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On the Trail of Delusion, Episode 44,

A review of Josiah Thompson’s 1967 book: “Six Seconds in Dallas,” F

Fred Litwin’s blog: www.onthetrailofdelusion.com

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Welcome to another edition of On the Trail of  Delusion,

where I try to give you something substantial on the JFK assassination rather than some of the usual nonsense you see on the internet and on YouTube.

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Well, today I thought I’d do something a little different. Well, we’ve actually done this once before, but today I want to do a review of Josiah Thompson’s Six Seconds in Dallas.

I thought it timely to to go through this book um and in a in a short video and sort of go through uh some of the strengths and some of the weaknesses. This book was published he end of November 1967, and the goal was to synthesize the evidence, new and old, and point the way to an emerging conclusion.

And so, Thompson tries very hard in this book to really give you another view of what happened during the shooting. Uh he has a reconstruction of the assassination in detail, um uh which is counter to to the Warren Commission. And Thompson comes to this with with uh some very, very good credentials. Uh he was helping with Life magazine’s reinvestigation of the assassination, and he had access to color enlargements of every frame of the Zapruder film. And that was something a lot of other people did not have, um was those really good reproductions. Um he wanted to put frames from the Zapruder film in his book, and he asked Life magazine, they said no, And so he he used uh sort of very good charcoal drawings in his book. Very very good drawings. And once the book came out, he was sued by Life magazine and they lost the case with the court saying that it was very it was fair use.

Um the book went out of print very very quickly and when I was investigating or when I started my work on the JFK assassination in 1975, the book was out of print. Couldn’t get a copy. And it it drove me crazy because you know on Geraldo Geraldo Rivera and all these other shows they started talking about the book Six Seconds in Dallas and I couldn’t get my hands on one. A

nd then I found out there was a copy of the book at McGill University, which is the major university in Montreal. I didn’t go to McGill, but one of my friends did. And so he took out a copy for me for two weeks and I read it and I was sort of really really wanted to get a copy. And shortly after that, I think in 1976 or so, the book came out in paperback format. Small paperback. And they actually put in the Zapruder frames and I bought a copy and back in the those days I was corresponding with Dr. Cyril Wecht and I told him in one of my letters that this book was now out in paperback. And he didn’t have a copy and I actually sent him a copy in the mail of Josiah Thompson’s Six Seconds in Dallas.

Thompson’s conclusions were that the assassins Oh, by the way, I should I should actually comment on the cover. And this is uh the Saturday Evening Post from 1967. This is December 2nd, 1967. Cover story Saturday Evening Post, major excerpt of the book in the magazine. And basically what happened was that this came out before the publication of the book and they loved Bernard Geis and Associates Associates. The publisher of the book loved this illustration, this picture of Kennedy. And this became the new cover. The the color graphic was so good that Bernard Geis trashed 25,000 book jackets just 1 week before its release costing them $2,000 and this became the the new cover of Six Seconds in Dallas. I haven’t seen what the old cover was. I don’t I’m not sure what what it was. So if we go back to uh Thompson’s conclusions. So Thompson concluded that there were three assassins who fired four shots at the motorcade. The first shot was fired from between Zapruder frame 215 to 224 from the Texas School Book Depository hitting Kennedy in the back and lodging there and then falling out during the autopsy. The second shot he claimed was fired from between Zapruder 234 to 238 and from the Dallas County Records Building and that was the shot that hit Connally and wounding his chest, wrist and thigh. The third shot at frame Z312 was fired from the Texas School Book Depository and hit JFK in the head pushing him slightly forward. Um and a fragment um from that exited his throat. Uh and the fourth shot one frame later at Z313 was fired from the grassy knoll and that hit hit JFK in the head pushing him back and to the left. He claimed that no shots missed and hence the title of the book, Six Seconds in Dallas. I mean if if he had concluded that the first shot had missed uh the book could have been titled 10 seconds in Dallas, but it’s nowhere near as catchy as 6 seconds in Dallas, and that in fact is one of the reasons why we everybody felt so constrained to believe that you know, this was 5.6 seconds were was the entire time length of the assassination. That’s just not true. The strength of his Thompson’s book was he really focused on the photographic evidence and of course particularly on the Zapruder film which he had access to. Um a very very big part of uh Thompson’s book was JFK’s head motion. This is an illustration from page 87 showing the forward motion of JFK’s head from frame 312 to 313 where he was obviously hit by a gunshot wound to the back of his head. And then from three at frame 313 to 316 um the the backward motion of Kennedy’s head which Thompson believes was from a shot from the grassy knoll. That was a major part of Thompson’s book, this double head motion of JFK. And here is a a diagram of his reconstruction of the assassination and you could see the three locations um and the four four shots um during the assassination. This book was very well received. Uh Max Lerner wrote in the New York Post that it was not until this book that I became clear in my mind about some collaborative shooting and about the trap that had been set for the president. And that was quite something. Max Lerner was a supporter of the Warren Report. He was a well-known columnist writing in a variety of newspapers, and this book really really clearly affected him. Diggy Deal wrote in the LA Times that it was the most forceful graphic and well-organized argument for reopening uh the assassination investigation. So people really felt this was well received and as I said, there was a major excerpt in the Saturday Evening Post and the editor, Bill Emerson, wrote upfront in the magazine an editor’s note about why he thought this was so important.

