false dilemmas to support his claims, such as suggesting that “only a double impact [involving a rearward and frontal shot] could account for [the] dispersion of debris” (97) that “sprayed” the patrolmen riding at the left-rear of JFK’s limousine (but not those on the right) with blood and tiny pieces of flesh. This explanation ignores the many alternate explanations for this phenomenon, including the direction and speed of the motorcycles riding through a cloud of precipitating blood droplets, as well as the wind blowing from the southwest. Another example is his claim that the invalidation of Neutron Activation Analysis methods necessarily invalidates the single shooter hypothesis, whereas it does not, or that S.M. Holland’s claim to seeing a “puff of smoke” invariably points to a rifle shot from the grassy knoll and not to, say, a cigarette, car exhaust fumes, or some substance that was kicked up (e.g., gravel dust) or shaken from a tree (e.g., pollen) that looked like smoke from a distance. A third example, which requires no explanation, reads: “A central controversy is whether the autopsy was botched by simple incompetence or whether it was botched by design […] I opt for the former.” (246)
Finally, Thompson engages in frequent bouts of circular reasoning by using loaded phrases that support his thesis without submitting his claims to verification. The “troubling” small bullet wound in Kennedy’s throat “made no sense” (97, 6), he writes, if the shooter had been standing behind and above him. He therefore concludes that it must have been caused by a cranial fragment that bore through Kennedy’s sinuses and jaw, with no medical evidence. (98) This is of course false and unjustified; John Lattimer proved that a small exit wound can be produced with a hard bullet shot through soft flesh when constrained by a tight collar and necktie. But Lattimer’s peer-reviewed ballistic tests are never discussed. In addition, the recovered bullet that Thompson calls “pristine” and “completely intact” (better known as CE399, and dismissed by many conspiracists as a “magic bullet”) is considered to be “utterly impossible” (22, 168). Nothing is said of ballistic expert Lucien Haag’s experiments that unambiguously demonstrated that similar bullets fired from a Carcano rifle repeatedly emerged intact when fired through soft flesh, and that the wounds and markings left behind by CE399 could not have been caused by any other projectile, since it invariably yawed (i.e., tumbled) upon exit, leaving an oblong entrance wound and no “bullet wipe” in Governor Connally’s jacket. Indeed, Haag is nowhere mentioned in all of Thompson’s book despite the fact that the two men appeared in the same TV documentary (PBS: NOVA: “Cold Case: JFK”, 2013), a program that focused on Haag’s ballistic tests. But by far the worst example of circular reasoning is Thompson’s repeated claim that upon being shot in the head, Kennedy “was slammed backward and to the left in his seat… as if he had been hit in the right temple with a baseball bat” (28, 95). In other parts he speaks of JFK’s head being “catapulted” backwards (96, 355) and “smashed so far left and to the rear that he then bounded forward off the rear seat cushion” (266). Thompson makes little attempt to clearly explain why this reaction cannot be attributed to a jet effect, a neuromuscular spasm, the movement of the vehicle, the restraining effect of Kennedy’s back brace, Mrs. Kennedy’s grasp of her husband’s arm and shoulder, or the combination of any of these. Rather, he relies on introspection and repetition of similar phrases, as if this formula makes the science stronger. It does not, and countless experts have rejected this simplistic conclusion as misinformed and self-serving.
Jerry Seinfeld demonstrates the numerous logical errors in Kramer's "magic loogie" theory
I could go on about the many unfalsifiable claims and lack of physical, visual, and auditory evidence that, were Thompson’s theory right, should have appeared where none was found (e.g., additional bullet holes/wounds/fragments) but pursuing this whim might lead us to fill a whole warehouse or, in this case, a book depository.
