Last Second in Dallas by Josiah Thompson

In this long-awaited follow-up to his critically acclaimed 1967 classic, Six Seconds in Dallas, Josiah Thompson reveals major new forensic discoveries since the year 2000 that overturn previously accepted “facts” about the Kennedy assassination. It provides incontrovertible proof that JFK was killed in a crossfire. Last Second in Dallas is not a conspiracy book. No theory of who did it is offered or discussed. Among the new discoveries: The test showing that all recovered bullet fragments came from Oswald’s rifle was mistaken. Several fragments could have come from bullets of any manufacturer and any caliber. The sudden two-inch forward movement of the president’s head in the Zapruder film just before his head explodes is revealed to be an optical illusion caused by the movement of Zapruder’s camera. This leaves without further challenge clear evidence that this shot came from a specific location to the right front of the limousine. Detailed analysis of film frames matched by the newly validated acoustic evidence show a second shot struck the president’s head from behind less than a second later. Result: two killing shots to the head from opposite directions in the final second of the shooting—hence the book’s title. At once a historical detective story and a deeply personal narrative by a major figure in the field, Last Second in Dallas captures the drama and sweep of events, detailing government missteps and political bias as well as the junk science, hubris, and controversy that have dogged the investigation from the beginning. Into this account Thompson weaves his own eventful journey, that of a Yale-educated scholar who in 1976 resigned his tenured professorship in philosophy to become a private investigator in San Francisco. Profusely illustrated, Last Second in Dallas features dozens of archive photographs, including Zapruder film frames reproduced at the highest clarity ever published.

Jim DiEugenio: It's pretty obvious now that director/producer Joel Surnow could not control his Herhsian mania to place every piece of weakly sourced or discredited piece of tripe that Kennedy's enemies have manufactured in this pile of TV cliches named The Kennedys. What is so interesting is that History Channel hired historians as fact checkers and were going to reward them if they approved the film! They could not do so even for money. That is how over the top Surnow is in this regard. And this fact checking process started with the script, and then went to a rough cut. So knowing that History Channel was watching him all the way, Surnow still could not contain himself. Richard Reeves, I believe, is not a really good historian--especially when it comes to JFK's foreign policy ideas. But the fact that even Reeves could not swallow this anti Kennedy, Rush Limbaugh inspired farrago says a lot. If the History Channel hired Limbaugh's buddy Surnow to begin with, they knew approximately what they were going to get. Therefore, the movers and shakers were not going to give Caroline Kennedy the time of the day if they liked Surnow. But it's clear that Surnow had no interest in facts or history. He just wanted to recycle Horowitz, Davis, Matthews, the Blairs, Thomas Reeves and Hersh's nutty books. This was not going to be real history at all. It was a reactionary political statement all the way. Surnow admitted that not all of Mr. Gillon and Mr. Dallek’s recommendations were taken. As if we didn't know it! Ted Sorensen, one of the closest advisers of JFK, opined the show was indeed "malicious and vindictive." 

Reading Donald Spoto's book on Marilyn Monroe one can see a good example of why this stuff that appears repeatedly on TV documentaries or films that cannot be trusted. Then read how Judith Exner kept on exaggerating and exaggerating her story after the Church Committee. In other words they got her to lie for money. To the point that toward the end, she could not even keep up with all the lies she'd told. She actually forgot JFK had impregnated her in previous books-a story she directly contradicted many times, but should we believe Kitty Kelley's version? Do you really think that after all had happened that Caroline Kennedy or RFK Jr. don't know about the conspiracy against their family? They do. But acting on it publicly carries a potent warning to it. So few of us are really martyrs. Personally, I don't know of any, do you?

