Paul Landis, one of the Secret Service agents near John F. Kennedy when he was assassinated in Dallas in 1963, has suddenly decided to reveal relevant actions and observations from that terrible day 60 years ago. His new perspectives, as the New York Times puts it, may “rewrite the narrative of one of modern American history’s most earth-shattering days in an important way,” and “encourage those who have long suspected that there was more than one gunman in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, adding new grist to one of the nation’s enduring mysteries.” The appropriate responses to Landis’s sudden urge to tell all are 1) “What took you so long?” and 2) “Oh, shut up.”
Landis has had many opportunities to, as the Times implies, unburden himself of nagging memories and doubts, but coincidentally chose now, as the 60th anniversary of the event loom, to write a book about it. Inflation making that pension a little thin after all these years, John? Apparently so. The claims Landis makes in his soon-to-be-published book “The Final Witness” will supposedly call into question the so-called “magic bullet” explanation of how sniper Lee Harvey Oswald alone managed to cause so much damage with a single shot, a central point of controversy among Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists.
The long-silent witness who comes forward after many years is a standard feature of complex historical events through history, notably the Lincoln assassination. They do no good, cause much confusion and distrust, and should be ignored but aren’t. Landis is squarely in this tradition. “I just think it had been long enough that I needed to tell my story,” he tells the Times. Gee, ya think, John? I’d say it’s been far too long rather than long enough. Your explanation that you found the alleged “magic bullet” that for decades has been described as turning up mysteriously on a stretcher believed to have held John Connally at Parkland Memorial Hospital and placed it there yourself would have been useful information around, say, 1964. Today it has no credibility whatsoever, but is apparently sufficient to generate a profitable late-life 15 minutes of fame.
Friends of the ex-Secret Service agent as well as committed JFK assassination conspiracy theorists interviewed by the Times naturally think Landis’s motives are pure and that his memory is trustworthy. Yet his new account is inexplicably inconsistent with two written statements he filed in the week after the Dallas shooting. The reaction of Gerald Posner, author of “Case Closed,” his 1993 book that concluded that Oswald was the lone shooter, is the obvious one. “People’s memories generally do not improve over time, and it is a flashing warning sign to me, about skepticism I have over his story, that on some very important details of the assassination, including the number of shots, his memory has gotten better instead of worse,” Posner told the Times, which goes to great lengths in its article to rationalize Landis’s delayed revelations.
“Mr. Landis has spent most of the intervening years fleeing history, trying to forget that unforgettable moment etched in the consciousness of a grieving nation, the Times tells us. “The memory of the explosion of violence and the desperate race to the hospital and the devastating flight home and the wrenching funeral with John Jr. saluting his fallen father — it was all too much, too torturous, so much so that Mr. Landis left the service and Washington behind.” But finally, “after the nightmares had passed at last”—sixty years later—Landis “realized that what he read was not quite right, not as he remembered it.”
I’m willing to accept that Landis really believes what he says he now “remembers.” Nevertheless, there is no reason to trust anyone’s 60-year-old memory, particularly when it clashes with the same witness’s recollections nearer to the event in question. Injecting such tardy pseudo-evidence into a historical controversy is irresponsible at best, destructive at worst. His book and his new version of events warrant exactly as much legitimate attention as that focused on David George, who claimed on his deathbed in 1903 that he was really John Wilkes Booth, and had escaped the Garrett’s burning barn with the assistance of federal agents.
And that was less than 40 years after the Lincoln assassination. Good story, though. George’s mummified body toured the carnival circuit for years.
Ethics Alarms 
What are his “new perspectives”?
Oh, now, after 60 years of musing, he wonders if there might have been a second shooter after all.
I mean- is there something more than his ramblings about putting a bullet on a gurney?
I read Posner’s book and it entirely convinced me. He went through the physics and physiology well enough for me, as a lay person, to understand.
People, in general, don’t like to have to accept that random events can play a huge role in their lives or especially in human history. But history is full of such things — Sarajevo, 1914. The configuration of the table in Hitler’s conference room, 1944. Antietam, 1862. Shakespeare’s infamous nail that was wanting.
The best evidence there was no conspiracy in JFK’s assassination? No conspirators have credibly come forward or told their wives or husbands or best friends. It’s the old adage — “Two people can keep a secret, if one of them is dead.” A hundred people? Nah.
Bingo. My Dad scoffed at the “magic bullet” skeptics, saying that anyone who had experienced combat knew what bizarre paths and weirdness bullets engaged in regularly, and there was, therefore, nothing unusual at all about the damage that bullet did to Kennedy and Connolly.
I’ve always scoffed at grassy knollers. It’s just chasing shadows because no one wants to believe that one deranged malcontent could decapitate the free world by killing its leader. Of course, it doesn’t help with clarity that there were several ongoing controversies (Cuba, the pending Civil Rights Act, which way Vietnam was going to go) and more than a few powerful people (and a few VERY powerful people) who had or thought they had reason to wish JFK ill.
