New Book On Murder Of J. F. Kennedy

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31542, 2 December 1967, Page 5

New Book On Murder Of J. F. Kennedy

(Reprinted from "Newsweek" bp

arrangement)

The Presidential motorcade swings left on Elm Street, past the Texas School Book Depository. Suddenly, from a sixth-floor depository window, assassin No. 1, who probably is not Lee Harvey Oswald, hits John Fitzgerald Kennedy with a shallow back wound, inflicted by a defective cartridge.

Assassin No. 2, on top of another building across the street from the depository, hits the Governor of Texas, John Connally. And then in a perfect double hit, assassin No. 1 in the depository and assassin No. 3 in a parking lot ahead and to the right of the limousine hit the President’s head with two shots an eighteenth of a second apart ...

The scenario for the events of Dallas, on November 22, 1963, is the latest in an annual autumnal wave of ever-more ingenious attacks on the official theory that a lone, lunatic assassin named Lee Oswald shot the President.

Its author is Josiah (Tink) Thompson, aged 22, a stubby, boyishlooking Haverford College philosophy teacher whose only other published book is a study of the pseudonymous works of the Danish Christian existentialist Soren Kierkegaard. But, for all his implausible credentials, Thompson has written a study which commands attention in part because of its philosopher's air of cool, relentless logic. And attention is precisely what “Six Seconds in Dallas" will get: Thompson sold it to (1) The “Saturday Evening Post” (which splashed it last week with the banner, “Major New Study Shows Three Assassins Killed Kennedy”) and (2) Bernard Geis Associates, a promotion-con-scious publishing firm best known for such swinging sellers as “Valley of the Dolls” and “The Exhibitionist.”

An Obsession Thompson’s interest—and his conviction that the assassination could not be laid to Oswald alone—dates virtually from the day of the crime of the century. “I dipped everything 1 could find in the newspapers,” he told "Newsweek’s” Robert Shogan. “The thing became an obsession, although I know I shouldn’t use that word.” He found the Warren commission report a major disappointment; he bad imagined that it would turn up additional conspirators and “that arrests would be made the same day the report was made public.” But the commission blamed Oswald alone, and Thompson fell to work on his own draft—a labour that consumed. 16 to 18 hours day Thompson’s work, says the editor of “Saturday Evening Post,” Mr Bill Emerson, in a blurb introducing the magazine's condensation, “demolishes the Warren report.” It doesn't, quite—though it lays bare the report’s shortcomings. What it does prove at least is that there are, four years after the fact, large anomalies in the available evidence—and that a man with the will, wit and time can make them suit a different conclusion.

The essentials of Thompson's case:

Assassin No.l

Thompson agrees that one gunman was on the depository’s sixth floor using Oswald's Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, but he insists it is “quite likely” that Oswald was on the first flow during the shooting. His main evidence is a F. 8.1. report quoting a depository secretary as saying she “thought she caught a fleeting glimpse” of Oswald possibly five—or possibly 20—minutes before the first ■ shot. He goes on

to suggest, from other fragmentary eyewitness reports and several blurry photos, that there were actually two men in the sixth-floor room. Fortunately for his work as a whole, Thompson does not push the point but appends it somewhat disgenuously as a postscript. His report of what one witness “thought” she saw hardly squares with the mass of evidence against Oswald.

not even go through Kennedy, reasons Thompson, a second assassin must have wounded Connally. Some of this is welltrodden ground. The Zapruder film indeed suggests that Connally was hit between frames 234 and 238 as Thompson (and Connally himself) thought: Connally’s mouth opens, his cheeks puff, his shoulder sags. Yet all Connally’s doctors agreed that a single bullet struck his torso, right wrist and left thigh—and the film shows his right wrist moving out of that line of fire starting at frame 226. This suggests Connally may actually have been hit by frame 226 and that the puffed cheeks and slumping shoulder a half-second later are delayed reactions. Since Kennedy might have been hit as late as frame 225, the two hits could well have been close enough together to support a onebullet theory. Thompson may overrate the F. 8.1. account of the shallowness of Kennedy’s first wound. Thompson generously quotes published statements by a New York medical examiner, Dr Milton Helpern, that the autopsy was improperly done, and that the single-bullet theory is dubious. But, as Thompson fails to note, Dr Helpern has no doubts that a bullet might well have passed through Kennedy, no matter how hard the wound was to track. “A bullet doesn’t make a tunnel,” he says. “Sometimes the path is hard to trace because the tissues collapse and shift after the bullet has gone through.”

