President Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connally, accompanied by their wives, minutes before the assassination, November 22, 1963 in Dallas.Bettmann Archives
Sixty years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, theories about the first live-streamed assassination attempt in history have spread like chewing gum, both in their documentary version (a constant ritornello over the facts) and in their incomprehensible dimension of conspiracy: the supposed loose edges, the shadowy areas of a historical event that still sends rivers of ink flowing. The first section includes two documentaries released this month and the second the appearance of a witness who supposedly refutes the magic bullet theory put forward in 1964 by the special investigative commission, the Warren Commission: the single bullet that would have killed the president and injured the governor from Texas, John Connally, who was traveling with him in the convertible. According to the above-mentioned witness Paul Landis, one of the four secret agents standing in the stirrup protecting the president that day, this was not the case.
If social networks had existed in 1963, proven facts, clues, suspicions and speculations would have sparked an endless bonfire. But hovering above the memories is the legend that continues to hover over the United States as if the events happened the day before yesterday. The JFK case is also becoming more topical thanks to the jump into the political arena of his nephew Bobby Kennedy, who has a not insignificant 24% of voting intentions as a presidential candidate in 2024. For the USA, Kennedy is the myth of the eternal return: the newspapers are reincarnations of the history of this patrician family, the closest thing to a dynasty the country has ever had. The dynasty of Camelot.
The facts proven by the Warren Commission and all records accredited to the National Archives in Washington, which has a special center and permanent exhibition on the assassination, have been challenged by Landis, who claims to have found a second bullet in the back of Kennedy’s limousine . This hypothesis casts doubt on the existence of a single gunman, Lee Harwey Oswald, who was arrested for murder and murdered two days later in the basement of the Dallas Central Police Station while in custody.
Of all the official documentation on this case, 97% is publicly available. Eleven months ago, the National Archives Research Service estimated the number of fully classified documents at just 515 and the number of partially classified documents at another 2,545. The most recent decision in this regard is a memorandum from President Joe Biden dated December 15, 2022, in which he states that “from the date of this memorandum until May 1, 2023, the appropriate authorities and NARA [Administración Nacional de Archivos y Registros] will look through the remaining material in the archive together […] to maximize transparency and disclose all information in the files relating to the murder unless there are more compelling reasons not to. Any information authorities propose to further defer disclosure beyond June 30, 2023 will be limited to the absolute minimum within the legal norm.”
Secret documents
The fact that 3% still falls under Article 5 of the JFK Act, which provides for the reservation to protect national defense, intelligence operations or foreign relations, captures the imagination of many. And who better to refute the official story than Landis, who was there (whether it took 60 years to do so is another question, perhaps to say goodbye to the world in peace with her memories?). In interviews he gave on the eve of the release of his memoir “The Final Witness” in October, the man said he heard three gunshots – not two, as he claimed in the written statement he gave to authorities a week after shooting presented. Murder – and saw the president collapse.
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Landis’ story also emboldens those who claim there was more than one shooter in Dallas that day. Although he completely rejects conspiracy theories, he questions the Warren Commission’s main conclusion that one of the bullets fired that day hit the president from behind, with an exit hole through the front of his throat, and struck Governor Connally, seriously wounding him in the back , on the chest, on the wrist and on the thigh. It seemed incredible that a single bullet could do all this, which is why skeptics called it the magic bullet theory.
Investigators came to this conclusion in part because the bullet was found on a stretcher believed to have transported Connally to Parkland Memorial Hospital and therefore assumed it was removed from his body during first aid had been. But Landis, who was never interviewed by the Warren Commission, said that was not the case. He actually found the bullet, he claims, not in the hospital, but in the limousine, hidden in the back of the back seat where Kennedy was sitting. Landis grabbed the bullet to prevent it from disappearing into the chaos as evidence, placed it on Kennedy’s gurney at the hospital, and then it somehow appeared on Connally’s gurney.
One of the secret agents rushes towards the president, who is helped by his wife Jacqueline, after he is hit by gunfire.Bettmann Archive
Landis always thought Lee H. Oswald was the only shooter, but “at this point I’m starting to doubt myself,” he told the New York Times in September. The investigation determined that the bullets were fired from a Mannlicher-Carcano C2766 rifle found on the sixth floor of the Texas Textbook Depository, now a nondescript administrative building. If Governor Connally had been hit by another bullet, as Landis’s statement suggests, it is unlikely that Oswald would have had time to reload his rifle so quickly.
The autopsy reports are the protagonists of the documentary JFK: What the Doctors saw, which collects the experiences of the doctors in the emergency room of Parkland Memorial Hospital, where the president was transferred. The New York Times critic puts the documentary very vividly: “While some documentaries feel like summaries of a Wikipedia page, What the Doctors Saw is more like a question-and-answer session with Siri,” Manzana’s virtual assistant. But the testimony he collects also contradicts the Warren Commission’s findings, such as that the front entry hole in the neck of a bullet, some doctors say, suggests there was more than one shooter. The hour-and-a-half document also reveals the contradictions between the injuries seen by doctors at the Dallas hospital and the autopsy report conducted in Bethesda.
The documentary miniseries JFK: One Day in America (JFK: One Day in the USA) deals with the intra-history of that November 22nd, 1963 in three chapters. According to the criticism of the newspaper The Wall Street Journal, this is the main merit of the national production Geographic brings together the known and the unpublished , if there is anything left to discover from those days that shocked the world. And it seems so: private recordings, relatively unknown recordings and unusual angles – of Jack Ruby, for example, loitering with the press and the police at the Dallas police station the night before Oswald was murdered; or Jackie Kennedy in the crowd waiting to accompany her husband’s coffin on the plane back to Washington – create a feeling of almost familial intimacy, of grief very close to mourning. The documentary contains new material, such as the statements of two Secret Service agents, Clint Hill and the aforementioned Landis, who does not comment on his ballistics theory.
Speculation about the character of Ruby, a minor figure in the underworld and Oswald’s murderer while he was in custody – a feat that raised almost as much doubt as the assassination attempt – appears to be reflected in the statements of journalists who are astonished that that Ruby, a He was an old acquaintance and confidant of the city police and could move freely in such a safe environment as the police station. In 1964, the Warren Commission concluded that Ruby acted alone to avenge Kennedy’s death, just as the assassinated Oswald acted alone. At least in theory. For suspects: The shooting that ended Oswald’s life in the basement of Dallas police headquarters was the final stop in an alleged plot to destroy Kennedy. Two murders in just 48 hours, broadcast live by cameras, which, together with the murder of the president’s brother, Senator Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 – the father of the current candidate for the White House – opened the floodgates of political violence in the country .
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