RIP to the Single-bullet theory?

[Jon Banks]

Vanity Fair: A New JFK Assassination Revelation Could Upend the Long-Held “Lone Gunman” Theory

Paul Landis was one of two Secret Service agents tasked with guarding first lady Jacqueline Kennedy on November 22, 1963—the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. In a new book, The Final Witness, to be published in October, Landis claims to have seen something that afternoon that he had never publicly admitted before. His secret, coming to light only now, will certainly reorient how historians and laymen perceive that grave and harrowing event. His account also raises questions about whether there might have been a second gunman in Dallas that day...

He claims he spotted a bullet resting on the top of the back of the seat. He says he picked it up, put it in his pocket, and brought it into the hospital. Then, upon entering Trauma Room No. 1 (at that stage, he was the only nonmedical person in the room besides Mrs. Kennedy, and both stayed for only a short period), he insists, he placed the bullet on a white cotton blanket on the president’s stretcher.

This secret, as it turns out, may upend key conclusions of the Warren Commission, the body created by President Lyndon Johnson to investigate the assassination.

The sad fact is that Landis—though required to provide his version of events to the Secret Service (and, in a second report, to what would become the Warren Commission)—never sat for an interview before the FBI and never testified before the commission itself. He left the Secret Service months after the assassination and before the panel had finished its work and issued its report.

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. He also says he felt unable to read anything in detail about the assassination until some 50 years later, starting in 2014, when he began to come to grips with all that he had witnessed, suppressed, and finally processed...

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/09/new-jfk-assassination-revelation-upend-lone-gunman

If Landis' story is true, it likely confirms that CE399 wasn't found on the Governor's stretcher and proves that the bullet that entered Kennedy's back didn't exit his throat.

[Alan Ford]

Vanity Fair: A New JFK Assassination Revelation Could Upend the Long-Held “Lone Gunman” Theory
If Landis' story is true, it likely confirms that CE399 wasn't found on the Governor's stretcher and proves that the bullet that entered Kennedy's back didn't exit his throat.

This calls for a new 3D model of some boxes!

[Chuck Salsman]

As absurd as the single bullet theory is, for this guy to not come forward for 60 years strains credulity about his story.

[Jon Banks]

As absurd as the single bullet theory is, for this guy to not come forward for 60 years strains credulity about his story.

It's perfectly plausible that he didn't know the significance of his recollection of events that day until later on. He says he suffered PTSD and didn't pay much attention to the investigations or alternate theories until the 2010s because the memories were too painful. Still, the fact that he waited so long to come forward with this information definitely makes his story worthy of skepticism.

More troubling though is the fact that neither the FBI nor the Warren Commission interviewed Landis. The trend throughout these investigations is that witnesses who had information that conflicted with the Lone-nut theory, were either ignored or were pressured to alter their testimonies.

Vanity Fair's article is much better written than the NY Times article on Landis FWIW.

I personally think he's telling the truth. While it's possible that he mistakenly put the bullet on Governor Connolly's stretcher thinking it was Kennedy's stretcher, his claim that the bullet was found in the rear seat where Kennedy was sitting, not the front seat where the governor was sitting, is not something that is easily forgotten or misremembered.

[Jerry Organ]

Landis seems to me to have conflated things he did pick up with something he read in "Six Seconds in Dallas", a 1967 book given him in 2014.

    "By this time someone was lifting the President's body out of the right side
     of the car. Agent Hill helped Mrs. Kennedy out of the car, and I followed.
     Mrs. Kennedy's purse and hat and a cigarette lighter were on the back seat.
     I picked these three items up as I walked through the car and followed Mrs.
     Kennedy into the hospital."
          -- Landris' statement, Nov. 27, 1963

In the 1967 book, Josiah Thompson advanced the theory that the President's back wound was shallow (due to a weak round) and that the bullet might have worked itself out. Thompson implied the bullet worked itself out onto the President's stretcher at Parkland, so that's where Landis left his "bullet".

