I highly recommend a new book on the Kennedy assassination entitled The Final Analysis by David W. Mantik and Jerome R. Corsi. It provides a critically important evidentiary building block that reinforces other circumstantial evidence and establishes beyond a reasonable doubt the criminal culpability of the national-security establishment in JFK’s assassination.
First of all, however, let me provide some detailed context and background for this new book.
There are thousands of books on the Kennedy assassination. If someone wants to explore this important part of our nation’s history — specifically, our history as a national-security state — it is a daunting challenge to determine where to start.
I always recommend beginning with a book entitled JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by James W. Douglass. This is without a doubt the best introduction to the Kennedy assassination that has ever been written. It is a profound book and one that is easy to read and understand. If a survey were to be taken of JFK assassination researchers, I’d be willing to bet that more than 95 percent of them would agree with my assessment of this book.
How it all began
I became interested in the Kennedy assassination after watching Oliver Stone’s movie JFK in 1991. Prior to that time, I didn’t know that there were people who questioned the official narrative of the assassination. I also had not heard about the controversy swirling around Stone’s film. When I walked into the theater to watch the film, I thought I was just going to be watching a biographical account of Kennedy’s life.
I left the theater stunned, given that Stone had posited an entirely different narrative from the official one. He posited that the JFK assassination was actually a very sophisticated regime-change operation carried out by the U.S. national-security establishment, specifically the Pentagon and the CIA.
Over the next several years, I read a number of the books on the assassination. Over time, I became convinced that Stone was right. However, I also knew that I wasn’t convinced beyond a reasonable doubt, which is the standard of proof required for a conviction in a criminal case.
That heavy burden of proof was important to me because I began my professional career as a civil and criminal trial lawyer and practiced law for 12 years. Thus, I was trained to think as a lawyer. That means
focusing on evidence, both direct and circumstantial. As persuasive as many of the assassination-related books were, I simply did not feel that they had established criminal culpability beyond a reasonable doubt.
And then I read a five-volume book entitled Inside the Assassination Records Review Board by Douglas P. Horne. Upon completing the book, my assessment of the assassination had changed. Horne’s book established beyond a reasonable doubt the criminal culpability of the national-security establishment in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
The fraudulent Kennedy autopsy
What was different about Horne’s book is that he primarily focused not on the assassination itself but rather on what happened after President Kennedy was declared dead, especially the autopsy that U.S. military officials conducted on JFK’s body on the evening of the assassination.
Why was that important for me? Because Horne established the fraudulent nature of the JFK autopsy. Once I came to the realization that the autopsy was fraudulent, it was “case closed” on criminal culpability. That’s because there is no innocent explanation for a fraudulent autopsy. It necessarily equates to a criminal cover-up of the assassination itself. And there is only one entity that the military would be covering up for — itself. That is, there is no reasonable possibility that the military would have conducted a fraudulent autopsy on the very evening of the assassination to cover up for the Mafia, Cuban leader Fidel Castro, the Soviets, or anyone else. A fraudulent autopsy on the very evening of the assassination could mean only one thing — a criminal cover-up of the crime that the national-security establishment itself had committed.
Knowing that many people would not take the time to read Horne’s detailed five-volume book, I decided to write a multipart article that summarized his key findings. That article became The Future of Freedom Foundation’s book The Kennedy Autopsy, which is FFF’s all-time best-selling book. I would recommend reading this book after one reads JFK and the Unspeakable. I would then recommend reading my book The Kennedy Autopsy 2.
The fourth book I would recommend would be another book published by FFF entitled JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas Horne. That book explores the motive behind the assassination.
I would then recommend watching a five-part video series by Horne entitled “Altered History: Exposing Deceit and Deception in the JFK Assassination Medical Evidence,” which is posted in the multimedia section of FFF’s website (fff.org). This is the most downloaded video in FFF’s 34-year history and focuses primarily on the matters detailed in Horne’s five-volume book.
I also recommend watching the presentations of two conferences that FFF held on the JFK assassination: “The National Security State and the JFK Assassination” and “The National Security State and JFK.” Those presentations are posted in the multimedia section of FFF’s website.
You will then be ready to tackle Horne’s book Inside the Assassination Records Review Board.
Horne served on the staff of the ARRB in the 1990s. The ARRB was an independent agency operating under the auspices of the president. Its job was to enforce the provisions of what is commonly known as the JFK Records Act, which forced the Pentagon, the CIA, the Secret Service, and all other federal agencies to disclose their long-secret assassination-related records to the public.
The official narrative after the assassination had been that a lone nut and former U.S. Marine with no apparent motive, who just happened to be there at the right place and time, had suddenly decided to assassinate President Kennedy using an old Italian-made rifle with a misaligned scope. U.S. officials had shrouded much of their investigation of the assassination in secrecy based on grounds of “national security,” which, needless to say, was quite inconsistent with their official lone-nut narrative.
U.S. officials had succeeded in keeping most of their assassination-related records secret for some 30 years, a point that Oliver Stone made in his movie JFK. Public outcry over such secrecy is what motivated Congress to enact the JFK Records Act, which was enforced by the ARRB, for whom Horne was working.
