After the assassination, I was re-assigned to guard the presidential vehicle after it had been flown back to the White House garage. Several hospital staff members from Bethesda Naval Hospital entered the vehicle to remove scalp, brain tissue and bone matter from the back seat. While waiting for the Bethesda Naval Hospital attendants to arrive, I did notice what appeared to be a bullet-hole in the front windshield of the driver’s side. I do not remember if the glass remnants were on the inside of the vehicle or the outside of the windshield. If the glass remnants were on the inside of the car, it would offer some acceptance to the theory that at least one of the shots came from the front of the President’s vehicle.
I don’t remember anything out of the ordinary regarding my duties prior to the assassination other than several trips to the Kennedy residence in Palm Beach, Florida. I also recall an incident in Chicago involving a suspect who was planning to assassinate the President. However, I was not involved in that investigation and the threat was taken care of by the Chicago office of the Secret Service.
I believe Oswald was the shooter and though I am not a conspiracy buff, I believe if others were involved, I think the Mafia would be the only ones who could have pulled it off without someone later confessing involvement in the President’s assassination. In those days, Mafia members had a strict code that did not allow them to confess. It had been said that a New Orleans Mafia Don, Carlos Marcello, was heard to say, “If you cut off the head of the snake (JFK), the tail (RFK), would die.” At that time, Robert Kennedy was the Attorney General and was working against the Mafia. Shortly after the assassination, Robert Kennedy was fired and it took another 20-years before the F.B.I. made any headway against the Mafia.
For the first 1/2 hr of the show, Secret Service Agent Joe Paolella will comment on the General Petraeus affair. Joe will also tell us amazing stories when he was a secret service agent to four US Presidents, including JFK. Joe was the Secret Service agent responsible for guarding JFK’s limousine after the shooting. He noticed a bullet hole through the front windshield and never told anyone about this. About 40 years later, the first and only person he ever told was his good friend Dr John.
Vincent Palamara was born in Pittsburgh and graduated from Duquesne University with a degree in Sociology.
Although not even born when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Vince brings fresh eyes to an old case. In fact, Vince would go on to study the largely overlooked actions - and inactions - of the United States Secret Service in unprecedented detail, as well as achieving a world's record in the process, having interviewed and corresponded with over 80 former agents (the House Select Committee on Assassinations had the old record of 46 with a 6 million dollar budget and subpoena power from Congress), not to mention many surviving family members, White House aides, and even quite a few Parkland and Bethesda medical witnesses for a corresponding project. The result was Survivor's Guilt: The Secret Service & The Failure To Protect President Kennedy.
Vince is also the author of the books JFK: From Parkland To Bethesda, The Not-So-Secret Service, Who's Who in the Secret Service, and Honest Answers about the Murder of President John F. Kennedy: A New Look at the JFK Assassination.
All told, Vince has been favorably mentioned in over 140 JFK and Secret Service related books to date (including two whole chapters in Murder in Dealey Plaza, The Secret Service: The Hidden History Of An Enigmatic Agency by Philip Melanson, and the Final Report of the Assassination Records Review Board, among many others), often at length, in the bibliographies, and in the Secret Service - and even medical evidence - areas of these works.
Vince has appeared on the History Channel's THE MEN WHO KILLED KENNEDY (VHS and DVD), C-SPAN, Newsmax TV, A COUP IN CAMELOT (DVD/BLU RAY), KING KILL '63, THE MAN BEHIND THE SUIT (DVD), National Geographic's JFK: THE FINAL HOURS (including on DVD), PCN, BPTV, local cable access television, YouTube, radio, newspapers, print journals, at national conferences, and all over the internet. Also, Vince's original research materials, or copies of said materials, are stored in the National Archives (by request under Deed Of Gift by the ARRB), the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Harvard University, the Assassination Archives and Research Center, and the Dallas Public Library.
Vince Palamara has become known (as he was dubbed by the History Channel in 2003) "the Secret Service expert." As former JFK Secret Service agent Joe Paolella proclaimed: "You seem to know a lot about the Secret Service, maybe even more than I do!" Agent Dan Emmett calls Vince a Secret Service expert in his new book.