In a shocking revelation, a former Secret Service Agent has put an end to one of the biggest lingering questions about the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Paul Landis, who was mere feet from JFK at the time of the shooting, has broken a 60-year silence surrounding the so-called “magic bullet” theory, raising questions about the Warren Commission’s official narrative.
Paul Landis, now 88, was a young federal agent assigned to protect First Lady Jackie Kennedy while the presidential motorcade passed through Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. From his position directly behind the president’s limousine in Dealey Plaza, Landis had a horrific up-close-and-personal view of Kennedy’s death and was one of the first to respond after the shots rang out. In his upcoming book The Final Witness, Landis is finally breaking a six-decade silence and revealing what he observed.
In an interview with the New York Times published on Saturday, Landis challenged the “single bullet” theory put forward by the Warren Commission, the investigative commission that reported on Kennedy’s assassination. According to the official narrative, former Marine turned Soviet sympathizer Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots at the motorcade with a C2766 Mannlicher-Carcano carbine.
The first shot went through Kennedy’s upper back and exited his throat just beneath his larynx. It is then posited that this same 6.5-millimeter bullet ricocheted to hit Texas Governor John Connally Jr. in the back, breaking one of his ribs and puncturing a lung before exiting his chest, piercing his wrist, and lodging in his thigh.
The Warren Commission’s so-called “magic bullet” theory has long been criticized given that the bullet trajectory it suggests means the projectile changed direction in midair multiple times.
The Commission defended its theory by citing the discovery of the bullet sitting on Connally’s stretcher at Parkland Memorial Hospital. But according to Paul Landis, the true story of how the bullet got there destroys that entire narrative—because Landis claims to have put it there himself.
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As Landis told the New York Times, immediately after the shooting, he found a nearly pristine bullet on the seat of the presidential limousine, which he then pocketed in the interest of preserving evidence. “There was nobody there to secure the scene, and that was a big, big bother to me,” Landis said. “All the agents that were there were focused on the president.”
“This was all going on so quickly,” he continued. “And I was just afraid that — it was a piece of evidence, that I realized right away. Very important. And I didn’t want it to disappear or get lost. So it was, ‘Paul, you’ve got to make a decision,’ and I grabbed it.”
At the time, Landis’ assessment was that the bullet only penetrated shallowly into Kennedy’s body, leading to it falling out when he was removed from the vehicle. Landis later transferred the bullet to Kennedy’s stretcher inside the hospital, believing it ended up on Connelly’s when the two were side-by-side. According to the Times interview, he remained unaware that the Commission’s official narrative did not reflect this until it was brought to his attention in 2014.
Landis, who was never interviewed by the Commission, made follow-up statements to investigators in the wake of the shooting, but he did not mention finding the bullet. Addressing this inconsistency, Landis said he was in a state of shock and had not slept much at the time the reports were compiled. He also claims that PTSD from that day and fear of being accused of evidence tampering have kept him from speaking out until now.
“I didn’t want to talk about it,” said Landis, who left the Secret Service a few 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.”
Without the single bullet theory, a whole host of new questions are raised about the Kennedy assassination, foremost among them the possibility of multiple shooters. If the “magic bullet” did not strike both Kennedy and Connelly, then the rate of fire required for that number of shots would likely have been impossible for Lee Harvey Oswald’s bolt-action rifle. This would raise the historically significant possibility that the Warren Commission’s central premise was completely wrong—and potentially reopen the investigation.
In response to the claims raised by Landis’ interview, presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Kennedy’s nephew, called out the “preposterous construction” of the magic bullet theory. Kennedy has notably blamed the Central Intelligence Agency for his uncle’s assassination.
The magic bullet theory is now dead. This preposterous construction has served as the mainstay of the theory that a single shooter murdered President Kennedy since the Warren Commission advanced it 60 years ago under the direction of the former CIA Director Allen Dulles whom my…
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) September 10, 2023
The Final Witness by Paul Landis is scheduled to be released by the Chicago Review Press on October 10. Addressing his upcoming memoir, Landis stated “There’s no goal at this point. I just think it had been long enough that I needed to tell my story.”
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