JFK Facts Podcast: Josiah Thompson on the Last Second in Dallas

For some reason, retired private investigator Josiah Thompson is known to all his friends as Tink. He enjoys a unique historical distinction. Besides Dino Brugioni, chief of the CIA’s National Photographic Intelligence Center in 1963, Tink Thompson was the first person to forensically analyze the film of President Kennedy’s assassination taken by spectator Abraham Zapruder. This was an investigative breakthrough at the time.

The Warren Commission didn’t forensically analyze Zapruder’s film. The Time-Life publishing empire, which held copyright to the film, didn’t break down film to identify the sources of the gunfire that killed the liberal president. Now thousands of people google “Zapruder film” and seek to understand it. In the 1960s, believe it or not, only the CIA and Josiah ‘Tink’ Thompson, then a philosophy professor, thought to look carefully–very carefully–at the photographic evidence of JFK’s death. The CIA’s findings were never made public.

Thompson published his findings in groundbreaking book, “Six Seconds in Dallas.” He went on to a long career as an investigator of white-collar crime and corporate fraud. Now retired, Thompson he has a new book out, published by the University Press of Kansas, called “Last Second In Dallas” in which he completes his lifelong investigation.

Alan Dale, host of the JFK Facts Podcast, spoke with Thompson.

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