I was in my eighth grade homeroom class when Sister Alfreda came in crying....and told us that President Kennedy had been shot. This was in a suburb of Pittsburgh. Three years and almost two months earlier our fifth grade Catholic school class had been herded out on Genesee Street in Buffalo to cheer as presidential candidate and then Senator Kennedy was driven from the airport to downtown to give an election speech. My wife and I honeymooned on Cape Cod and visited Hyannis Port a few times over the years. I had been reading about the Kennedys most of my adult life.....and that includes the events on that day in Dallas.
So the new book on the Kennedy assassination was to be released on Tuesday the 10th of this month but there was a delay and I received mine in the mail yesterday...The Final Witness....A Kennedy Secret Service Agent Breaks His Silence After 60 Years....by Paul Landis.
It was really his first day on detail for someone in a president's family. Dwight Eisenhower was the president....and his grandson David Eisenhower was the family member being protected by a Secret Service agent. Landis was to drive David somewhere when the twelve year old asked him...."You're new at this aren't you?" Special Agent Landis was so new that he didn't know that he had to report in on the car radio. Seventy-six year old David Eisenhower wrote a blurb for the back of the book.
This particular book on the assassination sticks out for this reason. I couldn't tell you how many first-hand books I have read on politics over the decades....but this may be the only one where I believed every word on every page. Here's why.
As the anecdote of young David Eisenhower shows....the Secret Service has come a long way in the past sixty years. Paul Landis essentially applied for a job with the Secret Service....almost as a lark....and got it....without a whole lot of experience at anything. He tells his story from the perspective as a regular human being who happened to at one time.....many years ago....been a Secret Service agent.
He resigned not long after those fateful days in November....a great toll having been taken on him....to say the least....and read nothing....and apparently paid no attention....to all the conspiracy talk....for about fifty years! He obviously has no axe to grind....and no superiors to run the manuscript by....and no side to take. He simply....and finally....became aware of the magic-bullet theory....or the single-bullet theory....and knew that the bullet wasn't found on Governor Connally's stretcher....because he Special Agent Landis had found it in the back seat....behind Mrs. Kennedy....and put it with the president's body in the trauma room of the hospital....during the chaos and confusion.
So some will read the book as additional...albeit new and startling information....and I'm part of that....but some will read the book simply on the personal level of a man who primarily had the assignment of guarding Jacqueline Kennedy and her children.....and I'm part of that group also. Both will be satisfied! It was hard to read his account of what happened in those approximate six minutes in Dealey Plaza. I had to put the book down....take a break....and then come back to it.
I can't resist....one more anecdote on the lighter side of the book. Landis....still new to the job....is doing night duty in a guard shack on one of the many presidential rural retreats. It is dark and quiet....and he is paying attention to what might be in the darkness and the silence....and there is a sudden loud thud right behind him in the shack....which scared the daylights out of him! The Kennedy's pet Welsh terrier Charlie had come into the shack and loudly deposited a croquet ball on the wooden floor for the two of them to play fetch with.....which Special Agent Landis did in fact do! I don't see that happening today.
Note: I started to pass the book around....and the third person is reading it now....each taking only two days to read it.
