He still remembers the first shot well. For a moment, as he followed the presidential convoy, he had the vain hope that the explosion could have been just fireworks or a flat tire. But he was proficient with weapons and knew their shots well. Then came another shot. And another. And the president fell.
For countless nights he relived this dark moment in nightmares. Now, 60 years later, Paul Landis, one of the Secret Service agents who stood just feet from President John F. Kennedy on that fateful day in Dallas, tells his full story for the first time. And in at least one fundamental way, his account differs from the official version in a way that could change the understanding of what happened at Dealey Plaza.
Since then, Landis has spent most of his years running from history, trying to escape this unforgettable moment seared into the consciousness of a grieving nation. The memory of the explosion of violence and the desperate rush to the hospital, the devastating flight home and the painful funeral at which John Jr. saluted his murdered father all of this was too much suffering for Landis, it caused him so much grief that he left behind the Secret Service and Washington.
Secret Service agent Paul Landis says he has new revelations about JFK’s death. Photo: Amir Hamja/The New York Times
Until finally, after his nightmares had finally stopped, he was able to think about it again. And he managed to read about the topic. And he realized that those words didn’t accurately describe what had happened, not as he remembered it. If Landis’ memory is correct, the muchdiscussed “miracle weapon” may not have been so magical after all.
Landis’ recollection contradicts the theory developed by the Warren Commission, which has been the subject of so much speculation and debate over the years that one of the projectiles fired at the president’s limousine was not only Kennedy, but also former Texas Governor John Connally , met. who accompanied him in the car, in different parts of his body.
The question everyone wants to hear
Landis’ account, part of an asyetunpublished memoir, could rewrite the narrative of one of the most tumultuous days in American history in important ways. Maybe it’s nothing more than that, but it could also embolden investigators who have long suspected the involvement of another gunman in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, adding new suspicions to one of the country’s most persistent mysteries.
Of course, like everything related to the Kennedy assassination, Landis’ report raises its own suspicions. Landis remained silent for 60 years, raising doubts even among his former Secret Service partner, and memoirs can confuse even those who seriously doubt their memories. Two elements of his report contradict official statements he made to authorities immediately after the shooting, and some of the implications of his report are not easily reconciled with existing records.
But Landis was there, he witnessed the murder firsthand, and it’s rare for new testimony to emerge six decades after the crime. He has never subscribed to a conspiracy theory and emphasizes that he is not propagating one now. At 88, Landis says he only wants to tell the story of what he saw and did. He will leave the conclusions to others.
“There’s no destination right now,” he said in an interview in Cleveland last month, speaking to a reporter about the issue for the first time as he prepared for the Oct. 10 release of his book, “The Final Witness.” published by Chicago Review Press. “The time I needed to tell my story is over.”
Kennedy was killed in Dallas in November 1963
The narrative revolves around a 6.5mm coppercoated projectile. The Warren Commission ruled that one of the bullets fired that day struck the president in the back, exited the front of his throat and continued on its trajectory, striking Connally and in some way injuring his back, chest, a wrist and a leg. It seemed incredible that a single projectile was capable of all this, which is why skeptics dubbed the version the “magic bullet theory.”
Investigators came to this conclusion partly because the projectile was found on a stretcher on which Connally was presumably being treated at Parkland Memorial Hospital. They therefore assumed that the bullet had exited his body during attempts to save his life. However, Landis, who was not interviewed by the Warren Commission, said that was not the case.
In fact, Landis said, he was the one who found the projectile not in the hospital next to Connally, but in the back seat of the presidential limousine where Kennedy was sitting.
Landis said that when he saw the projectile after the presidential motorcade arrived at the hospital, he kept it to avoid souvenir hunters. For reasons that still seem unclear even to him, Landis said he went to the hospital and placed the bullet next to Kennedy on the gurney where the president was, assuming it might somehow help doctors figure out what happened. At some point, he now suspects, the stretchers could have come closer together and the projectile could have jumped from one to the other.
“There was no one guarding the crime scene and that really bothered me,” Landis said. “All the agents there were focused on the president.” A crowd gathered. “Everything happened very quickly. And I feared that the projectile might disappear or be lost this was a test, as I realized at the time, very important. So I thought, ‘Paul, you have to make a decision,’ and I did.”
Landis suspects that the projectile hit Kennedy in the back, but for some reason lost momentum, failed to penetrate deeply into the president’s torso, and was eventually ejected as his body was removed from the limousine.
Landis was hesitant to speculate about larger impacts. He always believed that Lee Harvey Oswald was the only shooter.
Lee Harvey Oswald was named as the sole responsible for the crime. Photo: Victor Hugo King/Library of Congress/Portal
But what now? “At this point I start to doubt myself,” he said. “Now I’m starting to question things.” Landis didn’t stay long.
