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For the first seven years of my study of Kennedy's assassination, Six Seconds in Dallas, by Josiah Thompson, was a book I had heard about but not read. I understood that Thompson was an early Warren Commission critic, but his work was not easy to find. After I joined the Coalition on Political Assassinations in 1995, I heard him speak at conferences and I had a few conversations with him; but that didn't make Six Seconds any easier to locate. Only this year did I finally get a chance to borrow a copy and take notes. It's quite a book.
Consider the times in which he wrote. Rush to Judgment, by Mark Lane, and Accessories After the Fact, by Sylvia Meagher, had dissected significant aspects of the case. Jim Garrison's investigation of Clay Shaw in New Orleans was under way and was disclosed to the public in the same year Six Seconds in Dallas was published. The Zapruder film had still not been shown to the American public, and it was certain to be of interest to the Garrison inquiry.
Thompson thought that four shots may have been fired from three locations --- the Depository, the knoll, and possibly the roof of the County Records Building or the Dal Tex Building. (SSID, p. 137. Hereafter, all citations are from SSID unless otherwise noted.) Lone assassin theorists had suggested that witnesses to smoke from a shot on the knoll had actually only seen puffs of steam from a nearby pipe. Thompson demolished the "steam pipe" explanation:
An alternative explanation sometimes proffered by governmental sources-namely, that the smoke was really escaping steam from a steam line in the vicinity-makes even less sense. At the time Holland and the other railroad workers saw the smoke, they were standing not a foot from the steam line in question. This line parallels the railroad tracks and at no time is anywhere near the corner of the stockade fence. (p. 138, n 4)
But for lone assassin advocates, there is no story so false that it cannot be repeated. I encountered the steam pipe theory in 1992, when Jacob Cohen resurrected it in Commentary magazine. Gerald Posner reprised it in Case Closed the following year.
But in some other facets of the case, Thompson presented interpretations which seemed to argue against the evidence. He suggested that Kennedy's anterior throat wound was a product of the head shot. (p. 51-55) A fragment of bullet or bone veered downward, severing Kennedy's left cerebral peduncle in the process and exiting the front of his throat. Since the Zapruder film showed Kennedy raising his hands to his throat well before frame 313, Thompson's view is hard to believe:
A close study of the Zapruder film, however, reveals that the President's fists are clenched and that the movement carries his hands above his neck. Gayle Newman described how the President "covered his head with his hands" (19H488), and Marilyn Sitzman told me how "he put his hands up to guard his face." These descriptions accurately characterize what we see on the Zapruder film. ...Such a movement seems as consistent with a shot lodged in his back as with a transiting shot: there is no science of the way a person reacts to a bullet hit. (p. 39)
Since those descriptions do not accurately characterize what we see on the Zapruder film, one is left to wonder what film Thompson saw. Appeals to the absense of science in these matters do little to strengthen the argument.
In the Warren Commission's version of the crime, two of the alleged killer's bullets had to do double duty. One shot, the Magic Bullet, had to wound Kennedy and Connally. Another either had to hit the oak tree in front of the Depository and then wound James Tague, or it had to strike Kennedy's skull and then wound James Tague. The Commission never put the matter quite so concisely, but those were the only possibilities if the single assassin theory was true.
Thompson suggested that the wounding of James Tague was a consequence of the head shot. (p. 231) In Case Closed, twenty-six years later, Gerald Posner chose the tree --- the head shot being too unlikely a source. (Posner, p. 325-326) Since both explanations are incredible, it is difficult to choose between them.
But if Bullet 399 was not Magic, it had to do amazing things anyway. It had to strike Kennedy in the limousine and be found near someone else's stretcher by the emergency level elevator entrance.