Assassin N 0.3 Thompson’s most original contribution is his theory of a double hit on Kennedy's head. The Zapruder film, by his reading, shows Kennedy’s head snapping forward, as though hit from behind, at frames 312-313—and then, an eighteenth of a second later, taking “a tremendous wrench

Assassin N 0.2 Thompson’s case for the second assassin rests heavily' on his doubts about the : Warren commission’s hedged judgment that one bullet went through Kennedy and caused all Mr Connally’s wounds. His studies of Abraham Zapruder’s celebrated home movie of the assassination persuaded him that Connally was hit one-half to one and a half seconds after Ken-* nedy's first wound—too long, a gap for a single bullet to; have struck both men and too short for one assassin to have fired both shots. He says the intac* bullet supposedly I found on Connally’s stretcher ■ could not possibly have caused all that damage to two men and stayed unde-* formed. And he rejects the official autopsy verdict that the first hit passed through Kennedy’s neck, arguing that this was merely the inference of inexperienced men who learned only the morning after the postmortem that l there had been an exit wound, in Kennedy's throat. Indeed,* he contends that the exit wound was too small to have been caused by a 6.5 mm. bullet and makes a case that it marked the exit of a skull fragment from a bead shot. Thompson also offers a F.BJ. report noting that the autopsy doctors had been unable to probe the first entry wound deeper than a finger length. If the bullet did

. . . backward and to the left.” That to Thompson, points to a second hit from the right front—and so does the fact that “debris” from the wound showered back on to the trunk of the car and the motor-cycle police riding behind and to the left. Two pieces of skull were later found well off to the left. One “looked” to a doctor like a fragment of the rear skull—consistent, says Thompson, only with a hit from the front that blew out the back of Mr Kennedy’s head.

Based on Errors There are problems with this theory, too. Dr Helpern says that the bead snap backward could have been a neuromuscular reaction a possibility that Thompson raises and dismisses, arguing that the head’s velocity was too great. The Zapruder film itself shows a pink halo spraying upward and forward at the point a bullet hit Mr Kennedy’s head from behind —but no backward spray, as might be expected from an even more explosive head wound fired from the front and side. What’s more, the Bethesda doctors found only one entry wound, in the back of the skull, and if Thompson thinks little of their work, the feeling is mutual. The book, says Dr James J. Humes, the former Navy commander who headed the three-man autopsy team, “is based on so manv errors of fact and unwarranted assumptions, so much hearsay and half-truth, that it is unworthy of comment.”

“Dark Shape”

That judgment is too harsh. Mr Wesley J. Liebeler, a former member of the staff of the Warren Commission, who is still pursuing the inquiry at the University of California and who still believes the Warren verdict, calls Thompson’s book “the most interesting thing I’ve seen so far.” But, for all his rigorously clinical manner, Thompson deals extremely selectively with evidence and testimony, choosing to place his faith in those eyewitnesses who fit his case. Nothing in his three-assassin theory accounts for the fact that the only traceable bullet and bullet fragments came from Oswald’s rifle. Nor does he have any positive evidence placing any other conspirators on the scene. His “assassin No. 2” (in sharp contrast to Oswald’s mile-wide trail) appears to have vanished without a trace, and his prime exhibit for “assassin No. 3” is a grainy, amateur’s photograph of a fence on top of the grassy knoll, behind which Thompson discerns “a dark shape, the size of a head.”

More Expected Similar flaws, of course, marked most of the previous books attacking the Oswald theory, though far more obtrusively than in Thompson’s cool, measured work. Yet, as Thompson shows more effectively than most of his predecessors, the work of the Warren commission is also highly vulnerable. If his case is the latest, it is hardly the last. Historians, and those who would rewrite history, will be producing new versions of November 22,1963, for many anniversaries to come. But the government is not altogether helpless if it wants to help set the record straight. Still withheld from the view of independent experts (by government agreement with the Kennedys) are the autopsy photographs and X-rays. Competent inspection of this evidence would not lay all the doubts to rest—but it should settle some of the most gnawing questions about the assassination.