A former Secret Service agent who worked with John F Kennedy on the day he was assassinated has broken his silence after nearly 60 years.
Paul Landis was a young agent when he was assigned to protect Jackie Kennedy as the couple visited Dallas, Texas on that fateful November day in 1963.
Landis has now cast doubts on how the assassination panned out, claiming he was the one to spot and retrieve a nearly pristine bullet – which has since been dubbed “the magic bullet” – from just behind where Kennedy was sitting when he was shot.
The bullet became the first piece of evidence logged during the investigation but for decades it has been believed it was found on the stretcher of Texas Governor John Connally after it became displaced from a wound in his tight.
Landis said: “There was nobody there to secure the scene, and that was a big, big bother to me.
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“All the agents that were there were focused on the president. This was all going on so quickly.
“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.’”
The theory had it that the bullet had passed through Kennedy’s neck from the rear before entering the Governor’s right shoulder, exiting just under his right nipple and striking his right wrist only to then pass through his tight.
But Landis’s remarks to The New York Times seem to have now dismantled the “magic bullet” theory – and cast doubts on whether killer Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
The Kennedy Commission concluded Oswald was a lone gunman who had shot three bullets at the motorcade with a 6.5-millimiter Mannlicher-Carcano rifle.
The initial review said one of the bullets missed the target, the second was the so-called “magic bullet” and the third successfully killed Kennedy.
Landis suggested the bullet he found in the Kennedy limousine could have been undercharged, meaning it didn’t have enough penetrative force to stay inside the president’s body.
The former Secret Service agent said he mostly supported the conclusions of the Commission but admitted that “at this point, I’m beginning to doubt myself”. He added: “Now I begin to wonder.”
Historian James Robenalt agreed that Landis’s account of events opened the door to the possibility of a second shooter, noting Oswald would not have been able to reload his gun quickly enough.
Robenalt said: “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.
“The FBI recreation suggests that Oswald would not have had enough time to get off two separate shots so quickly as to hit Connally after wounding the president in the back.”
Footage from the assassination shows Kennedy and Connally reacted to being shot within roughly a second of each other.
FBI experts said it would have taken the gunman approximately 2.3 seconds to fire the first shot, work the Mannlicher-Carcano’s bolt reaction and then shoot again – a larger gap than the reaction time of Oswald’s two victims.
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