The New Yorker:

Josiah Thompson is an assistant professor of philosophy at Haverford College, near Philadelphia. He graduated from Yale, Phi Beta Kappa, ten years ago; served two years as a naval officer (in 1958, when the Marines landed in Lebanon, he commanded the frogman detachment charged with beach reconnaissance); spent a year in Denmark, doing research in the works of the philosopher who has become his specialty, Sören Kierkegaard; and returned to Yale to complete his doctorate. At Haverford, he teaches courses in the Philosophy of Existence and the Phenomenology of Existence, plus an introductory philosophy course; his dissertation, a study of Kierkegaard called “The Lonely Labyrinth,” is scheduled to be published by a university press this year. A boyish-looking young man whose friends call him Tink, he lives on the top floor of an old house on the Haverford campus with a wife, two small children, and perhaps the only complete set of Kierkegaard first editions in the United States. He is an authority on the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Thompson has learned to use an Abney level, a tool valuable in measuring angles, including the trajectories of bullets, and he has gone to Dallas, stood on Elm Street, early on Sunday morning when the traffic is light, and measured the angle from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Like many other academics, he has published a letter in the New York Review of Books that both commented on a review and displayed a vast and esoteric knowledge; in his case, the comment was on a review of assassination books by Richard Popkin, another philosophy professor and lay authority on the assassination, and the knowledge displayed was of pathology and ballistics as they relate to the course and impact of a 6.5-millimetre bullet. Although his interest in firearms had never extended past what he was required to learn in the Navy, he now owns a display board of the various types of bullets that could have theoretically been used in the assassination, and a rifle of the type Oswald was said to have used, so that he can personally get some idea of how its bolt operates.

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