Vince Salandria
Dear
All,
It is
with a heavy heart that I write to say that Vince Salandria died this past
Sunday of a heart attack while out walking his dog.
We
posted a tribute to Vince on the Truth & Reconciliation website.
We are
collecting remembrances and will post those as well, so please feel free to
share your memories.
Vince
deserves a proper obituary, and we are reaching out to our contacts in the
media, but if anyone can help please let me know.
We will
miss him,
Libby Handros
Dan
Storper
Co-Chairs
The
Truth & Reconciliation Committee
FAREWELL TO THE “FIRST RESEARCHER”
The man
who immediately understood the true cause and profound meaning of President
Kennedy’s assassination, and for 57 years quietly taught
that understanding to the rest of us, has died. Vincent
J. Salandria was 92, vigorous and lucid till the end. On Sunday,
August 23rd, he collapsed while walking his dog in his
Philadelphia neighborhood.
We
reprint here in full Christopher Sharrett’s excellent short biography of Vince,
written in 1999 as the introduction to False
Mystery, a collection of Vince’s speeches and articles that remain
indispensable reading today.
To the
extensive list of Salandria-inspired people and material
provided by Professor Sharrett below, we should add three of the
most important that have arrived on the scene since his piece
was written: Jim Douglas’s JFK and The Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why it
Matters and two works by David Talbot: Brothers: The Hidden History of the
Kennedy Years, and The Devil’s Chessboard, about the career of
CIA director Allen Dulles.
In
addition, Vince advised and will appear in two upcoming documentary
films, one directed by Max Good on the role of the Paines in
history, and Four Died Trying, produced by TRC co-chair Libby Handros
and directed by this writer.
Vince
insisted on asking fundamental questions that cut through the cant of
official propaganda. With an attorney’s clear logic, he asked with
perfect simplicity: “What would an honest government do?”
It was a
test the authorities consistently failed at the time of the assassination, and
one we would do well to apply more vigorously today.
Farewell, great
teacher.
John
Kirby
Provincetown,
MA
August
25, 2020
Introduction
to False Mystery
by
Christopher Sharrett
The
writings of Vincent J Salandria on the assassination of President John F.
Kennedy are historic, foundational, and essential to any serious scholar
interested in understanding the real dynamics of the Kennedy murder and its
place as a terrible and pivotal moment of the American Century. In his
1967 book Six Seconds in Dallas, Josiah Thompson notes that what he terms
the “second generation” of assassination researchers—including Mark Lane,
Edward J. Epstein, Harold Weisberg, Raymond Marcus, Léo Sauvage, Richard
Popkin—owe “a deep debt to Salandria’s pioneering and largely unsung research.”
Thompson is accurate, since Salandria is in the front rank of Warren Commission
critics, and the prescience of his analysis is an instruction to all interested
people.
On
November 22, 1963, the day of the assassination, Salandria watched the
unfolding narrative on television with his then brother-in-law, the late Harold
Feldman (himself a important scholar of this case and the author of the
monograph “Fifty-One Witnesses: The Grassy Knoll”). Many friends of
Salandria recount his responses to that day. Salandria noted at the first
moments of this crime that it reeked of a governmental coup, and that the
confirmation of his suspicion would be the murder of the alleged suspect while
in custody.
He observed that from the first hours of the case, the
pronouncements of the government, as carried by the major media, contained a
consciousness of guilt at the center of state power. At no time did the
government entertain seriously the possibility of a conspiracy to kill
President Kennedy, even as local authorities in Dallas and the mainstream media
offered a steady stream of evidence pointing to conspiracy (witnesses and
physicians saying Kennedy was shot from two directions; witnesses running to
the grassy knoll in front of the motorcade as well as into buildings behind the
motorcade; more than one rifle found; various suspects detained; gun smoke
smelled at ground level; a bystander wounded). Although many of these reports
could have been in error, Salandria noted that the federal authorities, if
honest, would have pursued these reports rather than shut down their options
and proclaim the guilt of one man, a warehouse worker named Lee Harvey Oswald.
Oswald’s
guilt was indeed immediately proclaimed, and rarely with the qualifier
“alleged.” Oswald’s supposed leftist political affiliations were loudly
trumpeted as a means of enhancing the aura of guilt around a man declared the
murderer—and the only murderer—even before he was officially charged with the crime. It
should be noted that the labeling by the government of Oswald as a leftist—and
hence a homicidal madman—effectively stilled the dissent of and terrified much
of the American progressive community, particularly with the publication of
the Warren Report. The voice of Vincent Salandria, who never wavered from
progressive values, was not so stilled.
On Nov.