A popular adage often ascribed (probably wrongly) to John Maynard Keynes says: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” Many of the known facts about the Kennedy assassination have changed greatly since the HSCA produced its questionable acoustic evidence of a fatal front shot (and therefore of a conspiracy involving multiple shooters), which even some of its own commissioners found dubious. As opposed to the memory of witnesses, which is never fully reliable and even less as years go by, advances in forensic, ballistic, acoustic, and computer science have continued to invalidate the alternative scenarios presented by Warren Commission critics since the Sixties. Sadly, Professor Thompson has decided that when the facts change, they should only be heeded when they agree with his heartfelt convictions. His choice to leave the pursuit of philosophical inquiry, along with Kierkegaard’s complex, challenging, and soul-baring expositions, speaks volumes about his determination to pursue the Truth—as Socrates did—wherever the evidence leads.
I would like to thank Michael O’Dell, Mel Ayton, and Fred Litwin for their assistance and support in preparing this book review.
Endnotes:
[1] ERRATUM: The original published article identified author Sylvia Meagher as Cynthia Meagher. This version has been corrected.
[2] Simon Fitzpatrick: “Simplicity in the Philosophy of Science,” (n.d.) Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://iep.utm.edu/simplici/#SH1a.
[3] Cited in Mel Ayton: The Kennedy Assassinations: JFK and Bobby Kennedy - Debunking the Conspiracy Theories. Pen & Sword Books, 2022, 69.
REFERENCES:
Agarwal, R.C., R. L. Garwin, and B. L. Lewis: “Signal Processing Analysis of the Kennedy Assassination Tapes,” Science & Society Research Report, RC 9771 (#43145) 12/27/82, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, https://www.jfk-online.com/acousibm00.html.
Barber, Stephan N.: “Double Decker,” 24 June 1989. https://www.jfk-online.com/doubled.html.
Barber, Stephan N.: “The Acoustic Evidence: A Personal Memoir,” (n.d.) https://www.jfk-assassination.net/barber.htm.
Bugliosi, Vincent: Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, W.W. Norton & Co., 2007. (endnotes 153-218).
Committee on Ballistic Acoustics (Ramsey Panel), National Research Council: Report of the Committee on Ballistic Acoustics. National Academy of Sciences, 1982.
DeRonja, Frank S. and Max Holland: “A Technical Investigation Pertaining to the First Shot Fired in the JFK Assassination,” Journal of the Association for Crime Scene Reconstruction, Vol.20, 9-33, 9 May 2016.
Haag, Lucien C.: “The Unique and Misunderstood Wound Ballistics in the John F. Kennedy Assassination,” American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology, Dec. 2019; 40(4):336-346. doi: 10.1097/PAF.0000000000000510.
Holland, Max: “The Truth Was Out There,” Newsweek, 11-28-2014. (online title: “The Truth Behind JFK's Assassination,” 11/20/14, https://www.newsweek.com/2014/11/28/truth-behind-jfks-assassination-285653.html)
Lattimer, John K. et al.: “Could Oswald have shot President Kennedy? Further Ballistic Studies,” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, Vol.48, No.3, April 1972.
Lattimer, John K. et al.: “Differences in the Wounding Behavior of the Two Bullets That Struck President Kennedy: An Experimental Study,” Wound Ballistics Review, Vol.2, No.2, 1995.
Myers, Dale K.: “Epipolar Geometric Analysis of Amateur Films Related to Acoustics Evidence in the John F. Kennedy Assassination,” Secrets of a Homicide, 2007-2010. https://www.jfkfiles.com/jfk/html/acoustics.htm.
Nalli, Nicholas R.: “Gunshot-wound dynamics model for John F. Kennedy assassination,” Heliyon 4(4), 2018. (doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2018.e00603: e00603)
Nalli, Nicholas R.: “The Ghost of the Grassy Knoll Gunman and the Futile Search for Signal in Noise,” (Review of Last Second in Dallas), Secrets of a Homicide, 6-3-2021. http://jfkfiles.blogspot.com/2021/06/the-ghost-of-grassy-knoll-gunman.html.
O’Dell, Michael: “Appendix 2: Replication of the HSCA Weiss & Aschkenasy Acoustic Analysis,” in Mel Ayton and Davin Von Pein: Beyond A Reasonable Doubt: The Warren Report and Lee Harvey Oswald's Guilt and Motive 50 Years On. Cardinal Publishers Group, 2014.