The autopsy fraud detailed in Horne’s book (which is summarized in The Kennedy Autopsy) is beyond the scope of this article. However, I will focus on two particular aspects of the fraud, given that they relate to the new book I mentioned at the beginning of this article, The Final Analysis.
Horne established that there were two brain examinations in the Kennedy autopsy. Why is that significant? Two reasons. First, the military pathologists who conducted the autopsy claimed under oath that there was only one brain exam. When people commit perjury over an important event, that is significant. Second, the brain examined at the second brain exam could not possibly have been the brain that belonged to President Kennedy, which obviously is another significant point.
The military pathologists also claimed that autopsy photos showing the back of Kennedy’s head to be intact correctly depicted the condition of Kennedy’s head. Yet, treating physicians at Parkland Hospital, where Kennedy was treated, established that there was a massive exit-sized wound in the back of JFK’s head. They weren’t the only ones. So did treating nurses, a Secret Service agent, a newspaper reporter, and even witnesses at the Bethesda Naval Medical Center morgue where the autopsy was conducted.
The ARRB learned of the existence of a woman named Saundra Spencer, who was a Navy petty officer in Washington, D.C., in November 1963, when Kennedy was assassinated. She worked in the Navy’s photographic lab in Washington, D.C., and worked closely with the Kennedy White House. She was summoned to testify under oath before the ARRB. After her testimony, the ARRB general counsel, Jeremy Gunn, stated that of all the witnesses testifying before the ARRB, Spencer was the most credible.
Spencer told the ARRB a remarkable story. She said that on the weekend of the assassination, she was asked to develop the JFK autopsy photographs on a classified basis. She had kept her secret for some 30 years. Gunn showed her the official autopsy photographs showing the back of Kennedy’s head to be intact. Upon viewing the photos, she said no — those were not the photographs that she had developed. The photos she had developed, she said, showed a big hole in the back of President Kennedy’s head, which matched what the treating physicians at Parkland and others had said.
If Spencer, the treating physicians, and other witnesses were telling the truth, then that could mean only one thing: The military’s autopsy photographs were fraudulent.
The military, however, had a backup — the famous Zapruder film, which captured the assassination. It showed the back of Kennedy’s head to be intact, just like those autopsy photos. That necessarily meant that if the photos were fraudulent, so was the Zapruder film.
That’s where my newest book, An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story, comes into play. In that book, I detail how the CIA produced a fraudulent copy of the film on the very weekend of the assassination, a copy that not only eliminated incriminating frames of the film but also included an artificial “black patch” on the back of Kennedy’s head. Needless to say, I recommend reading An Encounter with Evil.
But the military still had one piece of evidence to make its point — the x-rays it took as part of the autopsy, which purport to show no massive exit-sized wound in the back of JFK’s head.
The evidence of conspiracy keeps growing
That’s where the newest book on the assassination — The Final Analysis — comes into play. One of the authors of the book, David Mantik, is a radiation oncologist with a doctorate in physics. Mantik is one of the few people who have been permitted to examine the original Kennedy x-rays. In fact, he made nine separate trips to the National Archives to examine the x-rays — more than anyone else.
As part of his close examination of the x-rays, Mantik used an instrument called a densitometer to measure the densities of various parts of the x-rays. As he details in The Final Analysis, the densitometer revealed that the JFK x-rays were fraudulent copies, designed to hide the true trajectories of the bullets that hit Kennedy in the head.
One of the most fascinating chapters in the book is one in which Mantik focuses on a large bullet fragment that matches the caliber of the rifle that had supposedly been used to assassinate Kennedy. Mantik shows how that bullet fragment, which was not seen by the military pathologists on the night of the assassination, was later placed on a fraudulent copy of the x-rays.
Throughout his book, Mantik makes it clear that he is building on the foundation established by Horne in his five-volume book. In fact, Mantik and Corsi dedicate their book to Horne, just as I dedicated The Kennedy Autopsy and An Encounter with Evil to him.
The subject of x-rays is obviously very complex, but Mantik does a fantastic job of simplifying the subject for a lay audience. He also carefully explains how the fraudulent copies of the x-rays were produced with equipment in 1963.
Longtime supporters of FFF might recognize Mantik because he was one of the speakers at our 2021 online conference “The National Security State and the JFK Assassination,” whose presentations are posted in the multimedia section of FFF’s website. In fact, Mantik cites and footnotes the presentations at that conference in his new book.
It is not necessary to read Horne’s book before reading Mantik’s book. In fact, Mantik’s book serves as an excellent introduction to Horne’s book. One of the most fascinating parts of Mantik’s book occurs near the end, where he details the early surreptitious introduction of Kennedy’s body into the Bethesda morgue, a point that Horne detailed in his book.
Why is the national-security establishment’s assassination of President Kennedy still so important? After all, all of the participants to that murder are now dead. The national-security state, however, is still with us, and it remains the most powerful part of our federal governmental structure. As I have long maintained, the worst mistake America ever made was converting the federal government to a national-security state. The more Americans who become convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that the Kennedy assassination was, in fact, a national-security regime-change operation, the closer we will be to restoring our founding constitutional governmental system of a limited-government republic.
This article was originally published in the June 2024 issue of Future of Freedom.