2, 1964, Salandria published an article in The Legal Intelligencer, the
oldest law publication in the United States. The piece, reproduced herein, is the first sustained criticism of the
Warren Commission’s conclusions on the forensic evidence in the assassination.
It represents a courageous and articulate dissent from within the American
legal profession that, sadly, has rarely been replicated. To those who today
argue that the government’s initial response to the assassination flowed from a
concern merely to protect national security, Salandria’s article, written in
1964, is a crucial response. It shows that the authorities were utterly disingenuous
about the smallest detail of the forensic evidence of the crime, and none of
the official conduct augured well for confidence in the government’s
motivations, then or now, in telling us about the assassination.
The
circumstances of this article’s publication are as remarkable and historic as
its content. The Philadelphia Bar Association had just finished celebrating the
work for the Warren Commission of Arlen Specter, a native son who would soon be
elected the city’s district attorney. Salandria, a practicing lawyer in
Philadelphia, was unimpressed by his colleague’s new status in the profession.
Theodore Voorhees, then Chancellor of the Bar, felt that Salandria’s dissent
was too important for the Intelligencer to ignore, despite the
paper’s positive appraisal both of the Warren Report and the service
provided to the Warren Commission by its legal staff.
Salandria’s
article, like his subsequent essays for the New Left journal Liberation [published
in January and March 1965], contains a discourse now very
familiar to assassination researchers, although it is doubtful if many know
where the discourse originated. With a painstaking, methodical approach,
Salandria showed how the government’s own evidence completely undermined its
conclusions. His argument was bolstered many times over in his Liberation pieces,
written after the Commission had issued its twenty-six evidentiary and hearings volumes. While critics
have repeated ad nauseam the particulars of Salandria’s argument (the
conflicting medical exhibits; the timing of the shots; the impossible
trajectories; the ammunition; the ignoring of testimony), few, it seems to me,
have apprehended Salandria’s perspective and sensibility as he studied these
data.
Throughout
his analysis of the Warren Commission evidence, Salandria posed to himself and
to his reader questions that were at their heart philosophical and moral as
well as political. He noted that the authorities, from the beginning, asked us
to suspend not only the rule of law and basic physical laws, but also laws of
logic and reason. We were asked by the Warren Commission to accept the
Orwellian notion that two plus two equals five. We were asked to accept as
sensible and professional conduct under our system of law the Chief Justice and
his staff accepting into evidence crude anatomical sketches of President
Kennedy’s wounds, drawn by a Navy corpsman at the direction of his superior,
rather than primary autopsy data.
Salandria asked himself and his readers if
one could accept, as reasonable professional conduct of adult men, the Bethesda
military doctors who performed Kennedy’s autopsy not immediately contacting the
medical personnel in Dallas who first treated him, but instead contacting these
personnel only as an afterthought the morning after the autopsy was completed
and the body sent on for burial. These questions are still pertinent at the end
of the twentieth century, since the federal government has yet to provide to
the American public a clear, firmly supported account of how many times
President Kennedy was shot, from which direction(s), and on which parts of his
body he was wounded. Each time an accounting of the wounds is offered (the
Clark Panel in 1968; the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1979; the
Journal of the American Medical Association in 1992), the narrative changes,
usually to accommodate to some degree the skepticism of the public.
As
Salandria continued his research into the assassination, he observed that the
media’s representations of the crime shifted regularly to meet the needs of the
authorities in possession of the evidence. In this recognition, Salandria was
especially prescient. Today, such writers as Jerry Policoff, Michael Parenti,
Noam Chomsky, and many others have proven that ours is hardly an independent
media, but rather a set of (dis)information organs, constructed as
corporations, wholly answerable to state and private power. This was never more
evident than in Salandria’s early scrutiny of the media’s coverage of the
Kennedy assassination.
Less
than two weeks after the assassination, Life magazine published a
Memorial Issue containing an article that attempted to put to rest “nagging
rumors” about the assassination. The piece informed us that while President
Kennedy was indeed shot in the throat from the front, this could be explained
by examination of an 8mm film taken by a bystander that was at the moment of
publication Life’s exclusive property (the famous Zapruder film). The
author of the essay informed us that the film shows Kennedy turning far around,
exposing thereby his throat to Oswald’s sniper’s lair six stories above the
presidential motorcade. It would be ten years before the general public would
learn that no such turn took place as it finally saw the Zapruder film on
national television. Few would know the history of media mendacity on this
issue, but Salandria was keeping careful notes.
Life’s
uncritical support of the Warren Commission at times bordered on the
hysterical. When the Warren Report was issued in the fall of
1964, Life was so enamored of it that the magazine published not one but three versions of a single
issue. The issue contained an account of the Warren findings written not by
a Life journalist, but by Gerald Ford, the future President who
served (at the suggestion of his friend Richard Nixon) on the Commission.
