The Final Witness: A Kennedy Secret Service Agent Breaks His Silence After Sixty Years

by Paul Landis

Overview

Dallas, Texas. November 22, 1963. Shots ring out at Dealey Plaza. The president is struck in the head by a rifle bullet. Confusion reigns.
Special Agent Paul Landis is in the follow-up car directly behind JFK’s and is at the president’s limo as soon as it stops at Parkland Memorial Hospital. He is inside Trauma Room #1, where the president is pronounced dead. He is on Air Force One with the president’s casket on the flight back to Washington, DC; an eyewitness to Lyndon Johnson taking the oath of office.
What he saw is indelibly imprinted upon his psyche. He writes and files his report. And yet . . . Agent Landis is never called to testify to the Warren Commission. The one person who could have supplied key answers is never asked questions.
By mid-1964, the nightmares from Dallas remain, and he resigns. It isn’t until the fiftieth anniversary that he begins to talk about it, and he reads his first books on the assassination.
Landis learns about the raging conspiracy theories—and realizes where they all go wrong.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781641609449
Publisher:	Chicago Review Press, Incorporated
Publication date:	10/10/2023
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	14,408
Product dimensions:	8.90(w) x 6.10(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Paul Landis was a twenty-eight-year-old Secret Service agent in President Kennedy’s Dallas motorcade on November 22, 1963. Though he was a witness to the events that day, he was never interviewed by the Warren Commission, and has kept his recollections private until now, including details surrounding a key piece of evidence.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Resignation and Reflection
2. All My Eggs
3. The Queen City
4. Gettysburg and Protection
5. Secret Service School and White House Detail
6. My Debut
7. Ravello, Italy
8. Lace, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Loss of Patrick
9. Greece
10. Texas
11. Parkland
12. Back in Washington, DC
13. On the Move, Life After Death, or, Buried but Not Forgotten
Epilogue

Editorial Reviews

10/16/2023

A former Secret Service agent recalls the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and makes startling claims about the number of shots fired in this knotty debut memoir. Landis recounts his stint in the Secret Service from 1959 to 1964, much of it spent guarding Jacqueline Kennedy (a warmhearted but tragic presence in the book) and her children, Caroline and John-John. Landis’s winsome portrait of the First Family takes on a gripping, visceral immediacy when he narrates his experiences in Kennedy’s Dallas motorcade on the day of the assassination and makes a paradigm-shifting assertion about the “magic bullet,” credited by the Warren Commission with having caused several wounds to both Kennedy and Texas governor John Connally after it was discovered near Connally’s hospital gurney. However, Landis claims he found the bullet on Kennedy’s car seat, pocketed it, and placed it on Kennedy’s gurney or exam table (the book is not clear on which), a scenario that suggests it could not have subsequently wounded Connally (who was sitting in the front seat at the time of the shooting) and lends credence to theories about a second shooter. There are some tough to square aspects of Landis’s account: he did not log the bullet into evidence, mention it in his report, or tell anyone about it for decades. The recreation of the fatal day is vivid, but Landis’s claims require further investigation. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"Mr. Landis’s account, included in a forthcoming memoir, would rewrite the narrative of one of modern American history’s most earth-shattering days in an important way...But it could also 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 enduing mysteries." —New York Times

"It's a moment that changed history and a story that still fascinates." —People Magazine

"Paul Landis was one of two Secret Service agents tasked with guarding first lady Jacqueline Kennedy on November 22, 1963—the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. In a new book, The Final Witness, to be published in October, Landis claims to have seen something that afternoon that he had never publicly admitted before...His account also raises questions about whether there might have been a second gunman in Dallas that day." —Vanity Fair

“This book has enormous charm. Special Agent Landis, a young man in his twenties, had a front-row seat to Camelot, guarding First Lady Jackie Kennedy and her two sweet children. He was with Mrs. Kennedy at every major turn: the loss of her child Patrick, the trip to Greece to cruise with Onassis on his superyacht. And then he stepped into “a living nightmare.” Dallas. A close, first-hand witness who was never interviewed by the Warren Commission. His stunning revelation in this book will cause a major re-examination of every assassination theory. It is historical dynamite.” —James Robenalt, presidential historian and author of January 1973

“The Final Witness realistically and movingly transports the reader back to the halcyon days of the Kennedy’s presidency and the inevitable tragic events that followed as seen through the eyes of a passionate young Secret Service agent participating in his first presidential motorcade.” —Holly Witchey, author of The Autobiography of Jeptha Homer Wade

“In The Final Witness, Paul Landis renders a riveting account of his life focused on his years in the US Secret Service. As an historian, I would consider The Final Witness to be a must-read book on the Kennedy presidency and late Eisenhower presidency, on Jacqueline Kennedy as both First Lady and widow, and above all on the Kennedy assassination and the fateful questions surrounding it. I could not put this book down and I plan to recommend it to friends and students. As a boy, I knew Paul Landis as a member of the Eisenhower detail and can attest that every detail of his account is both accurate and interesting. He was a terrific Secret Service agent and person, and his remarkable life story is historically important. I am glad and I am sure readers will be glad that he has taken the time out to tell it.” —David Eisenhower, author of Eisenhower at War, 1943–1945

“A jolting, painfully personal account of President Kennedy’s assassination from a previously overlooked eyewitness. Paul Landis’s book is certain to rock the world and force a reexamination of that tragic day in American history.” —Ken Gormley, president of Duquesne University and editor of The Presidents and the Constitution: A Living History

From the Publisher