Six decades later, new details are still coming to light about one of the most scrutinized events in American history: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963.
Paul Landis, an 88-year-old former Secret Service agent who witnessed the president’s death up close, says in a soon-to-be published memoir that he took a bullet from the car. after Kennedy was shot and then left her on the president’s stretcher at the hospital.
It might seem like a minor detail in a case that has been closely scrutinized since the 1960s, but for people who have spent years analyzing every shred of evidence, Landis’s account is an important and unexpected development.
Conspiracies about how many gunmen were involved, who was ultimately responsible and how many bullets actually hit the president have abounded in the decades since the assassination.
The idea that the true facts of the case differ from the official version is the original conspiracy theory of modern America, and according to some historians, the assassination instigated the decline of Americans’ confidence in their government.
Depending on how you look at it, Landis’s story changes nothing or it changes everything.
His book The Final Witness is sure to add more spark to the never-ending national obsession with this murder.
“This is really the most significant news about the assassination since 1963,” says James Robenalt, a historian and Kennedy expert who worked with Landis preparing him to make his public revelations.
New details in an old case
The main facts of the Kennedy assassination are, by now, well known.
On November 22, 1963, a convertible carrying President Kennedy, First Lady Jackie Kennedy, and Texas Governor John Connally Jr. and his wife was driving through Dealey Plaza in Dallas when a series of gunshots were heard.
Kennedy was shot in the head and neck, and Connally was shot in the back. Authorities took both to nearby Parkland Memorial Hospital, where Kennedy was pronounced dead. The governor survived.
The Warren Commission report, the result of a government investigation into the assassination, identified Lee Harvey Oswald as the sole attacker.
Ballistic evidence helped confirm this conclusion. Oswald was shot and killed shortly after Kennedy’s assassination while in police custody.
The report also concluded that a single bullet passed through Kennedy and into Connally, hitting both in several places, helping to explain how a single gunman carried out the attack. The discovery became known as the “single bullet theory” or “magic bullet theory.”
The commission was based in part on the fact that a bullet was later found on Connally’s stretcher at the hospital.
At that time no one knew where it had come from. But the committee ultimately concluded that the bullet had become dislodged as doctors rushed to treat Connally.
Some skeptics of the official report have long focused on that single bullet, finding it hard to believe it could have caused as many injuries as it did to two separate men.
Landis’s story has fallen like a bomb not only because it provides new first-hand testimony but because, according to some opinions, it complicates the single bullet theory.
What Paul Landis remembers
On the day of the assassination, Landis, then 28 years old, was assigned to protect Jackie Kennedy.
When the attack began, he was a few meters from President Kennedy and witnessed the terrible shot to his head.
Then came absolute chaos. What Landis did next he told no one but a few confidants for decades.
In an interview with the New York Times, Landis said that after the motorcade arrived at the hospital, he saw a bullet in Kennedy’s car, behind where the president had been sitting.
He picked it up and put it in his pocket. Shortly afterward, according to her recollection, she was in an emergency room with President Kennedy, placing the bullet on the president’s stretcher so that the evidence would travel with the body.
“There was no one there to protect the place, and that was very disturbing to me,” Landis told the New York Times.
“This was all happening very quickly. And I was afraid that that might be evidence, which I realized right away,” he continued. “Very important. And I didn’t want it to disappear or get lost.”
Landis apparently never presented this evidence and the Warren Commission never interviewed him. He never noted it in any official report.
“He hadn’t slept at all and yet he was asked to continue working, and he was suffering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder,” Robenalt told the BBC.
“He forgot about the bullet,” says Robenalt, who spent a lot of time interviewing Landis about his memories and recently wrote an article for Vanity Fair analyzing the revelation.
“I was totally absorbed in the enormous things that were happening.”
For years, he avoided reading about the murder or the conspiracy theories it spawned, until he decided he was ready to tell his story to the world.
The mysterious bullet
Those who have read Landis’s account have drawn different conclusions, and the story raises as many questions as it supposedly answers.
Robenalt told the BBC that he believes this account undermines the “one bullet” theory.
Landis now thinks the bullet he found in the car was the one that turned up on Connally’s stretcher.
He thinks the bullet lodged superficially in Kennedy’s back and fell into the car.
If he’s right, Robenalt says, Connelly and Kennedy may not have been hit by the same bullet.
He even believes this could revive skepticism about whether Oswald acted alone.
If it had not been a bullet that caused both men’s wounds, Robenalt asks in his extensive article in Vanity Fair, could Oswald have fired both shots in such rapid succession from the rifle he used?
Several people, however, are skeptical of Landis’s account, including a colleague who was also directly involved that day.
Clint Hill, the agent who jumped into the back of Kennedy’s car to protect the president, does not believe Landis’ story.
“If you looked at all the evidence, the statements and things that happened, they don’t match up,” Hill told NBC News. “It doesn’t make any sense to me that he’s trying to put it (the bullet) in the president’s stretcher.”
For Gerald Posner, investigative journalist and author of “Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK,” Landis’ story actually supports the “single bullet” theory.
Posner claims that “her account should be taken seriously,” but also has doubts about the accuracy of Landis’ memories after nearly six decades.
For example, Posner pointed to interviews of people who were inside the emergency room with Kennedy at Parkland Hospital. No one mentioned Landis’ presence there, he said.
And the fact that Landis never reported to authorities raises questions about his conduct that day, Posner says.
“That said, he might say things that aren’t correct, but the underlying fact that ‘I saw a bullet, I grabbed it, put it in my pocket and left it at the hospital before I left,’ that may or may not be true.” says Posner.
Whether or not Landis opens up a new mystery or simply confirms an existing fact almost doesn’t matter.
After all, this is the Kennedy assassination, and its revelation will ensure years of debate and dissection of one of America’s greatest national traumas.
“Are they going to solve it so that everyone is 100% satisfied? No,” Posner says. “It’s a case that, for most people, will never be closed.”
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BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/articles/cw562vdqdw5o, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-09-13 16:10:07
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