60 years ago, a crime shocked the world: the assassination of the American president John F Kennedy, shot in broad daylight during a parade through Dallas, Texas, in the back seat of an open car. The investigation soon identified the shooter. Lee Harvey Oswald as the only culprit, but this explanation never really convinced most Americans.
The feeling that there was something wrong with that conclusion has persisted for decades and has gained renewed momentum now that Paul Landis, then a Secret Service agent, has decided to tell the whole story. The version of the witness, who was just a few meters away from the president, gave rise to new suspicions about the thesis known as the “silver bullet”. The name contains a certain irony and sets the tone of distrust.
Paul Landis, former Secret Service agent, shows where he was the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Photo: Amir Hamja/The New York Times
According to the investigation, a single gunman pulled the trigger three times but missed one of his shots. This hypothesis raised the question: How could two bullets inflict a total of eight injuries on the victims, President John F. Kennedy and Governor John Connally Jr.? The singlebullet thesis solved this problem by explaining that the same projectile penetrated the president’s back and exited through his throat before injuring the governor, who was sitting in the front of the same limousine.
“The positions of Kennedy and Connally at the time the President was struck in the neck confirm that the same bullet likely passed through both men,” the report concludes. from that Warren Commission.
The commission’s work was led by Judge Earl Warren and ended the year after the murder. The document states that after hitting the president, the projectile passed through the governor’s back at a downward angle, breaking one of his ribs and exiting below his chest. Because of this improbable trajectory, the biggest skeptics began calling the bullet “magic.”
American President John F. Kennedy, First Lady Jaqueline Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connally in a limousine parade shortly before the assassination attempt, Dallas, Texas, November 22, 1963. Photo: Walt Cisco/Dallas Morning News/Handout/File Photo via Portal.
Still, the theory goes, the bullet, after penetrating the president, would have hit the governor and fallen onto the stretcher as Connally was attended to by doctors. This would explain the fact that the projectile was found loose in the hospital and not in the body of any of the victims or at the crime scene. According to the Commission, this was the answer to the question murder which went down in the history of the United States.
An article published in the New York Times back in September 1964 highlighted that “readers of the report will find no basis to question the conclusion that President Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald, who acted alone.”
Simulations with armed forces snipers showed that it was possible to hit the president from the sniper position. “Actual testing has shown that, contrary to initial speculation, the shot was actually easy from the killer’s perspective,” the article said. The investigation thus rejected the initial suspicion that the president had been the victim of an ambush in the crossfire which would have resulted in at least one other shooter at the scene.
Two days after the murder, suspect Oswald was scheduled to be transferred from prison, an operation that was televised and watched with concern across the country. Suddenly, the man identified as Jack Ruby pulled out his pistol and fired at close range. Within hours, the person accused of murdering the president was also dead.
For decades since that fateful November 1963, questions, rumors and conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination of President John Kennedy gained new momentum. 88yearold former agent Paul Landis has now revealed that the bullet was found by him and not by the hospital.
According to the report, part of an unpublished memoir, a crowd began to approach, and with everyone worried about the White House chief, no one was at the scene to secure the evidence. “I was afraid that the projectile would disappear or be lost. “It was a test, it was clear to me straight away, it was very important,” he explained.
He claims that in the midst of this confusion, he decided to collect the bullet he found in the limousine. So he took him to the hospital and left him on President Kennedy’s stretcher, not Governor Connally’s, as the commission claimed a report that undermines one of the pillars of the “silver bullet” thesis.
For decades, the former agent never revealed that he had found the projectile or clarified the contradictions between his testimony at the time and what he believes to be true today. Therefore, Landis’ statements, like everything surrounding the case, arouse a certain degree of suspicion. Nevertheless, the new version again raises suspicions about the death of former President John F. Kennedy and the outcome of the crime./With information from the New York Times