Thompson later backed away from the shallow wound claim. Even in his book, he writes:

    "It might be argued that the character of this wound is not fully known.
     It was explored with fingers and metal probes, but it was not dissected.
     Here is an existential problem that no number of autopsy photos and
     X-rays can clear up."

Thompson also didn't believe the jacket and shirt material had a bunch at the nape and so dismissed the neck transit.



The "shallow wound" and "non-transit" conspiracy myths, while powerful arguments at first glance, might have influenced Landis.

[Jon Banks]

The "shallow wound" and "non-transit" conspiracy myths, while powerful arguments at first glance, might have influenced Landis.

The Vanity Fair article addresses that issue. It’s never been conclusively proven that the bullet that entered Kennedy’s back exited his throat. The Single-bullet theory wasn’t thought of at the time when Kennedy’s autopsy was done so they never tested the theory.

In other words, we can’t conclusively say that the bullet DIDN’T fall out of Kennedy’s back when his body was moved from the limo.

From the Vanity Fair article:

…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 Bethesda pathologists were puzzled when they probed the wound because it clearly was an entrance puncture, but it did not seem to have an exit wound, even though X-rays showed no bullet in the body.

In fact, the shoulder wound was shallow. Two doctors found that they could not pass more than half a pinky finger into the opening. Metal probes likewise uncovered no path of the bullet through the body.

Standing in proximity to the doctors were two FBI agents, Frank O’Neill and Jim Sibert, who had been dispatched by the bureau’s director, J. Edgar Hoover, to witness the autopsy and recover bullets or bullet fragments for the FBI lab. In their written statement, the agents discussed the frustration of the Bethesda doctors when they could not locate a bullet or exit wound for the projectile that had entered the president’s shoulder.

That night, according to the agents’ account, one of them placed a call to the FBI lab and found out that a “stretcher bullet” had been discovered at Parkland. Doctors used this information to theorize that “this accounted for no bullet being located which had entered the back region and that since external cardiac massage had been performed at Parkland Hospital, it was entirely possible that through such movement the bullet had worked its way back out of the point of entry and had fallen on the stretcher.”

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 (front) of the neck, and the ER staff had used that wound to create the tracheotomy. No one at the autopsy, according to FBI agents Sibert and O’Neill, had suspected there was a hole in the front of the president’s neck. With this new information, the Bethesda doctors revised their findings and assumed that the front wound was an exit for the bullet that had entered the president’s body from the back.

There were problems with this inference. The neck and shoulder had not been sectioned by those performing the autopsy to establish a bullet path. And by the time of the revelation of the front-neck injury, the president’s body had been brought to the White House to lay in repose in the East Room. (The next day, it lay in state in the Capitol rotunda.) Further, the wound in the back, according to Silbert and O’Neill, did not align with the location of the front-neck wound; such a pathway would have required a bullet traveling from the book depository, behind the motorcade, to have changed course inside the president’s body so as to exit higher up, through the neck, without hitting any bone to alter its course.

Agents O’Neill and Sibert didn’t buy it. “I do not see how the bullet that entered below the shoulder in the back could have come out the front of the throat,” O’Neill told the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978.

Landis’s discovery of the bullet on top of the rear seat, if true, comports with the initial finding: that the bullet had lodged superficially in the president’s back before being dislodged by the final blast to his head. It also explains the “pristine” nature of the bullet.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/09/new-jfk-assassination-revelation-upend-lone-gunman

[Jon Banks]

From political commentator Larry Sabato on Twitter/X:

“Part of new Landis info appears consistent with Parkland nurse Phyllis Hall's largely-forgotten account that she saw a bullet laying "almost perpendicular" on JFK's stretcher between Kennedy's earlobe and shoulder. See below. Unfortunately, Ms. Hall died April 18, 2023 at 87.”

[Charles Collins]

Another hoax “new account” in a new book that “just happens” to be published perfectly timed with the sixtieth anniversary of the assassination. Yawn, these types of things will probably still be appearing on the hundredth and sixtieth anniversary…