60 years later, a Secret Service agent grapples with JFK assassination

Paul Landis stood guard outside Parkland Memorial Hospital’s Trauma Room No. 1 as Father Oscar Huber rushed past, dressed in his Roman collar. It was just before 1 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 22, 1963. Less than half an hour earlier, Landis had been riding on the running board of a Secret Service car when he witnessed President John F. Kennedy’s murder up close as the motorcade drove through Dallas’s Dealey Plaza.

Now, as the 28-year-old agent kept an eye on his official protectee, the stunned first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, he watched Huber enter the trauma room to deliver Kennedy’s last rites.

“Si capax,” Huber whispered into the president’s ear. Translated from Latin, his prayer went: “If it is possible, I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”

For Landis, who was raised Presbyterian in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio, Catholic rituals were a mystery, but he knew this final blessing was of critical importance to the first lady. He waited outside the room for Jackie and Huber to emerge.

Landis, 88, is one of the few survivors who had a firsthand view of the tragedy. He is only now telling his whole story, in a book published last month, titled “The Final Witness.”

Sixty years after the assassination, the events of Nov. 22, 1963, have come to seem like a chapter firmly rooted in history, the subject of debate – and conspiracy theories – among many people born multiple generations later. But to Landis, his memories from Dealey Plaza and Parkland remain immediate, and the revelations those memories bring are helping reshape our understanding of that fateful day.

I have worked with Landis over the past six months, helping him prepare for the media attention that we knew would follow his book’s publication. Much of that attention focused on his assertion that he found an intact bullet on top of the rear car seat behind where Kennedy was shot – a claim that has cast fresh doubt on official narratives of the assassination. But we’ve also had many conversations about his experience on Nov. 22 and the complicated nature of memory in the aftermath of a trauma.

Landis was only there in Dallas because Jackie Kennedy – in whose security detail he served – had decided to accompany her husband on this campaign trip. It was his first time in a motorcade. In the moments before the president was shot, Landis was scanning the relatively thin crowd as the presidential limousine and his follow-on car, code-named Halfback, drove along Elm Street, below the Texas School Book Depository.

The crowds were enthusiastic and non-threatening. “I just remember as we moved closer to the business district, there was a lady among a group of children holding up a sign that read, ‘Please Stop, Mr. President,’” he recalled. “We started to pass by, but the president stopped the limo and started to shake hands with the children and adults, who immediately converged on the car. All the agents jumped off the follow-on car and took up protective positions around the limo until we started moving again. I heard the lady with the sign yell in excitement, ‘It worked, our sign worked!’”

As the cavalcade reached Dealey Plaza and the cars drove toward the Stemmons Freeway, a shot rang out. “When we reached Dealey Plaza and the cars straightened, first thing I heard was a sharp report that I immediately recognized as the sound of a high-powered rifle,” he said. “I had been around guns all my life, as a sportsman and Secret Service agent, so I knew the sound of rifles. It wasn’t a firecracker.”

He looked around and saw the president leaning toward the first lady but didn’t know whether he had been hit.

Then two more shots followed. “I saw a flash of white as the right side of the President Kennedy’s head exploded in a pink spray of blood, flesh and brain matter,” he wrote in his book. “I automatically ducked, not wanting to be splattered as we drove through it.”

Once at Parkland, Landis witnessed a scene of pure horror. The inside of the limo looked as if a bomb had gone off – blood, human tissue and bullet fragments were scattered everywhere. Jackie Kennedy was bent over her husband’s head, which she cradled in her lap. She wanted no one to see his condition. She wouldn’t let go.

Landis and Agent Clint Hill, also on the first lady’s detail, climbed into the back seat. “I said, ‘Let me help you, Mrs. Kennedy,’ and she kept repeating, ‘No, no, no, I want to stay with him,’” he remembered. “And she would not release the president.” Finally, he said, Hill “figured out that he needed to remove his coat and cover the president’s head so no one would see the devastating head wound.” With this, Jackie finally surrendered her husband’s body.

Landis noticed two bullet fragments in a pool of blood next to where Jackie sat. Then he saw a fully intact bullet on top of the rear seat, he said, behind where the president had been sitting when the final shot or shots knocked him violently back and to the left. “I scanned the area,” he said, “noticing that all the agents were rushing into the emergency room, and there was no one left to secure the limo.” Worried that the intact bullet might be lost or stolen by a souvenir seeker, Landis picked up the bullet and took it into the hospital. He would leave it on the president’s stretcher in Trauma Room No. 1, expecting it to be found by the doctors during an autopsy.

Landis knew the president was dead the moment he saw the final hit to his head. The clock on top of the Texas School Book Depository read 12:30 p.m. It quickly became clear that there was no chance of saving Kennedy, yet doctors still made an effort to resuscitate him. “After all, this was the president of the United States,” Landis says.

Landis was in complete shock. “My greatest fear was that I was going to pass out,” he said. The image in his mind of the president’s exploding head would not stop playing on loop.

As he stood outside the trauma room, he focused on the first lady, who entered the trauma room several times. “I was only a few feet away from her when she stood up and walked into an area of the emergency room with curtained booths,” he said. “She stood for some time just staring at the wall. I walked over and asked if there was anything I could do. She just shook her head no.”

From the muddle of that day, one memory stands out: when a committee had to decide the time of death. White House assistant press secretary Malcolm Kilduff huddled with Landis and others present. “He said: We need to have everything in proper sequence – what we will say to the public and the press, when the last rites were given – everything in proper sequence,” Landis said.

Landis would have placed the time of death at 12:30 p.m. Central time, when the sniper’s bullet (or bullets) hit the president’s head. But because Father Huber hadn’t arrived at Parkland until nearly 1 p.m., the group agreed to set the time of death as 1 p.m. – to comfort the family and the nation with the fiction that the president had survived long enough to receive the last rites of his Church.

And so it would be. Kilduff famously made the death announcement to the press in a room at Parkland normally used as a nurses’ classroom. With high emotions and a breaking voice, Kilduff said: “President John F. Kennedy died at approximately 1 o’clock, Central standard time, today, here in Dallas. He died of a gunshot wound in the brain. I have no other details regarding the assassination of the president.”

That time was picked up by Walter Cronkite of CBS News, who interrupted the soap opera “As the World Turns” to tell the nation of the president’s death. “From Dallas, Texas, the flash, apparently official, President Kennedy died at 1 p.m. Central standard time, 2 o’clock Eastern standard time, some 38 minutes ago.” He took off his glasses and choked up.

Meanwhile, Landis was on his way to Love Field with the president’s casket. He would fly back to D.C. on Air Force One. “I broke down on the plane,” he said. “I probably cried the entire way to Washington.” His thoughts were with the Kennedy children he knew so well and the first lady in the back of the plane sitting next to casket containing the remains of her husband.

History changed that day, and so did Landis’s life. He toughed it out for another six months on protective duty for Jackie Kennedy and her children, but when his nightmares didn’t dissipate, he knew it was time to leave. Sixty years later, he finally has unburdened himself of his memories.

James D. Robenalt is the author of “The Harding Affair, Love and Espionage During the Great War” and “January 1973, Watergate, Roe v. Wade, Vietnam, and the Month That Changed America Forever.”