On Saturday, the New York Times surprised many people, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. among them, with a lengthy article questioning the “single bullet theory” in the November 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
The man who got the Times’ attention is Paul Landis, a long-retired Secret Service agent who stood on the running board of Kennedy’s car that fateful day. What is odd about that attention is how little new information Landis adds to the conversation.
As Landis claims in the forthcoming book, The Final Witness, he originally misremembered where he first saw the pristine “magic bullet,” the cornerstone of the Warren Commission’s lone gunmen theory. Even if his revived memory is more accurate — it may well be — Landis’s reflections cloud the issue more than they clarify. For a journal that prides itself on swatting down conspiracy theories, the Times seems inexplicably eager to bite on this one.
Speaking of Kennedy, no single American has felt the sting of the Times’ historic disdain for so-called conspiracy theorists more than JFK’s legendary press secretary, Pierre Salinger. Unlike Landis, Salinger made the mistake of exposing a conspiracy that was very much in play when he exposed it.
I speak here of the case of TWA Flight 800. The 747 was en route from New York to Paris when it crashed off the coast of Long Island in July 1996, killing all 230 people on board. At the time, Salinger was working in Paris where the interest in TWA 800 was understandably high, 36 French citizens having died in the crash.