Reading Josiah Thompson, "Last Second in Dallas." For those who liked "The Umbrella Man," this is Thompson's latest and definitive book on the assassination. Three gunmen. Not one.

— errolmorris (@errolmorris) December 25, 2020

On Errol Morris’s recommendation, I’m currently reading Josiah Thompson’s Last Second In Dallas, his epic sequel in 2021 to Six Seconds In Dallas, the 1967 volume that influenced a generation of truth-seekers and investigators (categories that overlap but are not identical) fascinated, and sometimes obsessed, with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. (See also Morris’s “The Umbrella Man,” in which he interviews Thompson–as it happens, just as Thompson’s investigation of the assassination is nearing a crucial turning point. Now, a decade after Morris published that short film, the Arvo Pãrt score is all the more poignant and fitting.)

The Kennedy assassination of one of my earliest vivid memories, one in which I recall not only an event but also, to a considerable extent, the context surrounding it, including the weirdly pervasive feeling that “Dallas” was a kind of curse word. I recall an overwhelming sense of sadness. I recall a sense of shock, and a renewed sense of shock when Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald. I recall my mother weeping at the funeral procession, and again as the bugler played “Taps” at the graveside ceremony in Arlington Cemetery. My mother’s beloved younger brother had been seriously wounded in World War II, and as Mom explained to me when I became upset by her weeping, she always cried when “Taps” was played as she thought of how close her brother came to never coming home at all.

Like other Americans old enough to remember where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news. (I had just come home from a day at Mrs. Wills’ first grade. As I recall, the ride home was oddly silent. I was told of the killing only when I entered my house.) I can also remember the long aftermath of the 1960’s, seven years in which Kennedy’s vow to land an astronaut on the moon and return the astronaut safely to Earth drove an effort that has since come to define any heroic quest that focuses time, energy, expertise, and resources on a matter of great national and, eventually, human aspiration. We call those “moon shots.” I also remember all the related haunting 1960’s questions: would we have suffered as we did if Kennedy had not been assassinated? Would we have become enmired in Vietnam? Would Nixon have been elected? among many other questions.

I lived in Waco, Texas for several years, just about two hours south of Dallas. I visited Dealey Plaza several times, taking my family and then out-of-town guests to the Sixth Floor Museum, a place that always brought me back to my childhood and to my mother’s grief.

Now, as I read Thompson’s book, I think of those things. And I am surprised when even more intense thoughts come to me. I realize that this book speaks to me, resonates within me, because it is also the story of truth-seekers and the obstacles they face. It’s hard to amass evidence. It’s hard to sift the evidence, to evaluate the worth of this piece versus that piece. It’s hard to avoid confirmation bias. And it’s hard to ignore the fact that various organizational and institutional pressures work not to avoid confirmation bias, but to reinforce it, for ends that are sometimes nefarious and sometimes just plain self-protective or vain, or cussed. Sometimes all of these.

And so I realize that Last Second In Dallas is my latest book in a series I have read, over the years, about damaging or deadly personal and institutional failures in the search for truth. Investigative committees and authorities that are too lazy, greedy, narcissistic, afraid, or riven with political conflict to pursue the truth. Expertise that leverages reputation to evade or deny the truth. Evidence that’s mishandled. Often, sheer stupid incompetence. Often, people afraid to speak truth to power (and if you’ve ever encountered real power, you’d find it hard to blame them for their fear). Often, whistleblowers who are ignored, or dismissed, or scorned, or condescended to, or threatened or smeared and slandered and libeled. (My mother, in a very quiet small way, was once a whistleblower, another moment of deep grief for her.)

So now I see that this book by Josiah Thompson on the Kennedy assassination is also, and most importantly for me just now in this season of Lent, the story of someone who will not let the investigation go, who still wants to know what happened, and who has faith that the truth is discoverable. Thompson is not a conspiracy theorist. Early on he disclaims any interest in who did the shooting and why, and I believe him. His quest is to discover the truth about what happened. How many shots? When? How can we discover that from the evidence? What can we discover about ourselves and our institutions as we study the story of the investigations over the years. As Morris puts it in “The Umbrella Man”:

I believe that by looking at the assassination, we can learn a lot about the nature of investigation and evidence. Why, after 48 years, are people still quarreling and quibbling about this case? What is it about this case that has led not to a solution, but to the endless proliferation of possible solutions?

But first: What happened? Second: How and why did this happen. and who did this? The order cannot be reversed, lest What happened? be answered not by reason, but by desire. (When the cop says in Morris’s The Thin Blue Line, “we didn’t want [Randall Adams] to tell us what he thought; we wanted him to tell us what we knew,” the cop inadvertently but unerringly tells the truth of his own delusion.)

And so now I understand also that Thompson’s book is like other books I’ve read about organizational failures to identify, agree upon, and act on the truth. Or even to look for it in good faith, not because the investigators committed the very crime, but because they keep committing the enabling crimes that follow, that hide the truth in ways that characterize a much larger failure. Events and decisions and coverups and snafus (or the variant I learned from Thompson, the JANFU) where the first order of business is the denial of reality, and the next item the denial of the denial, either through bureaucratic means or, as I’ve often seen in academia, rhetorical hijinks I’d call sophistry.

So this book joins books I’ve read on the Challenger and Columbia tragedies as stories in which moments of intervention and potential revelation have come and gone, in which preventable disasters became inevitable. The Columbia tragedy, of course, is also the story of how NASA failed to learn from the Challenger tragedy, a failure foretold by Richard Feynman in part 2 of What Do You Care What Other People Think?, the section titled “Mr. Feynman Goes To Washington.” Strangely, in my mind these stories also connect with Fred Brooks’ The Mythical Man-Month,  as well as with a haunting essay on education reform I read a decade ago, “The Culture of Resistance,” by Robert Evans.

In my soul Thompson’s book also connects with Errol Morris’s magisterial The Ashtray. Like Thompson, Morris spend decades on a quest for the truth, in this case the truth of Thomas Kuhn’s denial of truth, and the truth of Thomas Kuhn’s unjust and immoral judgment, or rather, summary narcissistic self-exculpatory dismissal, of Morris’s arguments regarding truth.

There are questions I keep asking myself, questions that reappear as I read Thompson’s book.

I think of the end of Robert Penn Warren’s All The King’s Men. Was Willie Stark persuading Jack Burden of a hard truth, or was he reaching for a last chance to act the part of virtue, of valor?

I waited, but it began to seem that he wasn’t going to say any
more. His eyes were on the ceiling and I could scarcely tell that he
was breathing. Finally, the eyes turned toward me again, very
slowly, and I almost thought that I could hear the tiny painful creak
of the balls in their sockets. But the light flickered up again. He
said, “It might have been all different. Jack.*’

I nodded again.

He roused himself more. He even seemed to be straining to lift
his head from the pillow. “You got to believe that,* he said
hoarsely.

The nurse stepped forward and looked significantly at me.

“Yes,” I said to the man on the bed.

“You got to,” he said again. “You got to believe that.”

“All right.”

He looked at me, and for a moment it was the old strong, prob-
ing, demanding glance. But when the words came this time, they
were very weak. “And it might even been different yet,” he whis-
pered. “If it hadn’t happened, it might— have been different— even
yet.”

He barely got the last words out, he was so weak.

And that’s where I stop. Could it have been different? Might it yet be different? If it couldn’t have been different, if one can never make a difference, then neither the what happened nor the why matters all that much. But it might have been different, even yet, even now.

I’ve got to believe that sometimes, it might yet be. Then I have to figure out what I am prepared to do.