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The provenance of the bullet is also important in supporting or refuting Paul Landis’s purported memory. How was that bullet found? And how did it make its way to the FBI lab in Washington, DC, on the night of the assassination?
Landis’s recollection, as stated above, is that he found the undeformed bullet on top of the back seat of the limousine. “It was resting in a seam where the tufted leather padding ended against the car’s metal body,” he writes. When Jackie Kennedy stood up to follow her husband into the hospital, he saw it. He picked up the bullet, worried that souvenir seekers or others might take it or move it.
Upon arriving inside the emergency room, as stated above, he was jammed in with the first lady and a gathering horde of doctors and nurses. Standing near the feet of the president’s body, Landis left the bullet on his stretcher, as he believed it was crucial evidence and needed for the autopsy, which, under Texas law, should have taken place in Dallas.
But then a new chain of events overtook the gruesome sequence surrounding the assassination. A decision was made to transfer the president’s body, along with the first lady, Vice President Johnson, and others, back to Air Force One at Love Field. And with new tasks taking precedence for Landis—and the overwhelming national shock of the first assassination of an American president in 62 years (since the death of William McKinley in 1901)—the special agent simply never gave the bullet a second thought, he says. He had left it where someone would find it.
Landis didn’t make reference to the bullet in either of the two reports he submitted, hastily written in the turbulent days following the assassination. One short file, written two days after the funeral, didn’t even mention Parkland Memorial Hospital. A second, typed three days later—a day after Life magazine journalist Theodore White interviewed Jackie at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, in what became known, famously, as the “Camelot” interview—was drafted during a time of deep shock and trauma.
That Thanksgiving, November 28—three days after the state funeral at which world leaders marched behind Mrs. Kennedy in the streets of Washington, DC—Landis and Hill traveled to Hyannis Port in a security capacity, protecting Jackie and her children. The agents had no time off to regroup or get their bearings. Sleep had eluded them. Landis had been up for practically four days straight. In the months after Lyndon Johnson was sworn in and assumed the presidential reins, Landis’s role switched from being part of the overall White House protection group to working full time for the former first lady. (Congress passed an act to authorize this service.) With this change of responsibilities, he found it hard to think of much beyond the weeks ahead. And if his thoughts did migrate back to November 22, he dwelled on the horrific scenes of the assassination, and rarely on what he says he considered a minor detail: the fact that he had picked up a bullet and placed it next to the president’s body.
The evidence from 1963 makes it fully plausible that the stretcher on which the bullet was found could have been President Kennedy’s. How so? A Parkland Memorial Hospital engineer, Darrell Tomlinson, was asked on November 22, before the president’s remains had been taken from the hospital to travel back north, to set the controls of the elevator in the emergency area—the one that had taken the wounded Governor Connally up to the second floor for surgery—so that the elevator would only be operable manually. The security team had determined that only people with official clearance would be allowed access; Tomlinson was instructed to control who got on the elevator and where they would go.
When he pushed the button to open the elevator, he later recalled, there was a stretcher in the elevator—one that the Warren Commission presumed was Governor Connally’s stretcher, returned from the surgery floor. Tomlinson testified that the stretcher had some sheets on it and a white covering on the pad, but no bullet. He moved the stretcher out of the elevator and placed it against a wall.
However, Tomlinson testified that there was another stretcher already in the hall, which had been placed in front of a men’s restroom in the corner. That stretcher had bloody sheets and some used medical paraphernalia on it.
Tomlinson said that sometime later, “an intern or doctor,” in order to use the bathroom, pushed the stretcher out of the way but failed to return it to its spot against the wall after leaving. Tomlinson roughly pushed it back against the wall, and when he did so, he claimed, a bullet rolled out from under the mat. This was clearly not Connally’s stretcher.
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James Robenalt
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