O’Dell, Michael: “The Acoustic Evidence in the Kennedy Assassination,” (n.d.) www.jfk-assassination.net/odell/
Olsen, Charles and Scott Martin, Sonalysts, Inc.: “Analysis of the Dallas Police Department Dictabelt Recording Related to the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy,”, March 25, 2013, in Larry Sabato: The Kennedy Half Century: The Presidency, Assassination, and Lasting Legacy of John F. Kennedy. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013.
Ramsay, Norman F., et al: Report of the Committee on Ballistic Acoustics. National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences, 1982. https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/10264/chapter/2.
Sturdivan, Larry M.: The JFK Myths: A Scientific Investigation of the Kennedy Assassination. Paragon House, 2005.
Zavada, Roland J.: “Analysis of Selected Motion Picture Evidence,” Zavada Report, Kodak Technical Report 31842OP, September 25, 1998.
Documents related to this episode: *
1. Blow Out (Filmways Pictures, 1981). Dir. by Brian De Palma. feat. John Travolta, Nancy Allen, and John Lithgow.
2. Blow-Up (Premier Productions, 1966). Dir. by Michelangelo Antonioni. feat. David Hemmings and Vanessa Redgrave.
3. Laurent Bouzerau: The DePalma Cut: The Films of America’s Most Controversial Director. Dembner Books, 1988.
4. Will Mesce: “The First Cut is the Deepest: Blow Out – The First Screenplay Contest,“ Shore Scripts. (n.d.)
5. Jack Olsen: The Bridge at Chappaquiddick. Little, Brown, 1970.
* * *
6. James E. Barger, Scott P. Robinson, Edward C. Schmidt, and Jared J. Wolf (Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, Inc.): "Analysis of Recorded Sounds Relating to the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy," Report Prepared for the Select Committee on Assassinations, U.S. House of Representatives, January1979.
7. Mark R. Weiss and Ernest Aschkenasy (Department of Computer Science, Queens College, CUNY): "An Analysis of Recorded Sounds Relating to the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy," Report Prepared for the Select Committee on Assassinations, U.S. House of Representatives, February 1979.
8. U.S. House of Representatives: Report of the Select Committee on Assassinations of the U.S. House of Representatives (aka: HSCA Report). U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, 1979. National Archives: JFK Assassination Records, 2024.
9. James C. Bowles: "The Kennedy Assassination Tapes: A Rebuttal to the Acoustical Evidence Theory," 1979. JFK Online, David Reitzes, ed., (n.d.)
10. Stephan N. Barber: Double Decker, 1989. JFK Online, David Reitzes, ed., (n.d.)
11. National Research Council: Report of the Committee on Ballistic Acoustics (aka: Ramsay Report), Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. 1982. doi.org/10.17226/10264Don
12. Donald B. Thomas (USDA Subtropical Agriculture Research Laboratory): "Echo correlation analysis and the acoustic evidence in the Kennedy assassination revisited," Science & Justice 2001; 41: 21-32.
13. Michael O'Dell: JFK Assassination Acoustic Evidence website. 2023.
14. Michael O'Dell: "The Acoustic Evidence in the Kennedy Assassination," JFK Assassination Acoustic Evidence, 2003.
15. Michael O'Dell: "Replication of the HSCA Weiss & Aschkenasy Acoustic Analysis," JFK Assassination Acoustic Evidence, 2013.
16. Josiah Thompson: Last Second in Dallas. U P Kansas, 2021.
17. Michel Jacques Gagné: "Goldberg’s Pickaxe, Or How Professor Thompson Failed Logic 101," A review of Josiah Thompson’s Last Second in Dallas (U P Kansas, 2021). The Historian, 84(3), 539–548. Phi Alpha Theta, 2024.
18. Larry Sturdivan: The JFK Myths: A Scientific Investigation of the Kennedy Assassination. Paragon House, 2005.
19. Larry J. Sabato (UVA Center for Politics) and Sonalyst, Inc.: "Acoustical Analysis of November 22, 1963 Dallas Police Recordings," October 15, 2013. The Kennedy Half Century (addendum), 2013.
* All copyrighted video and audio clips are used for educational purposes only under "fair use" regulations.
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