The Warren Commission's story was that the bullet must have been found on or by Governor Connally's stretcher --- a position utterly defeated by the evidence. Thompson theorized that Bullet 399 was the bullet which caused the shallow wound in Kennedy's back. The bullet worked its way back out during efforts to resuscitate the President. How did it get from Kennedy's stretcher to the emergency level elevators where it was found? "To answer this question we must appeal to an old, traditionally American institution --- souvenir hunting." Perhaps someone "momentarily snatched it as a souvenir, only to recognize its importance and quickly secrete it on a stretcher" where it could be found later with "no questions asked." (p. 168-169)
Thompson approached the issue of why Bullet 399 wasn't found on Kennedy's stretcher by contriving a possible link between Kennedy's stretcher and the stretcher for a different patient altogether --- a two-year-old boy named Ronald Fuller who had fallen and cut his jaw. And if that was what had occurred, then Bullet 399 could conceivably be genuine.
Thompson's analysis of the markings on the three spent shells and single live round found in the Depository was closer to the mark. (p. 143-146) I once attempted, without the benefit of photos, to deconstruct Hoover's memo on the markings, which raised a lot of questions in my mind. (CE 2968, XXVI 449-450. In Lt. J. C. Day's Warren Commission testimony, he referred to them as "hulls.") Thompson noted that one shell, designated by the FBI as C 6 and by the Warren Commission as CE 543, was dented in a fashion which would have precluded its use in the shooting. The shell evidence is clearly suspect, for the reasons Thompson enumerated and others that he did not. If the evidence was taken to be genuine, then the other two hulls must have accounted for the two shots from the Depository. One of them seemingly struck Kennedy's skull. The other loosed Bullet 399.
In Thompson's presentation, a single bullet didn't have to account for wounds in Kennedy and Connally and emerge unscathed; it only had to penetrate a couple of inches into Kennedy's back. Why did a jacketed bullet traveling at 2000 feet per second fail to go completely through the President's body? Because it was a dud; because the ammunition was old and unreliable.
Evidently, the sniper in the Depository brought three live rounds and one spent shell. By coincidence, his first round was a "short charge," thus explaining the firecracker noise reported by witnesses. (p. 167-168. Did the firecrackers sound as if they had exploded well above street level? Thompson didn't elaborate.) Bullet 399 struck no bones and barely entered its target; that was why it was recovered in excellent condition. Someone found the bullet at Parkland Hospital and kept it briefly, only to change his mind and abandon it, presumably shamed or frightened by his actions.
The assassin's second round worked better. It struck Kennedy's skull and then must have wounded Tague. Thus, the Depository assassin fired two shots, the maximum permitted by Thompson's assessment of the shell evidence and the minimum demanded in the case against Lee Oswald.
Throughout Thompson's book, the Zapruder film was taken to be genuine, though profoundly enigmatic. William Manchester watched it 75 times:
and even this did not prevent him from making several important errors. Commission Counsel Liebeler saw it so often he lost track of the number of times. I had seen it countless times myself; in fact, I had spent considerable time viewing the copy in the National Archives... The crucial nuances and details in this film are easily overlooked..." (p. 7)
Thompson implied that the FBI might have made mistakes in interpreting the film because they had a copy of a Secret Service copy of the film. When Thompson saw color enlargements of the film, "the full impact of the Commission's oversight was brought home" to him. (p. 8-9) Presumably, the Secret Service must not have looked at their copy too carefully, or they might have seen the President's head thrown back and alerted the FBI.
More to the point, Thompson went to considerable lengths to measure the movements of the President's head and the implied accelerations. Thompson reasoned that Kennedy's skull was hit by two shots. (p. 111) While it might have been barely plausible that the FBI did not recognize important details of the film, the same cannot be said of Life magazine, which held the original. Why didn't Life score the journalistic coup of the century and publish its proof of conspiracy and high-level cover-up? In 1967, who had seen the Zapruder film? A tiny number of people might have gone to the library and examined the poor reproductions of the film in Commission volume XVIII. A tiny number of people might have learned of the film from the Garrison investigation in New Orleans. Dan Rather, having seen the film once at normal speed, certainly reached a far wider audience when he described it on CBS radio and television --- an account which was surrealistically inaccurate. If not from Dan Rather, Life magazine, or Josiah Thompson, how were people to know what the film revealed?
