A man who was only feet away from John F. Kennedy when he was shot has spoken out and said the official report on the day’s events does not correspond with his memory. Paul Landis was a Secret Service agent in the 1960s and was in Dallas with the President on the day of his death. After the assassination, he left the service and Washington, DC, and did not speak about his experience for 60 years. However, he says he needs to explain what he saw on that fateful day.
The Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination, reported that one of the bullets fired at the President went through his body and struck Governor John Connally Jr. of Texas in several places. An enduring mystery involving November 22, 1963, is how one bullet could have hit the Governor in his back, chest, wrist, and thigh. The mystery became known as the “magic bullet theory,” and Landis insists that the official story is wrong.
The bullet in question was located on a stretcher that was believed to have carried Connally to hospital, but Landis said he found the bullet in the back of the President’s car and placed it on the gurney carrying the Commander-in-Chief. He said he does not know precisely what happened to it after that. He speculates that the bullet hit Kennedy in the back but did not penetrate and fell out of his body and remained in the car.
James Robenalt, a former Secret Service agent and friend of Mr. Landis, said if his story is true, it could support the theory that the official culprit Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone. “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 is wrong,” he said. He added that if a second bullet hit Connally, it most likely did not come from Oswald.