Landis is an Ohio native and the son of a college athletic trainer. He doesn’t have the imposing look of a security guard. He had to stretch to reach the minimum height of 5 feet 7 inches required of candidates for the Secret Service; and today it would no longer meet the requirements. “Today I was too small,” he said, to enter the agency. Landis is composed and modest, has impeccably trimmed gray hair, and wore a jacket and tie to the interview. Despite some hearing difficulties and a weakened voice, his mind is clear and his memories flow.
In recent years, he has confided his story to several prominent figures, including former Secret Service Director Lewis Merletti. Attorney James Robenalt, author of several history books, extensively researched the Kennedy assassination and helped Landis process his memories.
“If what he says is true, and I am inclined to believe it is, the question of a second or more shooter could be raised again,” Robenalt said. “If the bullet, which we know as a magic or intact bullet, lodged in President Kennedy’s back, that means that the central thesis of the Warren Report, the single bullet theory, is wrong.” And if Connally of one If another projectile was hit, he added, then it is possible that it was not fired by Oswald, who, Robenalt argued, would not have been able to reload the weapon so quickly.
Merletti, who has been friends with Landis for a decade, doesn’t know how to interpret his report. “I don’t know if this story is true or not, but I know that the agents who were there at the time were tormented for years by what happened,” he said in an interview.
Merletti put Landis in touch with Duquesne University President Ken Gormley, a prominent presidential historian, who helped him find a publisher to publish his book. In an interview, Gormley said he was not surprised that after so many years of telling his story, a traumatized former Secret Service agent came forward and compared Landis’ memoir to deathbed testimony in court proceedings.
“It’s very common for people to want to make peace with the world at the end of their lives,” Gormley said. “They want to make public information that they have preserved, especially if it is a piece of history whose record they would like to see corrected. This doesn’t feel like a game where someone is trying to get attention or make money. I don’t see it that way at all. I think he firmly believes in it. I don’t know if it fits. But other people might find out eventually.”
Vice President Lyndon Johnson took office shortly after his death
Landis’ account differs in two ways from the written statements he recorded in the week after Kennedy’s assassination. He did not mention finding the projectile and said he only heard two shots. “I don’t remember hearing a third shot,” he wrote. He also didn’t mention entering the emergency room where Kennedy was taken, writing that he was standing “at the door” when the first lady entered.
Gerald Posner, author of “Case Closed,” a 1993 book that concluded that Oswald actually acted alone in Kennedy’s assassination, said Landis was duplicitous. Although he does not question the former agent’s sincerity, Posner stated that his report was not credible.
“People’s memories generally don’t improve over time, and for me that’s a warning sign that triggers the skepticism I have about his story because I don’t believe that about some key details of the murder, including that Number of shots he took. “Memory has improved rather than worsened,” Posner said.
“Even if he describes exactly what happened to the bullet,” Posner said, “it could simply mean that the bullet we know about came from (former) Gov. Connally in the limousine and not on the Parkland gurney Hospital where she was delivered.”found”.
Landis claimed there were errors in the reports he filed after the murder. He said he was in shock and had barely slept the past five nights as he helped the first lady through the ordeal, and that he had not paid enough attention to the texts he provided to authorities. Landis said it hadn’t occurred to him to mention the projectile.
Landis said he didn’t realize the difference between his memory and the official report about the bullet until 2014, but didn’t go public at the time because he believed he had made a mistake when he placed the projectile on the stretcher, without saying anything to anyone at that time. of nonexistent crime and lack of technology.
“I didn’t want to talk about it,” Landis said. “I was scared. I started thinking, ‘Did I do something wrong?’ I was afraid I might have done something wrong and felt like I shouldn’t talk about it.”
And in fact, Landis’ partner Clint Hill, the legendary Secret Service agent who jumped into the limousine in a futile effort to save Kennedy, advised him not to say anything. “Many consequences,” Hill warned in a 2014 email that Landis saved and shared with the reporter last month.
Hill, who has recounted what he saw in several books and interviews, expressed doubts about Landis’ version of that Friday. “I think a story becomes suspect when what he claims now, 60 years after the fact, differs from what he wrote in the days after the tragedy” and from reports in the years after, Hill said in an email. “I noticed serious discrepancies in various statements/versions.”
Landis’s encounter with history began in the small town of Worthington, Ohio, north of Columbus. After college and a brief stint with the Air National Guard in Ohio, he was working at a clothing store when a family friend told him about his job with the Secret Service. Admired, Landis joined the Cincinnati office in 1959, where he hunted down criminals who were stealing Social Security checks from mailboxes.
