CLEVELAND — President John F. Kennedy’s assassination changed the course of American history, but 60 years later, questions linger about that fateful day.

What You Need To Know

  • Former U.S. Secret Service Agent Paul Landis was assigned to work with the Kennedy administration, serving from inauguration until after President John F. Kennedy's assassination

  • Landis said he found a bullet in the president's limo following the deadly shooting Nov. 22, 1963

  • Landis said he placed the bullet on the president's gurney at the hospital and didn't report the evidence 

A witness who was close to the president during those seconds in Dallas is now breaking his silence and revealing never-before documented information about what some consider to be a pivotal piece of evidence.

Paul Landis said he has mainly happy memories about his five-year stint in the Secret Service.

“This was, to me, the greatest job in the universe,” Landis said. “I just, I loved it.

He holds on to news about the 35th president. He has a box full of unopened newspapers printed during the Kennedy administration.

“The Kennedys were young and vivacious,” he said. “I don’t think the country had seen a president like that before or since.”

Landis was there, on duty, as Kennedy took the oath of office.

“I was stationed in front of the inauguration stand in front of the White House in the afternoon,” he said.

He was also in Dallas when gunfire claimed Kennedy’s life on Nov. 22, 1963.

The bold headlines on Landis’s collection of newsprint are as bold as the event remains in his mind.

He was riding on the right rear running board of the vehicle behind the presidential limo when he heard a shot fired.

“Came from over my right shoulder,” he said. “And I turned and looked and didn’t see anything. And then I scanned the crowd and I looked at President Kennedy. I did not realize he had been hit at that point.”

A second shot rang out. Landis later learned that bullet wounded Texas Gov. John Connally.

Then another shot hit Kennedy in the head.

The motorcade raced to Parkland Memorial Hospital. Landis said he took a closer look at the limo and noticed a crack in the windshield.

When the First Lady stood up, he said he noticed something else.

“An almost perfect bullet on the back seat,” he said. “On the top of the back seat.”

Landis said he slipped the evidence in his pocket.

“I didn’t want to see a souvenir hunter or anybody get it,” he said.

Hospital staff rushed Kennedy to its Trauma Unit One. The surge of chaos pushed Landis against the president’s feet.

“I thought, ‘well, here’s a perfect place to leave the bullet,’” he said. “It’s with the president’s body, they’ll find it during an autopsy.”

He said he left the bullet on the gurney next to Kennedy’s shoe and didn’t mention it in any of his statements to the government’s 1964 investigation conducted by the Warren Commission.

“I think people have a hard time understanding the stress that everybody was going through,” Landis said. “I mean, I’m not using it as an excuse, it’s just what happened.”

Now Landis wants to set the record straight. He documents his memories surrounding President Kennedy’s assassination in a new book, “The Final Witness.”

“I think the bullet I took out of the limo is a big piece that the Warren Commission didn’t have,” he said.

Landis said his bullet refutes the Warren Commission’s theory that a single bullet hit both the governor and president, but supports the commission’s view that Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy.

“Nothing’s there to convince me that there was a second shooter,” he said.

Landis admitted not reporting the bullet was a mistake and he wasn’t braced for the backlash from skeptics criticizing his story, especially given the 60 years it took to reveal it.

“It’s like I stepped into a hornet’s nest,” Landis said.

Still, Landis said he’s happy to finally face this moment in time, a moment the country will never forget.

“All this stuff that I had buried was just like, ‘Puff,’” he said.

Journalist Geraldo Rivera is among Landis’s critics. In 1975, Rivera was the first to nationally broadcast a film showing the moments each bullet hits Kennedy.

At an event hosted by the University of Cincinnati’s Department of Journalism this month, Rivera said he researched the assassination extensively and has doubts about Landis’s claims.

“I think that his recollection is wrong,” Rivera said. “I can’t believe after all this time he would suddenly, as he’s publishing a book, come up with the alternate set of facts that the bullet was not on the stretcher, the bullet was on the backseat of the limo. So, I discount it, with all respect.”

Earlier this year, the National Archives and Records Administration released thousands of records related to John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

At this time, there are no plans to reopen an investigation into Kennedy’s death.