A Key Witness to JFK's Assassination Speaks 60 Years Later, But Will It Change History?

Dealey Plaza is a patch of downtown Dallas that stands as a historic marker of one of the most tragic and jarring events of the 20th century: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

The sixth floor of the schoolbook depository building where assassin Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots that struck Kennedy and Texas Gov. John Connally is now a museum dedicated to preserving the history and artifacts of that infamous day. It uses education, discussion and community outreach in the hopes that it won't be repeated.

Just outside the museum, however, lies a second and very unofficial museum or exhibition of sorts, depending on the time of day and who's out there. A group of people stand on the sidewalk leading up to the underpass with signs, displays and leaflets that proclaim their belief that President Kennedy's death didn't happen the way a minority, not majority, of Americans believe it did.

Even when new facts and revelations come to life, they seem to add more fuel to an already raging fire of claims about conspiracies, cover-ups and a second gunman who has somehow eluded capture for almost six decades. Now, a new piece of information is seeing some sunshine thanks to a U.S. Secret Service agent who stood just a few feet from Kennedy's 1961 Lincoln Continental limousine when the shots came raining down on his vehicle.

The New York Times published a profile about Secret Service Agent Paul Landis and his memoir recalling the events of that fateful day in Dallas, Friday, Nov. 22, 1963. Landis reveals a new and interesting detail he hasn't offered until now that may change the story of the assassination as we (don't really) know it, and may advance the discussion about the truths other people perceive.

Landis, now 88, recounts a key detail about one of the bullets that struck Kennedy. His story already tested the accuracy of the Warren Commission's report that advanced the infamous "magic bullet" theory, so dubbed by skeptics of the report's conclusion. The report states that one of the bullets, which struck Kennedy from behind, exited his throat and entered Connally but also caused damage to Kennedy's back, chest, wrist and thigh. The conclusion was drawn from a spent 6.5 mm bullet found on Connally's stretcher at Parkland Memorial Hospital.

Landis claims, however, that he actually found the bullet in the back seat of the limousine where Kennedy sat when he was shot and took it to keep "souvenir hunters" from stealing important forensic evidence. He later placed it on Kennedy's stretcher at the hospital, thinking it might help with the medical investigation. He's not sure how the bullet got onto Connally's stretcher, theorizing "the stretchers must have been pushed together and the bullet was shaken from one to another," according to the Times profile.

So far, it's not known just exactly how Landis' new detail could affect the views or interpretation of the events surrounding the assassination. Not even the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza has had a chance to review any of the revelations made by Landis.

Kim Bryant, the chief philanthropy officer of the Sixth Floor Museum, notes that Landis taped an interview for the museum's archives in 2016, in which he recalls the events of the historic day.

"As with anyone who participates in this project, we welcome them to add to their stories," Bryant wrote in an email. "Our staff have not had the opportunity to read Mr. Landis’s book, and therefore cannot speak to the specifics."

Darwin Payne, a professor emeritus of communications at Southern Methodist University and a former Dallas Times Herald reporter who covered the assassination in 1963, has his own memoir coming out in October titled Behind The Scenes: Covering the JFK Assassination. Payne was one of the first reporters to view the sixth-floor window from which Oswald fired his rifle and the first to discover that eyewitness Abraham Zapruder captured Kennedy's death on film with a Bell & Howell home-movie camera.

"I was there at Dealey Plaza about 10 minutes after the shots were fired," Payne says. "I raced down as quickly as I could from the paper and I saw a lot."

Payne says that Landis' new detail about discovering the bullet may change the narrative of events a bit, but he doesn't think it will change the minds of people who believe Oswald wasn't acting alone or wasn't even in the schoolbook depository building that day.
"It won't help the people who aren't convinced of the facts," Payne says. "If you watch the next few days, you'll see stories about people who studied it more carefully that know there couldn't have been a second shooter."

Payne notes there's also plenty of evidence for motive when it comes to Oswald's actions. Oswald was an avowed Marxist when he was just 15 years old and later wrote a letter to the U.S. Communist Party "asking whether he should be openly overt to democracy or working behind the scenes."

Oswald also held no grudges against Kennedy and took more of a moderate view of the 35th U.S. president. Based on his research, Payne believes Oswald's actions had a much larger picture in mind than one political figure.

"His ambition was to become a hero in the Marxist revolution that he thought would soon come," Payne says of Oswald. "He bought the pistol under an assumed name. He bought the rifle under a different name. He didn't know what the route would be until the Thursday before [that] Friday. The Dallas Times Herald had a map on page 1."

Landis' new account may offer an interesting new insight that explains something even the Warren Commission couldn't conclude, but it also contradicts Landis' official statements filed after the shooting and can't be affixed to the existing record. Payne says if there's any change to the trajectory of the bullet and the event's history, it will be one of more confusion, which will only cause skeptics to doubt the official narratives all the more.

"The question is where would the second assassin be found?" Payne says. "It wouldn't be in the same building and it couldn't be in the Dal-Tex building [on Elm Street across from the schoolbook depository], which was much farther away and you wouldn't have a good perspective from there and there were people all around like the triple underpass. Can you imagine two different people could fire a shot at the same time? It's unbelievable to me."