Josiah Thompson

The book was condensed in the Saturday Evening Post issue for December 2, 1967, generating news stories in both the New York Times and Newsweek. John Updike wrote a “Talk of the Town” piece for The New Yorker about “the Umbrella Man” (12/9/67) and described Six Seconds as “absolutely fascinating. It convinced me who’s never been a conspiracy man at all that the whole thing must be rethought.” Max Lerner devoted his syndicated New York Post column on November 27, 1967 to describing the book as “more careful and more powerful than the Warren Report. It was not until this book that I became clear in my mind about some kind of collaborative shooting.”

In 2011, The New York Times posted a short documentary film by Errol Morris featuring Thompson's commentary about the "Umbrella Man", a man holding a black umbrella during the assassination of Kennedy. In this interview, Thompson deploys both his philosophical and his criminal investigative skills to elucidate the difference between logical inferences premised on facts and speculative conspiratorial theorizing.

In 1988, he published Gumshoe: Reflections in a Private Eye, a well-received memoir discussing his post-academic life as a private detective.

In 1979, twelve years after publication of Six Seconds in Dallas, Thompson was hired to write part of a new book on the then-just-released House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) Report. His assignment was to evaluate the part of the House Report dealing with the physical facts of what happened in Dealey Plaza. He gave up that project in frustration, the new book explains, when it became clear that the core evidence in the case, as then understood, was internally contradictory. Confronting an apparent impasse, he turned away from the case and did not return to it until 2011.

In 1976 Thompson left Haverford and moved to San Francisco, to begin a new career as a private investigator, first working for Hal Lipset and then David Fechheimer. Thompson worked as a PI for thirty-five years, retiring in 2011. He worked mostly in criminal cases, including the investigation of dozens of murders. Among his better-known cases were participation in the defense of Bill and Emily Harris in the Patty Hearst kidnapping, and of Chol Soo Lee on murder charges. He was appointed by the federal court as investigator on the defense team for Timothy McVeigh in the Oklahoma City bombing trial, and investigated the bombing attack on environmental activists Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney.

Since 1976, Thompson has lived with his wife, Nancy, in Bolinas, California, a seaside village just north of San Francisco. He serves as registered agent for the Bolinas Cemetery Corporation, defending the 150-year-old graveyard from vandals, litterbugs and developers. Their daughter, Lis, died of breast cancer in 2015. Their son, Everson, practices as a criminal defense private investigator in San Rafael, California.

Thompson relies not only on the Zapruder film and the police radio dictabelt recording of the shooting (which he shows to be valid), but also begins the book by quoting the reports of numerous witnesses he interviewed for LIFE magazine in 1966 and 1967. At the end it becomes apparent that the cleansed forensic arguments confirm what numerous eye-witnesses reported just after the shooting in November 1963.

In Six Seconds in Dallas, Thompson argued that the physical evidence available as of 1967, corroborating eye-witness accounts, showed that multiple shooters fired within the same few seconds at President Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Fred Winship of the AP wrote that "some of Thompson's conclusions are based on original research in the National Archives, documents and photos not seen by the Warren Commission and interviews with eyewitnesses."

Thompson was born and raised in East Liverpool, Ohio. He graduated from Yale University in 1957 and immediately entered the Navy, serving in Underwater Demolition Team 21. Returning to Yale, Thompson earned his Ph.D. in 1964. He joined the Yale faculty as Instructor in Philosophy and then moved on to teach at Haverford College. He remained at Haverford, including a period living and researching in Denmark, until 1976. He wrote or edited several works about Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard.

Josiah "Tink" Thompson (b. 17 January 1935) is an American writer, retired professional private investigator, and former philosophy professor. In 1967, he published both The Lonely Labyrinth, a study of Kierkegaard's pseudonymous works, and Six Seconds in Dallas: A Micro-Study of the Kennedy Assassination. The culmination of his half-century-long Kennedy assassination project, updating his own and others’ investigative work, correcting certain errors, and reconciling the whole body of valid forensic and eyewitness evidence, was published in early 2021 as Last Second in Dallas.