Larry Hancock: Of many coincidences I actually refer in Tipping Point, Allen Dulles was in Dallas five weeks prior to the assassination. Invited to speak at the Dallas Council on World Affairs (of which George de Mohrenschildt was a member.) The remarks by David Morales's life long friend Frankie Knuckles and Bill Harvey's wife seem to me to carry strong weight. I think these people just didn't dislike JFK's policies, they considered him a traitor and literally hated him. The interview of Harvey's widow to Jefferson Morley sounds like the old woman slipped up and told the truth when she said about John Rosselli "...he was recruited for assassination purposes on Kennedy..." Then she caught herself and said, "I mean Castro." According to Clara Grace Harvey, Rosselli had been recruited by "another guy from the FBI for assassination purposes on Kennedy". Clara Grace Harvey thinks her husband was buddies with a mafia hit man, thought the mafioso was a "patriot?" Harvey was stationed in Miami to oversee operations regarding Cuba. During the Missile Crisis, he dispatched a crew to enter Cuba for suspicious reasons; however, when RFK & JFK found out about it, he was reassigned to the Rome CIA post. There in Rome, Harvey's drinking problem got worse. I'm sure Harvey was full of hate toward the Kennedys. Also, Clara Grace Harvey seems to have a problem about Jackie being at a drugstore sipping on a Coke... like the First Lady can't go down to a drugstore, sit at a counter and sip on a Coke?? Nuts! Of course, Ms Harvey talks about JFK's womanizing, but  do you notice that all of JFK's mistresses talked good of him, all of them, and even Jackie remembered him with so much affect. A year before his death Jackie told John "Please don't order us to a bomb shelter on Camp David. Me and the kids want to die with you!" In 1978 I had Thanksgiving dinner with a high-ranking special agent of the FBI. I was living and working in Washington DC, and the gal who invited me led me to the family farm for dinner. She had always bragged to me that her father had been buddies with J. Edgar Hoover. In the guy's den, before dinner, me and his son were having a couple of drinks. I innocently asked the guy what he thought "really happened" to Kennedy. His face got beet red and he lapsed into a tirade in which he called JFK a "goddamned communist". He said something to the effect that JFK and Bobby got what they deserved - he seemed to be gloating to me. He hated the Kennedy's in a way that shocked me to death. It was like it was personal - the Kennedy's weren't dead enough for this guy.... I found his obituary recently and I tried to research a bit about the guy. He was a special agent of the FBI at the time of the assassination named Leonard Spears.  

Douglas Caddy: William K. Harvey was one of the big men of CIA in it earliest days. A former FBI agent, Harvey was the agency's first chief of counterintelligence. He ran the CIA's Berlin base in the 1950s and in 1960 was put in charge of ZR RIFLE, the agency's assassination program. He was openly hostile to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy who forced the CIA to transfer him to Rome in 1963. He died in 1976. Mathilde Krim was LBJ’s mistress in the 1960s. She also just happened to be a fanatical supporter of the interests of Israel. In the late 1940s, she had been an active promoter of the Israeli terror group The Irgun. Mathilde Krim was also most likely a Mossad agent with long-time contacts to the highest levels of the Israeli government. I would have loved to hear the “pillow talk” between these two total opposites: the incredibly crude, uncultured and flabby LBJ and the cultured, sleek and highly educated Krim. You can bet that she was able to supply Israel with all sorts of top secret information that she was able to extract out of her bedmate. Maybe she also gave advice to LBJ about who exactly to blackmail or what transgressions by Israel for LBJ to ignore (like the USS Liberty attack). Mathilde Krim’s husband was the very wealthy Arthur Krim, one of the most powerful supporters of Israel in the USA. Mathilde Krim’s relationship with LBJ was most likely known by her husband but was “overlooked” by him because of its huge value to Israel as both as a source of information as well as for its potential use as blackmail. The heads of MSM at the time apparently knew all about the relationship between Krim and LBJ but “wisely” chose to ignore it unlike what they had done for JFK and his affairs. You can also bet that Krim dropped her lover LBJ like a hot potato once he left office and was no longer of use to her friends. 

Here’s Mathilde Krim with a soirée of Fine Folks to include LBJ & Lady Bird. She certainly made the rounds. Definitely an Intelligence Operative considering her prodigious network of contacts. It reminds me of a scene from Rosemary’s Baby. Behind the JFK and RFK assassinations is the Allen Dulles gang: Richard Helms, David Atlee Phillips, and James Angleton. It is true that Angleton had deep ties with the Mossad. It is also true that since the end of the second world war, Israeli skulduggery in the US and Europe has been massive. But these two political murders were planned and executed by the above Dulles cabal. Oswald was a CIA asset since his time as Marine serving at the US Atsugi base in Japan. Researcher HP Albarelli connects Oswald to right-wing Agency operative David Ferrie as far back as the early 1950s. Oswald was also part of Angleton’s false defector program, which inserted him into the USSR in the late 1950s. The grooming and handling of Sirhan Sirhan in California in the mid 1960s speaks of a well-entrenched domestic network of CIA assets. He was picked for patsydom for a number reasons, and Angleton, again, a prince of an ally for Mossad, liked Sirhan’s Palestinian background, which amped up the Arab threat, in the eyes of the US audience, to his Israeli friends. The author is correct that Thane Caesar was the real assassin of RFK. Previous to the RFK hit, Caesar had worked for the Hughes corporation in Burbank. The sprawling Howard Hughes business empire partially had served as a CIA cover since the 1950s. 