“anyone who had experienced combat knew what bizarre paths and weirdness bullets engaged in regularly, and there was, therefore, nothing unusual at all about the damage that bullet did to Kennedy and Connolly.”
Especially since Connolly and Kennedy were mostly lined up in a situation that the “magic” bullet actually followed a straight enough path that the deviations were perfectly attributable to the affects on a round of passing through fluid and bone…
Although I have never experienced military combat, I have been a student of applied ballistics (internal, external, and terminal) for nearly fifty years. The physics affecting external ballistics (what the bullet does between leaving the barrel and impacting the target) is so complex and variable that “bizarre paths and weirdness” are far from rare. Just the effects of changing wind and convection currents at various distances between the shooter and the target can drastically affect a bullet’s path and stability. Terminal ballistics (what happens after impact) has its own set of complex variables with which to contend. The “magic bullet” theory holds no magic for anyone with even a modicum of basic ballistics knowledge.
And thank you, Oliver Stone for giving all the conspiracy theories a new lease on life with “JFK.”
”But history is full of such things — Sarajevo, 1914.”
I’ll disagree with this. The assassination of the arch duke didn’t start WW1. Germany was desperate for the war to start as each passing year increased the power differential between Atlantic Europe and Central Europe.
WW1 was a war looking for a reason to start. In retrospect- there’s absolutely zero reason for the assassination to start that conflagration *other than Germany really wanted it to start*.
If the assassination hadn’t happened, some other reason would have given Germany the excuse to go.
In fact the assassination wasn’t even the starting point of the war. After the prince was killed, Austria-Hungary sent a humiliating ultimatum to Serbia. It included a list of demands like arresting Serbs who were anti-Austria, censoring anti-Austrian propaganda, dismissing certain officials in the Serbian government the Austrians didn’t like, allow Austrian officials to operate in Serbia for the purpose of “suppressing subversive movements”, and allow the arrested Serbs to be tried by Austrian law enforcement.
Clearly the point of this ultimatum was to make it so outrageous that Serbia had to reject it, thus giving the Austro-Hungarians an excuse for war. Yet they accepted every demand, with the exception that they wanted arrested Serbians to be tried in the Hague instead of Austria. While many contemporary diplomats were shocked by the insolent nature of the ultimatum, they were even more shocked when Austria declared war after the near diplomatic capitulation of Serbia. Perhaps even the Germans, who wanted the war more than anyone, were caught off guard; Kaiser Wilhelm II was on vacation in Norway (I think?) on the day the war started.
Well, Kaiser was probably fairly disconnected from machinations at that point. Wasn’t most of this hope for war being driven by the military high command and general staff?
The Kaiser was still the head of state and had supreme executive authority. Wilhelm was very much a fan of Bismarck and wanted aggressive wars of expansion for Germany. He just missed out on the whole careful diplomatic strategy that was the other half of Bismarck’s remarkable success.
But yes, the Prussian officer corps was definitely the largest faction of German society that wanted the war. Especially Moltke and Hindenburg. There was this feeling at the time that the large overseas colonies of Britain and France created a resource asymmetry that meant Germany would eventually be powerless to resist them if they waited too long. Another primary concern was if the Russians managed to modernize and expand their rail infrastructure it would be impossible to militarily defeat them, due to the massive number of men the Russians could mobilize. The highest levels of the German military command felt this ticking clock, and thought it was better to start a war now when they could still win. And the head of the Austrian military, Conrad von Hotzendorf, was even more rabidly pro-war than the Germans.
Back to the original point, the assassination of Ferdinand was hardly a random chaotic event that sparked a world war. Rather the German/Austro-Hungarian powers were looking for the first excuse to start a war that came along.
Can Gavrilo Pricip be blamed for causing the deaths of hundreds of millions of people in the 20th century? He knocked over the first domino…
No.
The domino he pushed over wasn’t even in line with the dominos leading to WW1. He pushed over that domino and the Germans yelled “oh hey! It didn’t continue the line!!!” right as they pushed over the line leaning to WW1 that they’d been stacking since the 1890s.
You never know. If someone had told me that a story about an old Secret Service agent wanting to make a quick buck with a book idea would spin into a thread about the origins of The Great War, I would have wondered how that could possibly happen.
Which is a microcosm of the phenomenon you’re discussing….
”People, in general, don’t like to have to accept that random events can play a huge role in their lives or especially in human history. But history is full of such things — Sarajevo, 1914. The configuration of the table in Hitler’s conference room, 1944. Antietam, 1862. Shakespeare’s infamous nail that was wanting.”
I’ll disagree with the “human history” part. The assassination of the arch duke didn’t start WW1. Germany was desperate for the war to start as each passing year increased the power differential between Atlantic Europe and Central Europe.
WW1 was a war looking for a reason to start. In retrospect- there’s absolutely zero reason for the assassination to start that conflagration *other than Germany really wanted it to start*.
If the assassination hadn’t happened, some other reason would have given Germany the excuse to go for it.
