In a new book, former Secret Service agent Paul Landis, largely silent for 60 years, says he found a bullet in Kennedy’s limo. A sometime presidential historian explains why that’s so significant, if true.
And yet, as I got to know him during more than a dozen meetings this past year, I was won over by his integrity and by the way his account of what he witnessed in Dallas—and in the grave months of American mourning that followed—remained consistent and unwavering. Over time, Landis and I became close. As a result, I am writing this assessment of his narrative not only as a historian and armchair investigator but as Landis’s confidant.
, a trip to Greece followed for an excursion aboard the luxury yacht of the shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis.Jackie Kennedy, her sister, Lee Radziwill, and Landis at a museum in Greece; October 8, 1963Then came November 22, 1963. A month after returning from Greece, Landis stood on the right rear running board of the Secret Service follow-up car, code-named “Halfback,” in the president’s motorcade as the vehicle headed from Dallas’s Love Field airport to a luncheon at the city’s Trade Mart.
Landis, to this day, attests that in the first few years following the assassination, he was simply unable to overcome his PTSD from witnessing the murder firsthand. He says that the mental image of the president’s head, exploding, had become a recurring flashback. He maintains that he desperately tried to push down the memories.
So there is virtue in looking anew at the evidence that was collected in 1963 and attempting to draw some tentative conclusions.are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.My own conclusion is that Landis’s story, for several reasons, is not just possible; it in fact makes more sense than the core finding of the Warren Commission, known as the “single bullet” theory.
First, it makes sense to retrace the main tenets of the Warren Commission’s official version of the assassination. According to the panel’s final report, issued in September 1964, three gunshots rang out as the president’s limousine passed by the Texas School Book Depository building in Dallas. Witnesses’ auditory memory differed, their testimony ranging from two to six shots. Most, however, recalled hearing a trio of blasts.
But what of the ammunition itself? Two large bullet fragments were found in the front seat of the limo, and slivers of lead fragments were recovered from an area below the jump seat where the governor’s wife, Nellie Connally, had been sitting.Bettmann/Getty Images. Landis contends that he reached over, picked up the lone bullet nestled in the crevice, and decided to place it in his pocket, mindful that if it were left there, precariously, it might be overlooked, pilfered by an unauthorized passerby, or misplaced once the president’s body was removed. Accompanying the first lady into Parkland, he says, he brought the bullet with him and, without conferring with Mrs.
But later that night, an autopsy began at Bethesda Naval Hospital, near Washington, DC. During the procedure, doctors examined the president’s remains, only to discover a small bullet hole in the right shoulder, about five inches down from the top of the collar. This injury had gone unnoticed at Parkland since the president was declared dead before his body could be surveyed in its entirety.
The next morning, the Bethesda pathologists, as stated in their Warren Commission testimony, were told by Parkland doctors that the wound in the front of Kennedy’s neck was more than just the result of the tracheotomy they had performed. In fact, the Parkland team stated, there had been a bullet hole in the anterior of the neck, and the ER staff had used that wound to create the tracheotomy.
Secondly, when the panel attempted to recreate the shooting in a manner consistent with the Zapruder film, FBI marksmen found that it took about 2.3 seconds to shoot, reload the bolt-action rifle, aim, and shoot again. Given Governor Connally’s reaction time, there did not appear to have been enough time for Oswald to have taken a second shot so quickly, let alone with any accuracy.
The panel’s members speculated that the bullet, after causing Kennedy’s and Connally’s wounds, ended up superficially stuck in Connally’s left leg and must have dropped onto his stretcher once inside the hospital.President Kennedy stands on the Texas airstrip with Jackie Kennedy and Governor John ConnallyBettmann/Getty Images.
But then a new chain of events overtook the gruesome sequence surrounding the assassination. A decision was made to transfer the president’s body, along with the first lady, Vice President Johnson, and others, back to Air Force One at Love Field. And with new tasks taking precedence for Landis—and the overwhelming national shock of the first assassination of an American president in 62 years —the special agent simply never gave the bullet a second thought, he says.
When he pushed the button to open the elevator, he later recalled, there was a stretcher in the elevator—one that the Warren Commission presumed was Governor Connally’s stretcher, returned from the surgery floor. Tomlinson testified that the stretcher had some sheets on it and a white covering on the pad, but no bullet. He moved the stretcher out of the elevator and placed it against a wall.stretcher already in the hall, which had been placed in front of a men’s restroom in the corner.
And what of the contemporaneous evidence from the witnesses who provided care to the governor in the emergency room and on the surgery floor? Johnsen was assigned to sit with the casket and near Mrs. Kennedy in the back of Air Force One on the return journey to the nation’s capital. The body, the widow, and the bullet all returned to Washington on the same plane, in close proximity.
Upon hearing this, the autopsy doctors tentatively revised their thesis and surmised that the bullet that entered Kennedy’s back must have exited through the front of his neck. To be fair to the record, the Warren Commission’s findings suggested that Kennedy’s stretcher was not the stretcher in the elevator lobby because the nurses who had treated the president testified that once they’d been informed that a casket had arrived at Parkland, they had removed bloody sheets from his stretcher before moving it across the hall to Trauma Room No. 2.
And what about the bullet wound in the front of Kennedy’s neck? In one of the earliest critiques of the Warren Commission report,proposed, not unreasonably, that the front-neck wound might have come from a bullet or bone fragment that was driven down and exited through the president’s throat from the final blast to his skull.
Perhaps Landis’s revelations will offer a critical mass of additional conjecture to prompt a reassessment of the “magic bullet” theory. In May, nearly six months after the assassination, Landis realized that the ordeal had taken its toll; concerned about his own mental health, he decided he couldn’t take it anymore. By August, at age 29, he had left the Secret Service. At the time, the Warren Commission had not issued its report, nor had Landis been interviewed for it; the public had not yet heard of the “single bullet” theory.
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