New things about the JFK assassination

Why we’re still learning new things about the JFK assassination
Story by Analysis by Zachary B. Wolf, CNN •
13 September 2023

the limo and placed next to President Kennedy's feet.
Current Time 1:30
/
Duration 4:04
CNN
Jackie Kennedy's ex-Secret Service agent makes new claim about the JFK assassination
0
View on Watch
View on Watch
A version of this story appeared in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.

It’s hard to believe there’s a new eyewitness account from a Secret Service agent who was right there at the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

This is, after, all among the most investigated, revisited and argued about events in US history.

But Paul Landis, who in 1963 was a young agent detailed to protect the first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, shares recollections in a new memoir, “The Final Witness,” to be published next month. The 60th anniversary of the assassination is in November.

What Landis remembers about being near Kennedy’s body could challenge elements of the so-called magic bullet theory, that one of the bullets that struck Kennedy also wounded then-Texas Gov. John Connally. According to the Warren Commission, the intact bullet was discovered when it was knocked onto the floor next to a stretcher holding Connally.

Appearing in his first television interview on CNN’s “The Lead with Jake Tapper” Wednesday, Landis, now 88, described the assassination and said he retrieved a bullet from the limousine that had carried the Kennedys. Landis said he later placed it in the exam room where the president was being treated at Parkland Memorial Hospital.

He described a chaotic scene and his split-second decisions both to remove the bullet from the limousine and then place it next to the president.

“I thought, well, this is the perfect place to leave the bullet, it’s an important piece of evidence and this was the opportunity to leave it,” Landis said.

Why he waited so long to speak
“Everything was pretty stressful for all the agents,” Landis told Tapper, explaining why he did not tell supervisors about the bullet at the time or in the intervening decades.

“I just stayed in view of Mrs. Kennedy,” Landis said. “I was afraid I was going to pass out and I kept telling myself I’ve got to hang in there.”

He was never interviewed by the Warren Commission Report and said he was afraid that if he was, he would have broken down “and be 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 differing positions on what to make of Landis’ memoir
Jefferson Morley edits a substack newsletter, JFK Facts, that pushes for more transparency in the official record on the Kennedy assassination. He has long doubted the “magic bullet” theory and deconstructed official government reports.

“Landis shows that this is an open question and we really need a much better explanation of what happened on November 22nd, 1960,” Morley told CNN’s Abby Phillip earlier this week.

Another expert says Landis has not altered the basic conclusions of numerous government reports and exhaustive investigations. Farris Rookstool III is a former FBI analyst who reviewed Kennedy assassination documents.

“The problem with all of this is that it does not change the basic fact that three shots were fired from the southeast corner of the Texas School Book Depository… using Lee Harvey Oswald’s rifle,” Rookstool told Phillip.

It would be impossible to go over all the evidence and foolish to try
If you want to spend days going down rabbit holes of evidence, reports and declassified documents, head on over to the National Archives website. They’ve got the Warren Commission report, which most people now feel was incomplete and rushed.

The National Archives has also posted the work of a congressional investigation that checked the Warren Commission’s work, the House special committee on assassinations, which issued a 1979 report that also found Oswald fired three shots and that two struck Kennedy. The House investigation did not rule out the possibility of another shooter and it also also suggested the evidence pointed to some kind of conspiracy, but not to any suspects. The committee found there was no evidence the Cuban government, the mafia or the CIA were involved.

There are still secrets
Despite promises by multiple presidents and a law passed by Congress in 1992, the CIA, the Defense Department and the Department of State all continue to have documents they refuse to publicly release.

Although that 1992 law was passed in an effort to build up credibility and cut down on secrecy, reading the 1998 report of a special board set up at the National Archives to push 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. Documents were released just last month, although as with many recently released documents they are still redacted, the typeset is extremely difficult or impossible to read, and their connection to the assassination investigation is not clear.

Biden and Trump both allowed these agencies to keep some documents secret
While both the Biden and Trump administrations released tens of thousands of documents, they allowed others to be kept hidden.