He says here, “With painstaking care and formidable logic, Thompson demolishes the Warren Report by building a case for three assassins and at least four bullets. It is not easy to get back into this horrible business, but we must do it.”

A very, very strong and powerful statement from the editor of the Saturday Evening Post.

But I have to say, there are some very, very big problems with this book and and I’m I’m not just saying it because I disagree with the book in 2026, but back then, a few people noticed some of the problems and George Hall, writing in the St. Louis Dispatch, wondered about the assassins.

He said, “Neither Mar or Thompson identifies the killers or provides a plausible framework for a conspiracy.

This is a major defect in every book that has been written since the Warren Report. No one has ever produced a single piece of positive evidence important enough to overthrow the Warren conclusions. All of the critical studies are based on inadequacies, real and imagined, in the Commission Report. They throw varying degrees of doubt on the Warren findings, they do not offer, in my opinion, anything better.” And I think that’s very, very true that nobody could identify the conspiracy and nobody could identify the positive evidence for both the conspiracy and the cover-up. Um if there was a massive cover-up, who was organizing it? Who was Who was in control? Where are the documents? How would Who was making the decisions? How were these decisions brought downstream to other people to to implement? We have There’s no positive evidence for such a cover-up. And the other thing in this book is that Lee Harvey Oswald is missing. Um Oswald may not have been the gunman in the sixth floor window. That during the shooting he was quite literally where he said he was on the first floor. That two conspirators other than Oswald may well have been in the sixth floor of the depository building during the shooting, but largely Oswald is missing from this book. He’s just not there. Um Thompson thinks he was on the first floor, but that’s it. There’s no There’s nothing else. Um the Tippit uh murder is not mentioned, not in the book at all. Uh the only mention of Jack Ruby in this book is the possibility that perhaps Ruby planted CE399. And Thompson does admit that Oswald’s rifle was used in the assassination. The Mannlicher-Carcano rifle fired shots from the Texas School Book Depository. Uh but somehow it wasn’t Oswald. How that rifle got in there, we don’t know. He also thinks that the Hughes film shows two men in the sixth floor window, and that the exit Those Those two men exited through the back of the building and then were picked up in the Rambler station wagon. And of course he references Roger Craig who had that testimony that he saw somebody, only one person, being picked up by a Rambler who he thought was Lee Harvey Oswald. In this case now, Thompson said he was picking up two men, um and probably not Oswald. There was one reporter from Scripps Howard who actually spoke to Thompson for his review, which was quite something to actually speak to the author. He said, “So, you don’t feel the need to explain why Oswald went to the movies?” And Thompson just replied, “No.”

