Không thể im lặng mãi

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...Mr. Landis’s account (câu chuyện), included in a forthcoming memoir (cuốn hồi ký), would rewrite the narrative (iết lại câu chuyện) of one of modern American history’s most earth-shattering days (ngày kinh hoàng) in an important way. It may not mean any more than that. But it could also encourage those who have long suspected (nghi ngờ) that there was more than one gunman in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, adding new grist to one of the nation’s enduring mysteries (bí ẩn).

...What it comes down to is a copper-jacketed 6.5-millimeter projectile. The Warren Commission decided that one of the bullets (đạn) fired that day struck the president from behind, exited from the front of his throat and continued on to hit Mr. Connally, somehow managing to injure his back, chest, wrist and thigh. It seemed incredible (khó tin) that a single bullet (một viên đạn) could do all that, so skeptics (hoài nghi) called it the magic bullet theory (giả thuyết viên đạn ma thuật).

Investigators came to that conclusion (kết luận) partly because the bullet was found on a stretcher (cáng) believed to have held Mr. Connally at Parkland Memorial Hospital, so they assumed it had exited his body during efforts to save his life. But Mr. Landis, who was never interviewed by the Warren Commission, said that is not what happened.

In fact, he said, he was the one who found the bullet — and he found it not in the hospital near Mr. Connally but in the presidential limousine (limousine của tổng thống) lodged in the back of the seat behind where Kennedy was sitting.

When he spotted the bullet after the motorcade arrived at the hospital, he said he grabbed it to thwart souvenir hunters (ngăn chặn những kẻ săn quà lưu niệm). Then, for reasons that still seem fuzzy even to him, he said he entered the hospital and placed it next to Kennedy on the president’s stretcher, assuming it could somehow help doctors figure out what happened. At some point, he now guesses, the stretchers must have been pushed together and the bullet was shaken from one to another.