Showing posts with label Paul Landis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Paul Landis. Show all posts

Sunday, September 10, 2023

I'm sure everyone will be just thrilled to know that the Secret Service detail protecting the Kennedy family had been out "socializing" until 5 a.m. the day JFK was assassinated

 Mr. Landis said he was surprised that the Warren Commission never interviewed him, but assumed that his supervisors were protecting the agents, who had been out late the night before socializing (Mr. Landis until 5 a.m., although he insisted they were not drunk). “Nobody really asked me,” he said.

Many pictures of those days of mourning show Mr. Landis at Jacqueline Kennedy’s side as she endured the rituals of a presidential farewell. Night after night, those seconds of violence in Dallas kept replaying in his head, his own personal Zapruder film on an endless loop. “The president’s head exploding — I could not shake that vision,” he said. “Whatever I was doing, that’s all I was thinking about.”

With Mr. Landis and Mr. Hill still protecting her, the former first lady was in constant motion in the months afterward. “She’d be in the back seat sobbing and you’d want to say something but it wasn’t really our place to say anything,” Mr. Landis recalled.

After six months, he could not take it anymore and left the Secret Service. Haunted, he moved to Cape Cod in Massachusetts, then New York, then Ohio near Cleveland. For decades, he made a living in real estate and machine products and house painting, anything as long as it had nothing to do with protecting presidents.


More.

That's what caught my eye about this man's story that the so-called magic bullet didn't injure Governor Connally. Landis says he found it "in the presidential limousine lodged in the back of the seat behind where Kennedy was sitting" and later put it on Kennedy's stretcher, which corrects his written testimony from the time.