🔎 New account from JFK witness

[phkrause]

Paul Landis — a former Secret Service agent who was standing on a running board just feet from President John F. Kennedy when he was shot — has given a new account to the N.Y. Times' Peter Baker, calling into question the Warren Commission's single-bullet theory — the "magic bullet."

• Lands has a book coming Oct. 10, "The Final Witness: A Kennedy Secret Service Agent Breaks His Silence After 60 Years."

Why it matters: The recollection by Landis, 88, differs from two written statements he filed right after the shooting. So: Who knows?

• But as Peter puts it, the new version could "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."

Here's Peter's preview: "The Warren Commission decided that one of the bullets fired that day struck the president from behind, exited from the front of his throat and continued on to hit [Texas Gov. John] Connally."

• "Investigators came to that conclusion partly because the bullet was found on a stretcher believed to have held Mr. Connally at Parkland Memorial Hospital."

But Landis says he "was the one who found the bullet — and he found it not in the hospital near Mr. Connally but in the presidential limousine lodged in the back of the seat behind where Kennedy was sitting," Baker writes:

"When he spotted the bullet after the motorcade arrived at the hospital, he said he grabbed it to thwart souvenir hunters. Then, for reasons that still seem fuzzy even to him, he said he entered the hospital and placed it next to Kennedy on the president's stretcher, assuming it could somehow help doctors figure out what happened."

Gift link to Peter's article.