More fuel for the bonfire of the mother of conspiracies in the United States.
Memory is lost with age, scientists say. But Paul Landis not only has not lost it, but has recovered it, something that has surprised quite a few and even more so because of the relevance of what he remembers.
Landis, 88, was one of the members of the secret service who formed the escort of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy's motorcade during his visit to Dallas (Texas) on November 23, 1963. Specifically, he was part of the protection team of the first lady, along with her partner Clint Hill, the famous agent who jumped into the presidential car to try in vain to save the president's life.
Landis was 28 years old. And he remembers a gunshot when they were driving through Dealey Plaza. And then another and a third, and how President Kennedy collapsed. According to his version, he found a bullet in the president's seat, which breaks with the central thesis of Congress' Warren Report, which states that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole author.
For 60 years that history has been kept, which can change what happened and how it happened. Conspiracy theorists will finally find fresh material in the book that the former agent will publish on October 10 – The final witness –, which does not appear in the official secrets that the government is declassifying.
If they already believed that Oswald did not act alone or that he was the scapegoat of a conspiracy, now they will find a compelling argument to support it, without considering that it could be a “recreation” of the memory of a man of a certain age. Nor will they take into account that this version contradicts the communications that Landis signed with the authorities and that they are difficult to reconcile with his new account.
In an advance in The New York Times, the former agent maintains that, after all these stormy years, of experiencing the weight of guilt, he has finally been able to make peace with himself and understand that the things he read did not fit with his experience. . So the so-called “magic bullet” of the Warren report that supported Oswald's exclusive guilt was perhaps not as magical as that investigation determined.
That theory, which has been subject to numerous speculations over the decades, considers that one of the bullets fired at the president's vehicle not only hit Kennedy, but also wounded Texas Governor John B. in various parts of the body. Connally Jr., who was traveling with him.
According to the Warren report, that 6.5 millimeter caliber projectile entered the president from behind, exited through his throat and hit the governor, causing damage to his back, chest, wrist and thigh. There were skeptics that a bullet could do so many things.
Investigators reached that conclusion because the projectile was discovered on a stretcher on which Connally was supposedly transported to the hospital. They assumed that her body spit her out as she struggled to save his life.
Landis, whom the commission did not question, assures today that this was not the case. He says he was the one who found the bullet in the presidential car, lodged in the back of the seat where Kennedy was sitting. Once he located it, he kept it for himself to prevent it from falling into the hands of souvenir hunters. Then, for a reason that is still unclear even to him, he placed her on the president's stretcher, trusting that it would help the forensic experts understand what happened. Someone moved it from one place to another.
In his version, that projectile hit Kennedy in the back, but for some reason it did not have enough charge and did not penetrate deeply, so it came out again before the president's body was taken out of the limousine. Although he did not embrace conspiracy theories and believed that Oswald was the only one involved, he today has doubts.
Experts point out that, if his account is true, the central thesis of the Warren report is wrong, that Connally was hit by another bullet and therefore may not have come out of Oswald's gun. This is not a reopened case because it was never closed.
