San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Josiah Thompson is back to tell us what really happened to JFK in 1963.
Josiah Thompson may have just cracked the John F. Kennedy assassination case.
Fiftyfour years after the publication of his 1967 book “Six Seconds in Dallas,” he is back with a followup book, “Last Second in Dallas,” that amplifies and revises his findings, using scientific means that weren’t available decades ago.
Thompson, who lives in Bolinas and was a private detective in San Francisco for more than 30 years, is unique among writers in the genre in that he has never advanced a conspiracy theory. He doesn’t know who killed Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, or why. Instead, Thompson only concerns himself with what can be proved through forensics, photography, ballistics, sound recordings and witness testimony.
His mission, which has lasted from his early 30s through today, at age 86, has been simply to find out what happened as the president’s motorcade passed through Dallas’ Dealey Plaza.
So, what happened? Seriously. This is my earliest datable memory. I’ve seen Oliver Stone’s “JFK” six or seven times. I’ve wanted to know the answer to this question since I was 4 years old: What happened?
“What happened that day was really simple: It’s what your eyes tell you happened when you see the Zapruder film,” Thompson tells me, referring to the recording of the shooting by Abraham Zapruder on his homemovie camera.
The sequence of events, according to Thompson, is that there were five shots fired, in three bursts. First, Kennedy was shot in the back. Then came the fatal shot from the right front. And finally, less than a second later, Kennedy was shot in the back of the head. Thompson postulates that the shots were fired from three different directions.
In the book, published by the University Press of Kansas, Thompson backs up his findings with analysis of Dictabelt recordings and with fullcolor, enlarged images taken from the Zapruder film. He puts together and harmonizes seemingly conflicting accounts by people who insist that the shots came from this direction or that. It’s impressive, in that he has his analysis down to the millisecond.
In the process, simply by approaching the question in a different way, Thompson demonstrates what has been the fatal flaw of other books about the assassination, including the granddaddy of them all, the Warren Report, commissioned by President Lyndon B. Johnson in the immediate aftermath of the assassination. They all started with an assumption about what happened and then looked for evidence to support that assumption.
In the case of the Warren Report, the assumption was that Lee Harvey Oswald was the assassin and that he acted alone. In the decades since, many other theories have surfaced — that it was the work of the CIA, or the mafia, or Fidel Castro. But most of the theories did it backward, by devising a scenario and then trying to prove it.
“All the complications come from trying to press this into the wrong profile,” he says.
Thompson’s evidencebased approach is grounded in basic logic. Kennedy’s assassination happened in only one way; therefore, all the evidence should point to the same conclusion. “Events happen in one way rather than another,” Thompson says. happened in one way rather than another. And if the event happened one way rather than another, all the evidence should be compatible with all the other evidence.”
There were a series of disappointing TV specials on the 50th anniversary of the assassination in 2013 that treated as canonical the notion that Oswald was the lone assassin. They even suggested that people who believed something different were motivated by emotional need.
“The idea is that Kennedy was such a towering figure that we can’t believe that a lowlife like Oswald could have killed such a figure,” Thompson says. “Talk about amateur psychoanalysis.” What makes Thompson’s findings a big deal is that, without setting out to do so, he all but proves that there was, indeed, a conspiracy. There had to have been one, by definition, because — according to Thompson — at least three people were involved (unless you believe that three lone assassins woke up that day with the same idea). Thompson further suggests that the very effectiveness of the assassination — it was practically a slaughter — argues in favor of professionals, not amateurs.
“That’s one of the aspects that’s so simple in this case, that’s so f—ing obvious. It worked,” he says. “He’s dead.”
Beyond that, Thompson has no more to add.
“One conspiracy is as good as the others,” he says. “I have nothing intelligent to say, so I shut up about that.”