Thompson enjoyed, at least initially, the assistance of Life, which granted him access to the Zapruder film but then denied him use of stills from the film --- forcing Thompson to illustrate his text with black-and-white charcoal sketches. In the last chapter, "Answered and Unanswered Questions," Thompson was able to resolve the "needless controversy" over frames missing from the film, citing Life Managing Editor George Hunt on the fate of frames 207-212. Hunt's statement, however, did not explain when or how frames from the original were lost, merely that intact copies of the film remained. One of those frames, 210, was printed in the Warren Report. (p. 217-218) It was also printed without the intersprocket area, although that is a matter of more recent interest. Hunt's explanation explained nothing.
Thompson then dealt with Julia Ann Mercer's reported sighting of a man with a gun case on the knoll shortly before the assassination. Thompson referred to an affidavit which, according to Jim Garrison, Mercer had repudiated. On NBC television on January 31, 1968, well after the publication of Six Seconds, Garrison related Mercer's story and its aftermath. It could be that Thompson had completed his study before that information developed. In any event, his interpretation was puzzling. Having seen the shell game, having seen the movie of the murder, how could he so easily accept the investigation's views on Julia Ann Mercer?
Thompson discounted the notion that Deputy Roger Craig saw Oswald getting into a station wagon after the shooting, relying on the account of taxi driver William Whaley to prove that Oswald was already away from Dealey Plaza. Thompson did not point out the various errors in Whaley's testimony which the Report admitted, or any of the errors it didn't. For example, Whaley said Oswald was wearing a jacket, although the jacket Oswald supposedly wore that day was found in the Depository after Oswald's death.
Whoever got in that taxi supposedly got on a bus first. The bus witnesses, in my opinion, ruled out Oswald as the someone in question; but I have rarely seen things as the Commission did. In any event, Thompson's acceptance of the bus-taxi get-away story, and all the contradictions it contained, was connected to another issue. To explain the testimony of James Worrell and Richard Carr, who saw men leaving the scene, Thompson proposed a possible route for the vehicle reportedly used, a station wagon. The route brought the car back to Elm Street, traveling west in front of the Depository, which accorded well with Craig's testimony. Had Thompson not overturned Craig on other grounds, Thompson might have perceived a connection between Oswald and that car.
It could be that Thompson's research was uneven or inadequate or rushed. Maybe he just put too much faith in the good faith of the authorities. Some of his work was sound --- his description of the shell markings, for instance. But his account otherwise self-destructed. His explanation for Bullet 399 was a daisy-chain of speculation as improbable as the Magic Bullet theory.
In his introductory remarks, Thompson provided a brief history of books on the assassination. The first generation of critics "advanced frantic and irresponsible hypotheses," while the second generation went through "labored point-by-point refutations of the Report." (p. ix) Thompson saw himself in the next echelon, attempting to:
synthesize the evidence (new and old) and point the way to an emerging conclusion. ...Up to now critics of the Report have gotten by with simply discovering the errors of the Commission and displaying them. It is the responsibility of future works ... to begin drawing all the evidence together and to attempt to make sense of it. [p. ix-x, italics in the original.]
Such language. The critics had "gotten by" somehow, as if they had met the minimum standard. It was responsibility of the critics to make sense of the evidence. With respect to the Zapruder film, the "full impact of the Commission's oversight" had been made clear to Thompson; yet he concluded Six Seconds in Dallas by writing:
What does this collection of new evidence prove? It does not prove that the assassination was a conspiracy...[n]or does it prove Oswald's innocence. What it does suggest is that there are threads in this case that should have been unraveled long ago instead of being swept under the Archives rug. It also shows that the question of Oswald's guilt must remain --- nearly four years after the event --- still unanswered. (p. 246)
As I said, it's quite a book.
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