Laurent Guyenot (a French highly-educated professional engineer, who shares an interest in political writing): Finally, through years of research on other contemporary “deep history”, I came to find a pattern in Israel’s tremendous capacity to engineer history. “Psychological profiling” is important in any criminal case, and I believe that Israel has that profile. Jewish hatred for anything Catholic adds to the profile, not to mention the Kennedys’ vague Judeophobia (“The Jews have won the war”, Joe Kennedy said after resigning his Ambassador position, JFK himself had praised Robert Taft for his courage to denounce the Nuremberg trials) and their war waged on the Jewish Lobby by RFK’s team. JFK threatened the flawed Jews narrative on Hitler too. From JFK diary (published on Time magazine in 2017), his diary reveals that during his time in Berlin, Kennedy wrote about visiting Hitler’s bunker only months after Germany surrendered in the Second World War. “You can easily understand how that within a few years Hitler will emerge from the hatred that surrounds him now as one of the most significant figures who ever lived,” Kennedy wrote in his diary in 1945. “He had boundless ambition for his country which rendered him a menace to the peace of the world, but he had a mystery about him in the way he lived and in the manner of his death that will live and grow after him,” he added. “He had in him the stuff of which legends are made.” 

RFK was especially vocal about his goal of ending the Vietnam war on the ’68 campaign trail. And then there’s Richard Nixon: a national security state favorite since his time as congressman during the so-called Red Scare of the early 195os, Nixon was their favored candidate in the ’68 election. RFK’s death sealed the deal for Nixon. Nixon would go on to incur the wrath of his former national security state allies with his secret negotiations with China and the USSR while president. Because of his previous good works for them, a political death was arranged rather than a violent physical one. And the “manufacturer” of the single bullet theory was Jewish Senator Arlen Specter of the Warren Commission. Another point about the Kennedy’s dislike of Israel it was much greater than anyone thought especially coming from the old man Joe. Lyndon Johnson’s great-grandparents, on the maternal side, were Jewish and Johnson helped smuggle Jews legally and illegally into Texas. “Israel,” in Kent’s analysis, “would use all the means at its command to persuade the U.S. to acquiesce in, and even to support, its possession of nuclear capability.” In short, Israel would use its immense political power – especially through its lobby in Washington – to force the United States to accede to Israel’s nuclear intentions. Stephen Green believes that Kennedy’s position vis-a-vis Israel was an important stand: “It was a remarkable exchange, and the last time in many, many years in which an American president precisely distinguished for the government of Israel the differences between U.S. and Israeli national security interests.” 

Thus it was that John F. Kennedy informed Israel, in no uncertain terms, that he intended – first and foremost – to place America’s interests – not Israel’s interests – at the center of U.S. Middle East policy. Kennedy’s friendly overtures to the Arab states were only a public aspect of what ultimately developed into an all-out ‘secret war’ between Kennedy and Israel. Another part of the all secret war between Kennedy and Israel was Ben-Gurion hated Kennedy because he consider his father an anti semite and Hitler supporter. Hersh wrote, “The Israeli prime minister, in subsequent private communications to the White House, began to refer to the President as ‘young man.’ Kennedy made clear to associates that he found the letters to be offensive.” Kennedy himself told his close friend, Charles Bartlett, that he was getting fed up with the fact that the Israeli “sons of bitches lie to me constantly about their nuclear capability.” Obviously, to say the very least, there was no love lost between the two leaders. The U.S.-Israeli relationship was at an ever-growing and disastrous impasse, although virtually nothing was known about this to the American public at the time. On his part, RFK was admirable for his bravery in confronting corruption and the mob. But it might very well have been the Kennedy’s un-doing: RFK’s morality. On the other hand, I came to doubt that Pentagon generals, whom James Douglass incriminate, would plot to assassinate their own president: a question of psychological profile. They may have wished him dead, and rejoiced over his death, but that is totally different. What I find interesting is Nixon’s observations, or perhaps cryptic messages, on both assassinations. Nixon was no real “friend” of Israel either. Recall the tape of his conversation with Billy Graham. Mark Felt, a Hoover insider and Jewish, was passed over by Nixon for top dog at the FBI, which was complicit in the coverup of both assassinations. Mark Felt became Deep Throat and kept the pot boiling on Watergate. Could Nixon have been suspicious about the official narratives of the assassinations? I strongly advise getting a copy of Greg Poulgrain 'JFK vs Allen Dulles' which documents the links between Dulles and de Mohrenschildt going as far back as the 1930's. Information that George de Mohrenschildt didn't disclose to the WC's Albert Jenner commission sessions attended by Dulles. Source: educationforum.ipbhost.com