The failed assassination of Hitler, likewise, doesn’t affect history that much. Von Stauffenberg’s plot was not to somehow bring the war to an end with some sort of pleasant return to pre-Nazi national borders. He and his cabal were quite happy with the land conquered by Germany and hoped to negotiate a peace with the Allies that brought the war to an end at least some of Germany’s non-German gains, still in German possession.
Except this is a whole year after the Allies had committed to an war aim of Germany’s *unconditional* surrender. Which would have meant Von Stauffenberg’s team of plotters would have only inherited a Germany they wanted to defend against the Allied demand.
Antietam comes closer to the mark – only the flaw here wasn’t some small random event. The Union would not have won the war at Antietam if McClellan hadn’t lucked upon Lee’s order – because he wouldn’t have had the order to capitalize on. But in reality, he had the order, AND he capitalized on it. Only, the same endemic problems plaguing the Pre-Grant Army of the Potomac all but guaranteed giving Lee another day to live despite the fortuitous Intel gain of the Order.
If we want to chalk up human history altering “random” events like that, I think we have to then consider every single battle as being chock full of such events. And suddenly that makes them less random.
However, I do think the “huge role in their lives” aspect is definitely true.
Case in point – a great number of people attached their personal mental well being to the JFK Camelot myth. So of course their lives were utterly devastated. But did his assassination really change the course of US history? I don’t know really. I don’t see our foreign policy changing. Do the individual party’s domestic policies change? Does their likelihood of being the party in charge change?
I think JFK’s legacy certainly has been boosted – he may very well have come out of the wash a lot uglier and dirtier if he’d finished his term or even gotten a 2nd.
Addendum – I will say the assassination of JFK probably had world changing effect in so much as it made Americans in general – less optimistic, more cynical, more distrusting, etc.
But, did the assassination do that? Or were Americans already on a little bit of that trajectory because distrust of government is in our national DNA and really America was beginning to come out of the *anomaly* of the FDR technocracy?
It’s impossible to know, of course, but I think there’s a substantial chance that the JFK assassination changed the course of US and world history as much as Bones did in “The City on the Edge of Forever”, in millions of ways on that infinitely large cosmic billiard table. LBJ would never have been President; neither would Nixon. No Nixon, no Watergate, no Watergate, no Ford or Carter, Fred Thompson(“Law and Order!”) or Hillary Clinton….or Sam Dash: would I have even taken legal ethics in law school (he was my professor, a star!). Vietnam might not have become what it was—the whole Sixties disaster—drugs, irresponsible sex, the launch of the generation that wrecked education—might have spun in a different direction. ALL US assassinations has as much effect (or not). Lincoln, certainly. Garfield was on a path to be transformational. If McKinley isn’t shot, Teddy never gets to be President (he wouldn’t have been nominated, ever). Just to take one consequence of THAT: we probably wouldn’t have the National Parks Without Teddy we also wouldn’t have been stuck with Woodrow Wilson, which means the US stays out of WWI (maybe). No “Lost Generation” literature! No Hitler? No U.N.???
Wow, those are great points. I often feel that a lot of the deterioration in the presidency can be traced back to Johnson. That was where the phrase ‘credibility gap’ started. Johnson and McNamara spent a lot of time and effort over the years misleading us and lying to the American public about Vietnam, and it had a huge impact on subsequent elections and administrations.
I don’t think Kennedy was any less of a hawk on Communism than Johnson. However, if JFK was in his second term when he was dealing with all of it, there would not have been any reelection pressure on him. He might not have had some of the insecurities that drove Johnson (he’d have his own demons).
It is a fascinating subject for me — does it make you wish that multiverses were real so we could take a peek inside one of them?
And then there’s always the chance — what if JFK lost in 1964, to Goldwater or wasn’t Rockefeller also running? I think America certainly could have done worse than Goldwater as, ultimately, it did. If Goldwater gets in, does Reagan ever win the presidency? Certainly 1964 with Kennedy would not have been the blowout it actually was. What about Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement?
With Antietam, the random event I referred to was Lee’s officer losing the Order _and_ a Union soldier finding it. Without that there is no battle of Antietam. It’s an interesting question how that campaign might have played out. If someone else is in charge of the Army of the Potomac, it’s much more likely that Lee’s army would have been defeated in detail and routed at Antietam.
I think Hitler’s assassination would have been at least somewhat of a game changer even in 1944. But I cannot see the Allies discarding the unconditional surrender demand — for one thing, I don’t think Stalin would have acceded to it and by then the Soviet had or were about to destroy Army Group Center. One of the main things that slowed them down that summer was waiting for the Nazis to destroy Warsaw.
WWI — yes, it’s going to start over something or other. Europe had already come pretty close several times in the preceding few years. Sarajevo was a pretext, but something else would have happened. People then really had no idea of what a major European war would be like. In the 1930s they knew too well.
Perhaps a more accurate statement would be that many people perceive that seemingly random events cause huge consequences, and they have a hard time accepting that there is not something larger behind those ‘random’ events.