JFK and the Undercharged Bullet

Sept. 24, 2023

One of the last surviving Secret Service agents from the presidential motorcade detail of John F. Kennedy when he was assassinated in 1963 has written a book claiming he found a barely damaged bullet on the back seat of the presidential limousine after the shooting. In the book, Paul Landis, 88, comes forward after 60 years and says that bullet fell out of President Kennedy’s back.

In a preview article of the book in Vanity Fair, James Robenalt, an attorney and historian who helped Landis with the book (full disclosure Landis’s publisher, Chicago Review Press, has been my publisher), explains, “Maybe the bullet entered the president’s back only superficially; these WWII–vintage bullets, after all, were notoriously undercharged with gunpowder. If this were the case, it might have indeed fallen out when he was violently struck with the final shot; when Mrs. Kennedy, at one point, pushed him down onto the seat; or when she clambered onto the trunk, the bullet falling off of her and onto the top of the back seat.”

Robenalt believes this finding refutes the magic bullet theory and raises the possibility of a second shooter. If the bullet entering JFK’s back at supersonic speed stopped and actually did fall out of his back, it would contradict Lee Harvey Oswald being the only shooter because Oswald only fired three times. A fourth bullet means he could not fire bullets fast enough to account for all of JFK’s wounds as well as those of John Connally.

But conspiracy theories invariably confine themselves to attempting to prove what did not happen, rather than explaining what did happen to comport with known facts. To explain established facts about the assassination, theories often resort to preposterous explanations, such as Lee Harvey Oswald having a body double or JFK’s limousine driver as the assassin. Is that the type of sophistry at work here?

I don’t know if Paul Landis found a bullet, what bullet he found, or where he left it, but there are two major problems his story creates that conflict with the forensic evidence.

First: If this bullet fell out – what caused JFK’s throat wound? As Robenalt writes, “In one of the earliest critiques of the Warren Commission report, Josiah Thompson, author of Six Seconds in Dallas, proposed, not unreasonably, that the front-neck wound might have come from a bullet or bone fragment that was driven down and exited through the president’s throat from the final blast to his skull.”

Josiah Thompson is one of the most reasonable of the Warren Commission skeptics, but a bone fragment causing the throat wound should be dismissed immediately. None of the doctors or pathologists, whether they believe the wound was an entry or an exit wound, has ever said it was caused by a bone fragment. Everyone, skeptic or not, believes the president’s throat wound was caused by a bullet.

Robenalt acknowledges this possibility and notes that one of the X-rays taken of the president’s wounds supposedly housed at the National Archives is missing. “It might have contained evidence of a shot from the front of the motorcade—a frangible bullet that disintegrated into tiny pieces after entry into the body.

A heavy lift, for sure, but medical staffers who saw the front-of-the-neck wound before the tracheotomy believed it was an entrance wound because of its neatness. “ (A neat wound is telling evidence against the bone fragment theory – if a bone fragment causes a wound, it is rarely, if ever, neat.)

A bullet wound from the front? This means not just a second but also a third shooter and five bullets as well. To explain what is known, it would take five bullets fired by three shooters: one that missed everything (fired by Oswald), one causing JFK’s back wound (fired by Oswald), one causing JFK’s head wound (fired by Oswald), one causing JFK’s throat wound (fired by a second shooter in front), and one causing John Connally’s multiple wounds (fired by a third shooter other than Oswald from behind.)

This is a good example of how improbabilities magnify when conspiracy theories have to explain what actually happened. Five shots are wildly improbable, and in sixty years, despite all efforts there has never been physical evidence of any other shooter. The bullets supposedly fired by the two other mystery shooters have never been recovered.

Further, as Robenalt theorizes, it requires both a bullet undercharged with gunpowder and a frangible bullet (one that breaks up and leaves little or no trace on impact.) The latter is especially noteworthy – frangible bullets used outside of shooting ranges were not in wide use until a decade after the assassination.

And although several emergency staff did identify the throat wound as an entrance wound, this is also exceedingly unlikely, given the geography of Dealey Plaza. There was almost nowhere for a sniper to cause a midline throat wound by shooting at the president directly head on (unless the limousine driver turned around and fired at JFK); virtually every position except for the triple overpass would have meant a crossing shot.

While the overpass is a difficult but potential sniper site, there has never been any concrete evidence of a sniper in that area. Regardless, to hit JFK that shot would have meant a bullet going through the passenger side windshield (where there is no bullet hole), and avoiding the Secret Service agent in the front passenger seat and John Connally in the jumpseat, both of whom were essentially functioning as a shield for the front of the president.

The far more plausible explanation is that the back wound was an entry wound from a bullet that went through the president’s body at 1400 miles/hour, and the throat wound was that exit wound.

Second: If the bullet fell out – how was John Connally wounded? Perhaps the most significant weakness of the Warren Report and all the subsequent analyses is the relative neglect of John Connally’s wounds, which are well documented. We also know from the Zapruder film when Connally was wounded – about one second after JFK. But because the attention has always been on JFK’s wounds, much of what can be deduced from Connally’s injuries has been ignored.

Connally’s initial entry wound was in the back, underneath his right armpit. Remove JFK from the scenario, and laser analysis shows that the shot came from above and to the right, aligned with the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, Oswald’s position. Reinserting JFK in the appropriate position – slightly to the right and above Connally (this is the actual position – not directly behind him as conspiracy theorists argue), shows the bullet passing through JFK before hitting Connally. This assumes the bullet path was not deflected by going through JFK, which both the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassination agree did not occur.

With JFK no more than one and a half feet in front of the right side of Connally’s back – JFK now shielding Connally’s back – it means Connally had to be hit by the same bullet that went through JFK. Anything else is impossible – no alternative trajectory, bullet angle or sniper position could explain Connally’s injuries. Construct any shooter position, trajectory, angle you want – it is impossible to explain Connally’s wounds, one second after Kennedy was hit, any other way. Amidst every conspiracy theory, no one has ever offered a credible alternative explanation of how John Connally was wounded. Put simply, whether or not Paul Landis found a bullet in the limousine, the same bullet that passed through JFK from the sixth floor of the TBD had to hit John Connally. There is no possibility of a second shooter who wounded John Connally.

The difficulty with conspiracy theories in the JFK assassination is that they violate the law of parsimony – the principle that the most likely explanation is the one that requires the fewest assumptions, sometimes known as Occam’s Razor.

The bullet that Paul Landis says he found requires at least the following assumptions to explain the crime: five shots and three shooters; an undercharged bullet traveling faster than the speed of sound that stops suddenly as well as a frangible bullet that may or may not have been in existence at the time of the shooting; an incredible frontal shot that left no damage to the limousine windshield and a shot that wounded John Connally that appears to defy the laws of physics. Judge the credibility for yourself.