It’s hard to believe that there is a new eyewitness account from a Secret Service agent who was present at the time of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. After all, this is one of the most investigated, revisited and discussed events in the history of the United States.
But Paul Landis, who in 1963 was a young agent assigned to protect the first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, shares memories in a new memoir, “The Final Witness,” which will be published next month. The 60th anniversary of the assassination is in November.
What Landis remembers about being near Kennedy’s body may challenge elements of the so-called magic bullet theory, that one of the bullets that hit Kennedy also wounded then-Texas governor John Connally. According to the Warren Commission, the intact bullet was discovered when it fell to the ground next to a stretcher carrying Connally.
In his first television interview on CNN On Wednesday, Landis, now 88, described the assassination and said he recovered a bullet from the limousine carrying the Kennedys. Landis said he later placed her in the exam room where the president was being treated at Parkland Memorial Hospital.
He described a chaotic scene and his split-second decisions to remove the bullet from the limousine and place it next to the president. “I thought, well, this is the perfect place to leave the bullet, it’s important evidence and this was the opportunity to leave it,” Landis said.
Why did he wait so long to speak
“It was all very stressful for all the agents,” Landis said, explaining why he didn’t tell supervisors about the bullet at the time or in the decades since. “I just stood within sight of Mrs. Kennedy. I was afraid I was going to pass out and I told myself I needed to hang in there,” she said.
He was never interviewed for the Warren Commission Report and said he feared that if he had been, he would have collapsed “and been an embarrassment to the Secret Service.” Haunted by his experience, Landis said he left the Secret Service less than a year after the assassination.
There are different positions on the information received from Landis’s memoirs
Jefferson Morley edits a newsletter, JFK Facts, that pushes for more transparency in the official record of Kennedy’s assassination. He has long doubted the “magic bullet” theory and deconstructed official government reports.
“Landis shows that this is an open question and that we really need a much better explanation of what happened on November 22, 1963,” Morley said.
Another expert says Landis did not alter the basic conclusions of numerous government reports and exhaustive investigations. Farris Rookstool III is a former FBI analyst who reviewed documents from the Kennedy assassination.
“The problem with all of this is that it doesn’t change the basic fact that three shots were fired from the southeast corner of the Texas School Book Depository with Lee Harvey Oswald’s rifle,” Rookstool said.
It would be impossible to examine all the evidence and it would be foolish to try
If you want to spend days sifting through evidence, reports, and unclassified documents, visit the National Archives website. They have the Warren Commission report, which most people now consider incomplete and rushed.
The National Archives also published the work of a Congressional investigation that verified the work of the Warren Commission, the special House committee on assassinations, which issued a report in 1979 that also concluded that Oswald fired three shots and that two struck Kennedy.
The House investigation did not rule out the possibility of another shooter and also suggested that the evidence pointed to some type of conspiracy but not to any suspect. The committee concluded that there was no evidence that the Cuban government, the mafia or the CIA were involved.
There are still secrets
Despite promises from several presidents and a law passed by Congress in 1992, the CIA, the Department of Defense and the State Department continue to hold documents that they refuse to release publicly.
Although the 1992 law was passed in an effort to increase credibility and reduce secrecy, reading the 1998 report of a special council created at the National Archives to pressure the American national security apparatus to comply with the law is a study in bureaucratic infighting.
The vast majority of documents – millions of them – have been released. But the transparency effort continues. The documents were released last month, although, as with many recently released documents, even though they are redacted, the typography is extremely difficult or impossible to read and their connection to the murder investigation is unclear.
Biden and Trump allowed these agencies to keep some documents secret
While the Biden and Trump administrations have released tens of thousands of documents, they have allowed others to be kept secret. President Joe Biden required agencies to write a justification for why the documents should remain hidden.
It mostly comes down to not wanting to reveal confidential sources who are still alive, or who might be alive, and protecting methods. The CIA says it will wait until people are dead or can be presumed dead at age 100 before releasing this information.
As a result, the agency continues to maintain thousands of documents, inventoried in a 118-page index.
“Benign cover-up”
The CIA historian himself described the agency’s selective cooperation and complete withholding of information from the Warren Commission and the House committee as a kind of “benign cover-up.” This story is on the non-governmental transparency site National Security Archive and features information from Kennedy assassination expert Philip Shenon.
Shenon and University of Virginia historian Larry Sabato were among those who pored over documents released in recent years, some of which suggested doubts, even within the CIA, about the official story of the assassination.
Many of the questions revolve around Oswald’s trip to Mexico City weeks before the assassination. Under CIA surveillance, he visited the Cuban and Soviet embassies, apparently trying to obtain a visa to flee the US.
Despite all his flaws – and there are many – Sabato wrote in 2013 for CNN about how the main points of the Warren Commission report hold up.
Most Americans don’t believe official reports
A majority of Americans (54%) said in a 2018 CBS News poll that there was a cover-up. In 2013, 61% of respondents said in a CBS poll that people other than Oswald were involved. In fact, this number is lower than in 1998, when 76% said they believed there were other people involved.
When the CNN asked in 2013 who people believed was involved, a third of the country, 33%, suspected the CIA had something to do with it. But in that 2013 poll, not insubstantial minorities also suspected that the mob and then-Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson might be involved.
The evidence still points to Oswald
After seeing Landis’ interview and reading that classified CIA documents still exist, I asked Sabato if he supported the 2013 argument made by the basic idea of the Warren Commission.
“Yes, I still believe that Oswald was the only shooter – despite everything,” Sabato said. “By ‘everything’ I mean the inadequacies of the Warren Report, the FBI’s admitted destruction of important evidence, the CIA’s untruths about Oswald, as well as the agency’s refusal to release all of its JFK assassination documents, and so on. ”.
He wishes the Warren Commission had interviewed Landis and others in 1963, rather than simply accepting statements without cross-examination.
“There has been a lot of magical thinking by theorists since the 1960s,” Sabato said, pointing to the many, often bizarre, theories you can easily find on the internet.
That said, Sabato said he understands why people don’t believe the commission’s findings. And he highlighted an important point that goes far beyond the assassination of JF Kennedy.
“Our own government and its major agencies have given people plenty of reason to doubt what they said about the Kennedy assassination,” Sabato said.
“In 1963, we bought pretty much whatever the authorities told us – that’s how we were brought up. But now, after decades of the government lying about Vietnam, Watergate, Iran, 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq and a thousand other things, can we blame people for not buying into what the Warren Commission was it selling?” he said.
Source: CNN Brasil
Bruce Belcher is a seasoned author with over 5 years of experience in world news. He writes for online news websites and provides in-depth analysis on the world stock market. Bruce is known for his insightful perspectives and commitment to keeping the public informed.
