[15] 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.
It convinced me who’s never been a conspiracy man at all that the whole thing must be rethought.”[17] 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.
Combined with personal memoirs and accounts of his investigation of the evidence, the 475-page illustrated result (361 pages of text, plus appendix, extensive notes and index), Last Second in Dallas (ISBN 978-0-7006-3008-0), was published by the University Press of Kansas in February 2021.
[20] 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.
[21] Thompson relies not only on the Zapruder film and the police radio dictabelt recording of the shooting (which he defends as valid), but also begins the book by quoting the reports of numerous witnesses he interviewed for LIFE magazine in 1966 and 1967.
In the end, Thompson writes, he concluded that the cleansed forensic arguments confirm what numerous eye-witnesses reported just after the shooting in November 1963, that is, that Kennedy had been shot from the front as well as from behind.
[22] When first struck in the head at Zapruder frame 313, almost five seconds after the initial burst of gunfire which had already wounded Kennedy and Texas Governor Connally, the President moves backwards and to the left.
The first of these final and equally non-survivable shots, Thompson argues, came from behind a stockade fence atop the grassy knoll and not from the Texas School Book Depository, where Lee Harvey Oswald was located.
[23][24] 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.