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.
With a likely assist from French intelligence, Salinger was put in touch with retired United Airline pilot and accident investigator Dick Russell. Russell had been suspicious about the cause of the crash since Pentagon spokesman Ken Bacon first announced it. Russell had been around long enough to know that civilian plane crashes were not the natural bailiwick of the Defense Department.
Having gathered information through his own network of aviation insiders, Russell sent a summary e-mail to his associates with the message, “TWA Flight 800 was shot down by a U.S. Navy guided missile ship which was in area W-105. It has been a cover-up from the word go.” Although recipients had vowed to keep the information among themselves, one of them posted the information on the internet, and it somehow found its way to Salinger.
Salinger called Russell about the intel and visited him in Florida soon afterwards. In addition to the information Russell and his colleagues had been sharing, Salinger had with him several government dispatches that reinforced the theory that the U.S. Navy accidentally shot down the 747.
As to Salinger’s motives, Russell believes that he seriously disliked the Clintons. He remained a loyal enough Democrat, however, to sit on his information until it lost its political punch. He broke his silence at an aviation conference in the French resort city of Cannes two days after the November 4 presidential election.
There, Salinger told the assembled executives that he had “very important details that show the plane was brought down by a U.S. Navy missile.” He added the obvious: “If the news came out that an American naval ship shot down that plane it would be something that would make the public very very unhappy and could have an effect on the election.”