A year later, Landis was sent to Washington, where he joined the security team caring for thenPresident Dwight Eisenhower’s grandchildren. After Kennedy’s election, Landis, whose code name was Debutante because of her young age, was tasked with protecting the president’s children and later the first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, along with Hill. Landis, then 28, was part of the presidential convoy in a support car that followed the procession a few meters behind the right side of the black Cadillac convertible codenamed Halfback, the presidential limousine because the first lady was accompanying her husband on a visit in Dallas that fall afternoon in 1963.
When Landis heard the first shot, he looked over his right shoulder in the direction of the sound but could not see where the shot was coming from. Then he turned toward the limousine and saw Kennedy raising his arms, obviously concerned. Suddenly, Landis noticed that Hill had jumped out of the support car and was running toward the limousine. Landis thought about doing the same thing, but had no opinion on it.
He said he heard a second shot, which sounded louder to him, and finally the fatal shot that struck Kennedy in the head. Landis had to dodge to avoid being hit by the brain tissue that had been loosened by the impact. And I knew at that moment that the president was dead. Hill, who was in the limo at that moment, turned around and acknowledged death with a thumbs down.
When they arrived at the hospital, Hill and Landis convinced the distraught first lady to release her husband so he could be taken inside. After everyone got out of the car, Landis noticed two bullet fragments in a pool of blood. He grabbed one of them but left it lying there.
Landis said it was then that he noticed the intact bullet in the fold of the dark leather upholstery. He said he put the bullet in his jacket pocket and went to the hospital, where he planned to hand it to a supervisor, but in the confusion he placed it on Kennedy’s stretcher instead.
The hospital’s chief machinist later discovered the projectile while retrieving Connally’s already empty stretcher and collided with another stretcher in the hallway, causing the bullet to fall to the floor.
The Warren Commission report states that “President Kennedy’s gurney was excluded as the source of the projectile” because the president remained on his gurney while doctors attempted to save his life and was not removed until his body was placed in a coffin.
Investigators determined that the projectile, designated Commission Exhibit 399, was fired from the same C2766 MannlicherCarcano rifle found on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. They concluded that the bullet penetrated Kennedy and then passed through Connally’s right shoulder, hit his ribs, exited under his right nipple, continued its trajectory to his right wrist and also struck his left thigh.
Doctors agreed that a single projectile could have done all the damage. However, the bullet found was described as virtually intact, having lost only between 0.065 grams and 0.13 grams of its original weight of 10.4 to 10.5 grams, causing skeptics to doubt that the projectile had caused whatever the bullet caused had. The commission said it caused . Nevertheless, on the 50th anniversary of the assassination, ballistics experts using modern forensic techniques concluded that the onebullet theory was entirely plausible.
Landis said he was surprised the Warren Commission didn’t interview him but assumed his superiors were protecting the agents who were still making contacts late that morning. (Landis until 5 a.m., but he insisted no agent got drunk). “Nobody really questioned me,” he said.
Many photos from these days of mourning show Landis alongside Jacqueline Kennedy during the president’s farewell ceremonies. Night after night, his mind replayed those seconds of violence in Dallas, projecting his own Zapruder film on an endless loop. “The president’s head exploding — I couldn’t shake the sight of it,” he said. “No matter what I did, that was all I thought about.”
As Landis and Hill continued to ensure her safety, the former first lady was constantly on the move in the months that followed. “We could hear her crying in the back seat. I wanted to say something, but it really wasn’t our job to say anything,” Landis recalls.
After six months he couldn’t take it anymore and left the Secret Service. Haunted by memory, Landis moved to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, then to New York, and then to Ohio, a place near Cleveland. For decades, he made a living as a real estate agent, salesman and house painter—everything that had nothing to do with protecting presidents.
Landis had a passing knowledge of conspiracy theories but never read books about them or the Warren Commission report. “I just paid attention. I just withdrew. I felt like I had already been through everything. I had seen the whole thing. I know what I saw and did. And done.”
Landis gave a few interviews in 2010 but never mentioned the projectile. Then, in 2014, a local police chief he knew gave him a copy of “Six Seconds in Dallas,” a 1967 book by Josiah Thompson in which the author argues that multiple shooters were involved in the shooting be. Kennedy assassination. Landis read the paper and concluded that the official account of the projectile was incorrect. Which led to conversations with Merletti and Gormley and finally, after many years, to his book.
The process was not easy. When he finished the manuscript, Landis stared at his computer screen and cried uncontrollably. “I didn’t realize I had so many repressed emotions and feelings,” he said. “I just couldn’t stop. And that brought me tremendous emotional relief.” / TRANSLATION BY GUILHERME RUSSO