The The other part of this book and is that beyond the photographic evidence, Thompson relies a lot on the eyewitness evidence. And he’s got gra He does a nice chart of where he shows you where all the witnesses are located in Daily Plaza, and he’s got a big chart um showing the identities of every witness and what they testified to. Um but he inflates the number of grassy knoll witnesses. So, for instance, Emmett Hudson, the Daily Plaza groundskeeper, said the shots came from behind and above me. Um Bobby Hargis testified the shots could have been coming from the railroad overpass, but I had a feeling they might have been from the Texas School Book Depository. Thompson says Robert Jackson is a knoll witness, even though he saw a gun in the window of the Texas School Book Depository. And he places several witnesses in the knoll category, even though they were unsure. I have a chart here that shows you some of the errors, some of his claims that he makes in his uh in the text, and some of the errors that I think uh in his uh clarification and in how he looks at these witnesses. And uh this will be up in my up in the notes, so you can get to a link to see this table um in its full dimension. The the other area which I have trouble with is here is his trajectory for the Connally hit. This is the shot was from the Records Building, Dallas County Records Building, and just hit Connally. And you know, he has the the limousine sort of positioned I I’m not sure if it’s the correct position, but I don’t I’d like to see what Dale Myers would have made of this in terms of looking from the other way around. Would this bullet have missed JFK? I I’m not so sure. There’s only like one eyewitness who says that the shots came from either the two buildings to the east of the Texas School Book Depository. Witnesses did not say shots came from the Dallas County Records Building. And where did this bullet go that hit Connally? Uh Thompson says it disappeared. It was missing. That’s all he could say. Somehow this this bullet never turned up or fragments from this bullet never turned up. And of course, um, he clearly doesn’t think this was CE399, which he thinks was planted at the hospital. And that CE399 was his magic bullet. Thompson actually has a magic bullet in his text and it’s CE399, which he claims was the bullet that hit JFK in the back of the neck and lodged there only to fall out during the autopsy. Uh, but of course, he does admit this was fired through Oswald’s rifle, which was a high-velocity rifle. Um, and so he can only come to this conclusion by claiming that CE399 is a atypical projectile. And in support of this conclusion, he points to the fact that the ammunition was last manufactured in 1944, according to a letter from the Winchester-Western Division of Olin they sent to Mark Lane, which is indeed published in Mark Lane’s book, Rush to Judgment. Uh, but this was not correct. The ammunition was actually manufactured in 1954 under contract to the US Army for use in Europe and particularly in Greece. Um, Thompson relies upon Sylvia Meagher, but in fact, uh, her book hides the fact that a letter that she got from the manufacturer did say quite clearly that the bullets were manufactured in the early 1950s. I have a copy of that letter. You can find that in her files. I will put this in the blog post. She admitted that from her book, that the that she knew the bullets were were fired or were were from the 1950s. And of course, she ignores, and so does Thompson ignores the fact that the FBI tested hundreds, uh, many bullets. They test fired through Oswald’s rifle and there were no misfires. And it’s unclear as to any bullet, uh, would have penetrated just a few inches in soft flesh and then just falling out. But Thompson could have done some of his own testing on this to show that this was indeed possible, could have happened, probable. Um but in fact, he did not do any testing and I think that this is his magic bullet. His reconstruction three assassins firing four bullets. The only fragments that were retrieved in the assassination and the one bullet that was retrieved at the hospital all came from the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. No other fragments, no other bullets were retrieved from the other right any other rifle. There’s no physical evidence of another rifle being used in the assassination. I think that’s a a major problem um with his book. And I think there’s some other questions. And here’s one which really I found quite surprising cuz this was brought up in 1967-68 in one of the major reviews of the book and it was written by Arthur Schiller of the DePaul Law Review. And he raises an important question. I’ll read it to you. Herein lies the basic error of his analysis. Has every hypothesis accounting for the double movement been examined and rejected? One glaring unsuggested and unexamined hypothesis is what physical effect would a bullet entering from the rear have if it exploded within a skull in light of Newton’s second law of motion that acceleration is directly proportional to the resultant force and is in the same direction as that force. Because of that failure, Professor Thompson’s conclusions must fall. Now, I think this author is alluding to sort of suggesting some sort of jet effect. He’s gotten Newton’s wrong Newton’s law wrong. I think it’s the third law of thermodynamics, not the second law of motion. Um but clearly he’s pointing to an explosion that occurs in Kennedy’s head. And would that account for the motion that we see in the Zapruder film? And it’s a very good question that was brought up early on um that Thompson does not answer. And the other thing that Thompson doesn’t answer, would a bullet fired from the grassy knoll have enough momentum to actually push his head back into the left? There’s a lot of measurements in the book about the Zapruder film and what it shows about the motion of Kennedy’s head, but there is no examination of whether that bullet would have enough force. And we see from the first the shot that did hit Kennedy in the head in frame 312, even Thompson will admit in this book that the bullet hit him, pushed his head only forward 2 in, and that was it. But somehow this other bullet pushed him way back into the left. That is not explained. The the other problem with this book is his own chart of the witnesses in this this own diagram, four only four witnesses said that the shots came from two directions. All those witnesses, whether they thought they came from the knoll or from the Texas School Book Depository, all thought they came from one direction. That’s a major problem in his own book that he does not address. And so his book I think is very problematic. It is beautifully I have to say and what they are that this book is laid out in an incredible fashion. Uh Arthur Hawkins is the name of the designer of this book. And this book looks great. Really, the layout of the pictures, the diagrams, the text, this book is magnificent. It It is a terrific job in layout. Uh I I give this book full marks. It’s not just good. It’s breathtakingly beautiful. And and I I mean I I hire a designer to design my books. And you know, I wish I could get something that would look this good. This is a beautifully laid out book. The problem is that the text isn’t that good. Just isn’t. A

nd so, uh thank you for tuning in to On the Trail of Delusion, and we’ll be back soon with another episode.