President Joe Biden required agencies to write down a justification for why documents should stay hidden.

It mostly boils down to not wanting to out confidential sources who are still alive, or might be alive, and protecting methods. The CIA says it will wait until people either die or can be presumed dead at the age of 100 before releasing that information.

As a result, it continues to hide thousands of documents, inventoried in a 118-page index.

‘Benign coverup’
The CIA’s own historian has described the agency’s selective cooperation and outright hiding of information from the Warren Commission and the House committee as a sort of “benign coverup.” Read that history at the non-governmental transparency website National Security Archive and get some context around it from Kennedy assassination expert Philip Shenon.


Shenon and the historian Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia have been among those poring over the documents released in recent years, some of which suggested doubt even within the CIA about the official assassination story.

Many of the questions revolve around Oswald’s trip to Mexico City weeks before the assassination. Under surveillance by the CIA, he visited the Cuban and Soviet embassies, apparently trying to get a visa to flee the US.

For all of its failings – and there are many – Sabato wrote in 2013 for CNN about how the main points of the Warren Commission report hold.

Most Americans don’t believe the official accounts
A majority, 54%, said in a 2018 CBS News poll there was a coverup. In 2013, 61% said in a CBS poll that others, in addition to Oswald were involved. That’s actually down from 1998, when 76% said they believed others were involved. When CNN asked in 2013 who people believed were 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 the mafia and then-Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson could have been involved.

The evidence still points to Oswald
After watching the Landis interview and reading that there are still classified CIA documents, I asked Sabato if he stands by that 2013 argument that the basic thrust of the Warren Commission holds.

“Yes, I still believe Oswald was the lone gunman—despite everything,” Sabato told me in an email.

“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 its JFK assassination documents, and so on.”

He wishes the Warren Commission had interviewed Landis and others back in 1963 rather than simply accepting statements without cross-examination.

“There has been too much magical thinking by theorists since the 1960s,” Sabato said, pointing to the many, frequently outlandish 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 made an important point that extends well beyond the Kennedy assassination.

“Our own government and its top agencies gave people plenty of reasons to doubt what they’ve said about Kennedy’s murder,” Sabato said. “In 1963 we bought pretty much anything the authorities told us—that’s how we were raised. Now, though, after decades of government lying about Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-Contra, 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, and a thousand other things, can you blame people for not buying what the Warren Commission was selling?”

For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com

***


Everything We Know About The New JFK Assassination Revelations
Story by S. Flannagan •
9/13/23

JFK Dallas Texas motorcade
JFK Dallas Texas motorcade
© Bettmann/Getty Images

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy as he rode in a motorcade with his wife Jackie through Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963, is one of the defining moments of 20th-century American history. Kennedy's murder was one of those time-stopping news stories: as the old saying goes, everyone who was alive at the time can remember just where they were when they heard the news that the president had been shot.

The nation was gripped as news broke that the security services had apprehended the gunman, ex-Marine Lee Harvey Oswald, who had seemingly fired multiple rifle rounds from the window of the nearby Texas Book Depository. However, Oswald was shot and killed before his trial, meaning he never received justice or made his exact motives known on the stand. Ever since, the nation has been divided as to what exactly happened that day and who was responsible, with the findings of the subsequent Warren Commission continuing to be scrutinized even today.

Over the years countless conspiracy theorists have studied the footage, talked to the people who were there, and examined the location firsthand, and while many versions of what actually happened that day have since emerged, none have successfully supplanted the official explanation that Kennedy was murdered by the deranged Oswald, who was acting alone. But in September 2023, a new detail emerged from someone who was there at the scene, ex-Secret Service agent Paul Landis, that arguably challenges how the assassination has been interpreted for the last six decades.

Read more: False American History Facts You Always Thought Were True

Who Is Paul Landis?
Paul Landis and James Robenalt interviewed
Paul Landis and James Robenalt interviewed
© Heritage Images/Getty Images

Paul Landis (pictured, left, with co-author James Robenalt) was born in Ohio and studied geology at Ohio Wesleyan University, from which he graduated in 1957. He was first admitted to the Secret Service at the age of 24, after which followed a period of intense training, according to the Akron Beacon Journal. He soon found himself serving an integral role in protecting the first family at the time, that of President Dwight Eisenhower.