Salandria remarked that it was highly unusual, in an era before computer-based
publishing, for a magazine to publish three versions of a single issue. The
reason for this strange enterprise became clear as Salandria scanned the three
versions. Each text contained refinements that bolstered the Commission’s
lone-nut thesis, and attempted to clear up (but in the process only
complicated) the contradictions related to a broad range of subjects—from the
direction of the President’s body under the impact of the fatal shot to the
timing of the Tippit shooting to the internal dissent on the Warren Commission.
Salandria wrote to Life editor Ed Kern about the peculiar phenomenon
of three versions of the same issue. Kern replied that indeed such an occurrence was highly
unusual—and very costly—but could not figure out who authorized the changes nor
how it was done.
In
1967-69 Salandria supported the efforts of New Orleans District Attorney Jim
Garrison in reopening the assassination probe. This work is not represented
here, but is mentioned in other locations, including Garrison’s A Heritage of Stone and On the Trail of the Assassins. Suffice it to say that
Salandria’s contribution to Garrison’s effort was significant; Garrison sent an
early printing of On the Trail of the Assassins to Salandria with the
inscription: “To my intellectual mentor and friend.” Garrison’s discussion of
“models of explanation” in A Heritage of Stone owes much to
Salandria, whose examination of the elementary data convinced Garrison that he
was looking not at a plot of right-wing fringe groups, but a coup at the center
of the American power structure.
In the
early 1970s, Salandria refined his model of explanation of the assassination in
a speech before the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. The
speech was published in the unlikely venue Computers and Automation, a
Boston-based science journal created by Edmund Berkeley and Richard Sprague,
two computer systems analysts committed to the truth of the assassination and
issues of social justice. In this transitional article, reprinted here, Salandria parted company with the school of
assassination research—a school he helped to found—focused on Dealey Plaza, in
order to examine the why of the assassination and its implications for America.
At this stage of his work he determined that the continued ransacking of the
Dealey Plaza microdata was a way of prolonging a false debate and instilling a
pointless doubt and doublethink in the public, a theme that has been dominant
in Salandria’s work to this day.
For
Salandria, the endless probing of the evidentiary minutiae proceeds from the
assumption that the case for conspiracy isn’t proven (and perhaps can never be
proven), and that we should give the authorities the benefit of the doubt as we
continue obsessional and debilitating detective work. For Salandria this
reasoning, which invites the authorities to continue in their prevarication, is
absurd and intellectually dishonest, since a consciousness of guilt was
manifest in state power from the moment the assassination occurred. The
micro-fixated critical orientation to this case forestalls an understanding of
the assassination as a political act requiring mass mobilization, and an
analysis of the murder attentive to its political-economic context.
In the
mid-70s, Salandria developed these concerns further with the assistance of his
friend, Professor Thomas Katen. In a piece called “The Design of the Warren Report, to Fall to Pieces,”
perhaps Salandria’s most controversial article, he posited something many
critics—including Sylvia Meagher and Harold Weisberg—had long intuited about
the Warren Report. To read the Report is to disbelieve it. The reasoning
of the Report is absurd, yet unreasonable or irrational men didn’t write it.
Salandria argued that the Report was designed to appear incredible,
and thereby signal to the people of America that faith in constituency-based
government was obsolete, as state power and the capitalist system it represents
consolidated their authority over America. Salandria scholars (there are more
than a few) debate this piece, arguing that the evidence is insufficient to judge
the intent of the Warren Report authors to the level of Salandria’s
assertions. Intentionality is indeed a tough call, but it is useful to consider
the effect of the Warren Report alongside Salandria’s
argument with the hindsight of thirty-six years.
Today,
the Kennedy assassination has entered cyberspace and the domain of pop culture.
JFK assassination experts are everywhere, and although most think a conspiracy
was “likely,” few seem able or interested in seeing how it was precipitated by
basic assumptions of our government and economic system. Even fewer people seem
interested in the crime’s relationship to subsequent history and our current
moment as the case is consigned to the culture of postmodernity and The X
Files. Looking at the current situation, we might reflect on Salandria’s most
explosive contentions in “The Design of the Warren Report,” and an earlier piece, “The Promotion of Domestic Discord.” Is much of our
supposedly adversarial culture, in large part produced by a culture industry, a
means of coopting and diluting genuinely adversarial energies? The Huxleyan
vision of the future Salandria spoke of in “The Design of the Warren Report”
seems too close for comfort as wars become video games, and as we seek solace
from the VCR and prescription tranquilizers.
