Lee Harvey Oswald

The Final Witness

I just read — for the Second time — The Final Witness: A Kennedy Secret Service Agent Breaks His Silence After Sixty Years, by Paul Landis, a Secret Service agent not interviewed by the Warren Commission, who quit the agency in 1964, and who kept silent until recently.

Maybe if the commission had interviewed him, future US Senator Arlen Specter wouldn’t have wasted everyone’s time on the “Magic Bullet Theory”, with its mystical properties of changing direction, that enabled the conclusion that the infamous Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole shooter of President John F. Kennedy and Texas Governor John B. Connally.

Let me cut right to the chase. If you ever had, or have, a passing interest in the Kennedy Assassination or were/are a full-fledged “addict” of the most-significant crime of the 20th century, buy this book. Read this book. Underline significant passages in this book so you don’t have to waste time finding them when you read this book again; and maybe again after that.

The book had a one-month backlog on Amazon. I now not only have a copy for myself, but have also bought the book for several friends. You have a lot to read in life, but this is an easy read. The first 130 pages are about Agent Landis’ life before November 22, 1963. He writes well and you’ll blast through these so quickly it will seem like you’re skimming.

Then you are at the heart of the matter, lasting about 30 pages. You will either believe Agent Landis, or ascribe that he is too old to remember details, or that he has an axe to grind why he did not remain in the Secret Service, or that he just wants to make money.

Let’s quickly examine all three potential beliefs. As the author of over 15 published non-fiction works, I can tell you that Agent Landis didn’t make enough money as a first-time author to make up for the crap he is probably getting daily on social media for upsetting established “truths.” Second, as an Army officer for over 30 years, I know PTSD when I see or hear it, and while I’m not a psychologist, I know that he never got over what he experienced that day, and his resignation a year later proved that. He was right in the middle of the blood and the gore. And he couldn’t prevent it.

As to the facts, he presents so much detailed information, to include visual, audio and actually holding an intact bullet, and several bullet fragments, WHILE THEY WERE STILL IN THE PREIDENT’S LIMOUSINE.

In his book, he writes of three observations, from his position as a Secret Service agent who guarded the President’s wife and children. He started in a limo behind the President’s. Heard two shots from the rear that sounded different from one another. My take. This observation of sounding different could be a faulty memory. People remember songs well, but not exactly how individual instruments sound after the event. Two different sounds could be two different rifles, but they could also be the same weapon at changing distances and angles as the motorcade kept moving.

When they got to Parkland Hospital, Paul got into the President’s limousine while Mrs. Kennedy was in the back seat and found two bullet fragments on the seat beside her. Picked them up, looked at both quickly, and put them down where he had found them. My take. Happened as he said.

Now the last piece, and this is the big one. He helped lift JFK’s body out of the limo and on to a gurney. Then he helped Mrs. Kennedy stand up in the car, at which time he saw a completely intact bullet on top of the cushioning behind where she had been sitting. In other words, at that instant it was between the First Lady’s back and the back of her seat. My take. He was accurate, primarily because of what happened next.

Believing that the increasing crowd of people might include a souvenir-hunter, he puts the bullet into his pocket. However, he realizes in the examination room that he should not keep it, and places the bullet next to President Kennedy’s foot on the examination table. My take. Before writing this book, Paul Landis KNOWS that admitting that he took the bullet from the car will be critical of his conduct on that day. All he has to do is keep quiet and no one will ever know that. But he chooses the harder right and explains what he did and why he did it. This account rings true and accurate.

Conclusion. The intact bullet fell out of JFK’s back at some point during the shooting or the ride to Parkland. It could not have been the same “magic bullet” that supposedly went through the President, caused multiple wounds to John Connally and ended up on John Connally’s stretcher, having fallen out of Connally’s body.

It had fallen out of the President’s body, and later someone moved it from the side of the President’s foot to Connally’s stretcher — either by mistake or with intent.

Not even Arlen Specter can make a bullet go backwards and undo all the wounds it “supposedly” caused to the governor.

It also means that Oswald would have had to fire an additional shot that wounded just Connally. But he did not have time to do that.