FUJIFILM FAN-001 Cooling Fan, Fans
FUJIFILM FAN-001 Cooling Fan, Fans
Ad
B&H Photo-Video-Pro A
After John F. Kennedy won the 1960 election, Landis found himself at the auguration and remained a constant vigilant presence around the president, the first lady, and their children. He was in his late 20s when he was assigned to protect the Kennedys as their motorcade drove through the streets of Dallas. He was positioned on the running board of the trailing security vehicle directly behind the president and first lady, and was therefore one of the closest witnesses to the shooting as it unfolded, as well as one of the first people to rush toward John F. Kennedy after he slumped down from the impact of the bullets.

Related video: Secret Service agent’s new revelation in JFK assassination (ITN)
President's head exploded, but Mr. Blood and flesh.
Current Time 0:05
/
Duration 2:04
ITN
Secret Service agent’s new revelation in JFK assassination
0
View on Watch
View on Watch

After the horror of the assassination and the trauma he suffered as a result, Landis left the Secret Service shortly afterward, relocating from Washington altogether and moving on with his life. Apart from two written reports he gave to the Warren Commission in the aftermath of the slaying, he has remained largely silent regarding what he witnessed that day. That was until 2023 when, at the age of 88, Landis stepped back into the public eye with a memoir that revealed some previously unknown details.

Landis' Account
The JFK assassination magic bullet
The JFK assassination magic bullet
© Bettmann/Getty Images
Per The New York Times, Landis claims to remember clearly the chaos on Dealey Plaza after the first shots rang out and those traveling with the president's motorcade realized that they were under attack.

But what has raised eyebrows about the former security agent's recollections is a small but hugely significant detail. In his memoir, Landis states that after the motorcade sped the fatally wounded president to hospital, the agent discovered a bullet jutting out of the seat where Kennedy had been shot. In what seems to have been a reflex action, Landis pocketed the bullet -- which he knew was important evidence -- and later, when he went indoors to view the president's body, placed it on his gurney beside Kennedy's foot.

According to Landis, the position of the bullet in the car suggested that it had struck Kennedy in the back but failed to enter his body entirely; as noted by James Robenalt, a lawyer and historian who collaborated with Landis on his memoir, "The Final Witness," published by Chicago Review Press, the bullet came from an old World War II rifle, and it is conceivable that it may not have been fully loaded with gunpowder (via Vanity Fair).

What If It's True?
JFK's stretcher in hospital
JFK's stretcher in hospital
© Don Uhrbrock/Getty Images

So what are the repercussions of Paul Landis' claim that he found an intact bullet and placed it on the dead president's gurney is true? His co-writer James Robenalt has spoken about the accuracy of Landis' memory and claims he is convinced by his testimony, which he thinks is one of the most significant revelations regarding the assassination in over half a century. "If what he says is true, which I tend to believe, it is likely to reopen the question of a second shooter ... 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" (via The New York Times).

The single-bullet theory argues that one bullet that hit Kennedy passed through his body and struck Gov. John B. Connally Jr., causing him multiple injuries. For many, the commission's findings -- which were based on the presence of a bullet near Connally which was believed to have exited one of his wounds -- have always seemed far-fetched. Landis believes that the bullet found by Connally was that he had placed near Kennedy, which arguably opens up the possibility of a second gunman.

However, skeptics argue the length of time that has elapsed since then means Landis' account is probably unreliable. Indeed, no contemporaneous accounts of the murder or its aftermath place him in the room with the president's body, and Landis' own written reports from the time contradict his later version. Nevertheless, it seems the debate over what happened that day isn't set to end anytime soon.

Read the original article on Grunge.

What do you think about the new JFK assassination revelations?
5 votes
·
1 comments
·
11 hours ago
It's shocking
It's exciting
It's confusing