Paul Landis, an 88-year-old former Secret Service agent, was just a few feet away from when President Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas, Texas. At the time, he was assigned to protect Jackie Kennedy, the former first lady.
Mr. Landis, in a recent interview with the New York Times, cast doubt on the government-backed Warren Commission's finding that a "magic bullet" struck and exited the president before it struck then-Texas Gov. John Connally Jr., a theory that has been the subject of criticism for decades and has helped fuel a range alternative theories about the former president's assassination. Officially, the U.S. government and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has maintained that a lone gunman—Lee Harvey Oswald—was the sole perpetrator.....
In the interview with the paper, published on Sept. 9, Mr. Landis recalled hearing multiple gunshots at Dealy Plaza in Dallas as he went behind President Kennedy's limousine, seeing the president moving forward after being shot in the head. After the assassination, Mr. Landis recalled picking up what he called a near-perfect-condition bullet from the back seat of President Kennedy's limousine, near where the president had been sitting.
The former agent then transported the bullet to the hospital where President Kennedy was taken and put on a stretcher to be examined. The reason why he took it is because he believed someone might pocket the bullet, which he did not describe in detail, as a keepsake....
Explaining why he hasn't spoken out for 60 years, the former agent said, “I didn’t want to talk about it." He left the Secret Service months after the assassination. “I was afraid. I started to think, did I do something wrong? There was a fear that I might have done something wrong and I shouldn’t talk about it," he said.
Historian James Robenalt, who helped work on Mr. Landis's forthcoming memoir, said his eyewitness account raised the possibility of there being more than one gunman.
“If the bullet we know as the magic or pristine bullet stopped in President Kennedy’s back, it means that the central thesis of the Warren Report, the single-bullet theory, is wrong," he told the NY Times....
“The FBI recreation suggests that Oswald would not have had enough time to get off two separate shots so quickly as to hit Connally after wounding the president in the back," he wrote. Mr. Oswald, according to officials, had used a bolt-action Carcano Model 38 infantry carbine.
Referring to his memoir, meanwhile, Mr. Landis said that "there’s no goal at this point. I just think it had been long enough that I needed to tell my story."
[From The Epoch Times]