Thank you, Paul Landis.

The Third Bullet by Stephen Hunter

The Third Bullet by Stephen Hunter

A Bob Lee Swagger Novel

Simon & Schuster, 2013

(February 14, 2023) I just re-read, for probably the fifth time because it is so well-written and a real pager-turner, The Third Bullet by Stephen Hunter. Part of the Bob Lee Swagger series, this fiction book transcends that genre, which I’ll address in a moment, and is clearly on my all-time top ten fiction book list.

It would probably not spoil the book, which I have carefully stored in our hide-away in Puerto Rico so that I may read it every year when we are down there, if I mentioned that it is about the John F. Kennedy assassination in Dallas in 1963. Kennedy’s picture is on the front dust jacket of the hard cover edition of the Simon & Schuster book (while Lee Harvey Oswald’s picture is on the back dust cover.) On the front title page is a photograph of the murder weapon, the infamous Mannlicher-Carcano Model 38 carbine with its cheap and poorly attached Japanese-made scope, and on both the front and rear inside of the hard cover are detailed sketches of Dealey Plaza – which probably has no significance for 99% of all Americans except for being the site of JFK’s murder.

The book begins with the hit-and-run death of an author (a “gun-guy” that wrote about snipers and weapons,) which being a writer myself obviously caught my undivided attention. The man’s widow does not believe it was an accident, so she contacts Bob Lee Swagger, who had been a sniper in Vietnam, who has had additional gun-related escapades in his later years, and whose body has so many old bullet wounds that it makes Swiss cheese look solid.

I will leave the story there and apologize to Mr. Hunter if I have said too much already.

Reviewer Lee Child (Jim Grant, Jack Reacher series) said of the book, “it might even be true,” while noted author Vince Flynn – who died shortly after The Third Bullet was published – opined that the book “answers the question ‘What if?’ in astonishingly plausible detail,” so if my modest writing skills remain unimpressive, at least you know that those two literary heavyweights liked Hunter’s book as well.

From Mark Lane (Rush to Judgment,) almost immediately after the assassination, to tomes published to this day fifty years later, authors have attempted to show that this group or that – with or without Lee Harvey Oswald’s participation – brought off the crime of the century, and some would say the most significant crime in the entire history of the United States. Most of these books, while they add bits and pieces to the general body of knowledge surrounding the assassination, often fall short in two areas: the technical capabilities of the firearm (maybe more than one, you’ll have to read the book) and bullets in question, and that the route of the presidential motorcade did not become known until a short few days before the event. Large, complex organizations do many things well, but doing them quickly is usually not a characteristic of the ponderous, as the author shows.

In short, after reading and re-reading Hunter’s work, one quickly concludes that the author truly understands firearms in all their complexity – and sometimes simplicity, such as a tour-de-force description of what the Mannlicher-Carcano was originally designed to do when developed in 1891 – as well as a consummate ability to leave no loose ends in the theory at the heart of the story.

However, there is another level to the novel that I mentioned earlier. Later in the work, the main character, Bob Lee Swagger, is informed by several literary experts that people who loved to read great literature often develop a sense of how they could insert puzzles and clues in their work (be that writing or espionage, etc.) that some people might find, while others miss them; some of these puzzles – which were key to understanding “who done it” – were in plain sight, while others had multiple layers of detail and nuance; some of them followed a clichéd formula, while others are undramatic and small.

Why is this dialogue important? Because the discussion is really not a focal point of finding “who done it.” That revelation is already known in the first third of the book.

No, I believe that Stephen Hunter slid this conversation of literary puzzles into the book intentionally for someone to find much later in reading The Third Bullet – maybe decades from now after Hunter and I and those of us who were living in 1963 are long gone – and conclude:

“This story is not total fiction. In fact, it is probably 70% true, maybe even more, and the author stumbled across it and promised his source that he would portray the book (‘Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination…’, humma, humma, etc.), as PURE fiction, when it is anything but a work of fiction at its heart.”

Read The Third Bullet yourself and see what you think. Is it simply a work of fiction that is so well-conceived and adroitly written that Stephen Hunter hit it out of the park, or is it something more?