An ex-Secret Service agent who was feet away from John F Kennedy when the former president was shot to death has broken a decades-old silence to cast doubts on the single-bullet theory held by the commission which investigated the assassination.
In an interview published by the New York Times over the weekend, Paul Landis explained how he long believed the official finding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he killed Kennedy.
But, based on discrepancies between things he saw on the day of the assassination and the report from the commission which investigated Kennedy’s killing, “I’m beginning to doubt myself,” Landis told the Times. “Now I begin to wonder.”
Landis’s recollection of Kennedy’s slaying is bound to fuel those who believe multiple shooters killed the late president in Dallas on 22 November 1963. Yet his remarks – coming about a month before he releases a memoir – differ from two written statements which he turned in shortly after the assassination, surely keeping one of the darkest chapters in US history shrouded in mystery.
Landis was on the running board of the topless car that Kennedy was riding when – as he tells it – he heard a barrage of gunshots and a bullet struck the president from behind. The Warren Commission convened to examine the investigation concluded that one bullet then continued forward, striking fellow passenger and Texas governor John Connally in his back, thigh, chest and wrist.
As the Times noted, the main reason that investigators believe that was because the bullet was found on a stretcher used to move Connally around a hospital afterward.
Enter Landis’s new interview and his upcoming memoir, The Final Witness: A Kennedy Secret Service Agent Breaks His Silence After 60 Years. Landis told the Times that he was the person who discovered that bullet, which he remembers being stuck in the limousine seat behind Kennedy’s seat after the president had been brought to the hospital.
Landis also told the Times that he didn’t think the bullet went too deeply into Kennedy’s back before “popping back out” prior to the president’s removal from the car. Worried that someone would try to pocket it as a souvenir, Landis said he took the bullet and placed it next to a stretchered Kennedy.
“It was a piece of evidence that I realized right away [was] very important,” Landis said, according to the Times. “And I didn’t want it to disappear or get lost. So it was, ‘Paul, you’ve got to make a decision’ – and I grabbed it.”
Realizing in 2014 that the location of the bullet’s recovery cited by him was different than the one cited by the Warren Commission, Landis checked in with multiple officials, according to the Times’s report. He was generally met with skepticism, largely because of two written statements that he filed himself.
Neither statement mentioned his finding the bullet in question, and he reported hearing only a pair of gunshots at the time of the assassination, the Times wrote.
Landis maintained that he was in shock and suffering from sleep deprivation at the time he filed those reports. He said he expected those reports to have mistakes and omissions because his focus at the time was on supporting the first lady Jacqueline Kennedy through her grief.
Going public with his contradictions of the official Kennedy assassination narrative was not an easy decision, as his lengthy wait to do so suggests, Landis told the Times.
“I didn’t want to talk about it,” said Landis, who left the federal agency whose duties include protecting presidents about six months after the Kennedy assassination. “I was afraid. I started to think, did I do something wrong? There was a fear that I might have done something wrong and I shouldn’t talk about it.”
The Final Witness is set to be released on 10 October. Its scheduled arrival comes less than a year after Biden’s White House directed the National Archives to publish about 12,000 documents pertaining to Kennedy’s assassination – a move that more than 70% of Americans favored, according to a new poll at the time.
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