A Great New Book on the JFK Assassination

A great new book on the U.S. national-security establishment’s assassination of President John F. Kennedy has recently been published. It is entitled The Final Analysis by David W. Mantik and Jerome R. Corsi.

Longtime supporters of The Future of Freedom Foundation might recognize Mantik’s name. That’s because he was one of the speakers at our online 2021 conference entitled “The National Security State and the Kennedy Assassination.” In fact, Mantik cites presentations at that conference in various parts of his new book.

Mantik is a radiation oncologist who also has a Ph.D. in physics. He is one of the few people who have been permitted to examine the extant x-rays that were taken of President Kennedy’s head as part of the autopsy that the U.S. military conducted on JFK’s body on the evening of the assassination. As he points out in this new book, Mantik did a careful examination of the x-rays on nine different occasions. It is Mantik’s findings with respect to those x-rays that form the central thesis of The Final Analysis.

But before I reveal Mantik’s findings, permit me to put things into context.

I began reading books on the Kennedy assassination after watching Oliver Stone’s movie JFK in 1991. That movie posited that the official narrative on the assassination — which is that a lone nut, former U.S. communist Marine who just happened to be at that right place at the right time assassinated the president using an Italian-made rifle with a misaligned scope — was wrong. In fact, Stone’s movie argued, the assassination was carried out by the U.S. military-intelligence establishment based on the notion that Kennedy’s Cold War policies posed a grave threat to “national security.” (See FFF’s book JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas Horne.)

Over time, I became convinced that Stone’s thesis was correct, but while assassination researchers had made a convincing case for criminal culpability on the part of the national-security establishment, I still felt that they had nonetheless not proven their case beyond a reasonable doubt, which is the standard of proof required in a criminal case.

Then I read a five-volume book entitled Inside the Assassination Records Review Board by Douglas Horne, who had served on the staff of the ARRB in the 1990s. The ARRB was an independent agency that was charged with enforcing the JFK Records Act, which mandated that the military-intelligence establishment, which had succeeded in keeping its assassination-related records secret for some 30 years, disclose such records to the public, . The law was enacted in the wake of public outrage over the secrecy that was generated by Stone’s movie JFK.

Horne’s book convinced me beyond a reasonable doubt of the criminal culpability of the U.S. national-security establishment in JFK’s assassination. That’s because Horne focused on the autopsy that the military conducted on the president’s body and, specifically, on the fraudulent nature of that autopsy.

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, there is no innocent explanation for a fraudulent autopsy. It necessary equates to guilt in the assassination itself. That’s because a fraudulent autopsy can only mean cover-up. And the only entity the military would be covering up for is itself.

Realizing that many people might not take the time to read Horne’s massive five-volume work, I wrote The Kennedy Autopsy, which summarized the key points in Horne’s book. I dedicated the book to Horne. It became FFF’s all-time best-selling book.

Mantik’s book builds on the foundation built by Horne. In fact, Mantik and Corsi also dedicate their book to Horne. Mantik builds on Horne’s evidence of the fraudulent autopsy by establishing the fraudulent nature of the autopsy x-rays. On several of his visits to examine the x-rays in the National Archives, Mantik took an instrument called a densitometer, which measures the density of various parts of the x-rays. As he carefully documents and explains in new book, the measurements he took establish that the extant x-rays have to be fraudulent altered copies rather than original x-rays.

One of most fascinating aspects of the book is a chapter about a 6.5 mm bullet fragment in the extant x-rays. The size of that bullet fragment conveniently matches the Italian-made rifle that the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, supposedly used to assassinate the president.

However, when the three military pathologists were asked about that bullet fragment, they all said that they never saw it. Yet, given the enormous size of the fragment, it is impossible to miss. Mantik even asked his young daughter if she could identify the fragment and she easily did so. When you see a photograph of that particular x-ray in his book, you will easily see the fragment as well.

Why didn’t those pathologists see that fragment after the original x-rays were taken? After all, one of the main purposes of taking x-rays is to find bullet fragments and remove them as evidence. There is only one reasonable explanation: Someone made a fraudulent copy of the x-ray with the bullet fragment inserted. Mantik carefully explains how this would have been done with the technology existing in 1963.

Another fascinating part of the book comes at the end, when Mantik and Corsi describe the process by which Kennedy’s body was sneaked into the Bethesda Naval Medical Center morgue at 6:35 p.m. on the Friday of the assassination, which was almost 1 1/2 hours before the official entry time of 8 p.m. That’s a point covered in my book The Kennedy Autopsy and in Horne’s book Inside the Assassination Records Review Board. At the risk of further belaboring the obvious, when people are sneaking a president’s body into a morgue, they are up to no good.

I would be remiss if I failed to mention my latest book An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story, which details the CIA’s role in the cover-up by producing an altered copy of the famous Zapruder film, which captured the JFK assassination. As Mantik mentions in his book, he — as well as Horne — have also concluded that the extant Zapruder film is an altered, fraudulent copy of the original. In fact, at a JFK conference last fall at Duquesne University, Mantik delivered a fantastic presentation on this part of the JFK cover-up, during which he noted my book.

By establishing the fraudulent nature of the x-rays in his book The Final Analysis, Mantik has added to the mountain of evidence that establishes beyond a reasonable doubt the guilt of the national-security establishment in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. This is a great book. I highly recommend it.