The
essay entitled “A False Mystery Concealing State Crimes” is Salandria’s
speech before the Coalition on Political Assassination’s 1998 conference, and
is a summary statement of his work. It exhorts the reader not to participate in
the false, debilitating debate that refuses to say President Kennedy was the
victim of a state-sanctioned coup. Salandria asks that we use this murder as an
instruction for our times, a lesson concerning the bankruptcy of our way of
life, as we engage in the difficult task of building a more just society. The
speech, which took Salandria nearly two hours to deliver at COPA, received a
prolonged standing ovation, heartening him greatly after a long period of believing
assassination research had become an intellectual hobby horse and taken a
disastrously pointless turn. The next evening, COPA gave Salandria a
long-overdue lifetime achievement award.
Vincent
Salandria has never wanted a public profile, and consistently rejected offers
to write a book. Occasionally, he has accepted invitations from the
Philadelphia media to speak on the subject of the assassination. He has also
accepted invitations from civic groups to debate Arlen Specter; Specter has
always refused, claiming he has “already” debated Salandria (presumably because
he once answered questions about Salandria’s work). A speech by Salandria,
although rare, is always pregnant with import that either misses most of the
audience or is treated with derision. In a 1967 lecture attended by author
Joe McGinniss, Salandria stated that RFK would most likely be assassinated, and
that LBJ would step down from office. McGinniss, a chronicler of the 60s and
70s, thought it “sad” that Salandria should believe such things.
In the
past thirty-five years Salandria has, in pop psychology terms, “empowered” any
number of people interested in the truth of the Kennedy murder. A few people
who have benefited from his thought: Harold Feldman, Gaeton Fonzi, Ray Marcus,
Jim Garrison, Sylvia Meagher, Jim DiEugenio, and incidentally myself. In the
early 1990s, Salandria assembled a circle of correspondents who engage in a
round-robin exchange concerning the Kennedy assassination, its legacy, and the
shape of our current world. Among those who have participated in this very
prolific circle are E. Martin Schotz, Michael Morrissey, Robert Dean, Fletcher
Prouty, Steve Jones, Gaeton Fonzi, Barbara LaMonica, Jim Douglass, Dick Levy,
Donald Gibson, William Pepper, Joan Mellen, Ben Schotz, and many others. I have
been privileged to be in their number. In time, some of this correspondence may
be offered for publication, an event that I think would be significant in
enhancing public discussion of the JFK assassination. The thinking of this
group has already found its way into Fonzi’s The Last Investigation and Schotz’s History
Will Not Absolve Us.
Both Fonzi and Schotz have been close friends to
Salandria for over thirty years. Fonzi produced groundbreaking research for the
House Select Committee on Assassinations. Schotz, who speaks with Salandria
almost every day, has been his intellectual gadfly, a contributor of such
magnitude to our understanding of this case it is appropriate that this
compendium includes his essay “The Waters of Knowledge,” also presented at the 1998 COPA
meeting.
Schotz,
a Boston psychiatrist, long ago suggested to Salandria that the public was
encased in denial concerning the Kennedy assassination. Schotz observed that
public discourse seemed to permit the notion that a conspiracy was “possible”
or “likely.” A common statement on the subject is that one “feels” or
“believes” that there was official misconduct and obfuscation in the crime.
Like the addict or alcoholic unable to confront the seriousness of the disease,
the American public would prefer not to know the truth and say it,
but to remain locked in psychic and political paralysis rather than state
outright that Kennedy was removed by official power, and thereby confront the
monstrousness of our political-economic system. I have suggested to Schotz that
he extend his penetrating insight a bit further, since to live in America, it
seems to me, means to live in some state of denial, because a sensitive person
could not live here, aware of the nation’s history, its murderous past, its
cruel and inequitable present, without hiding in a carapace of denial. It is
the hope of Schotz, Salandria, and this writer that we may all confront truth,
shed denial, and build a better world.
I have
many fond personal memories of Vince Salandria. I was still living in
Doylestown, Pennsylvania, in 1973 when I screwed up the courage to drop a
letter to this formidable, yet quiet, founder of the JFK assassination research
community. My adolescent shyness was still obvious in those years, and I
disliked imposing myself. My friend Robert Cutler, a flinty and outspoken
Bostonian who did major work on the Dealey Plaza trajectory evidence, scoffed
at my inhibition. He admonished me with the remark: “Do you know who he is?”
I couldn’t muster a reply. “He’s the first damn researcher!” I wrote to
Salandria, we had a brief exchange of letters, I invited him to lunch, he
accepted.
At the
time, I was completing my first graduate degree at Villanova University, and
often took a train into center city Philadelphia before making a very long trek
to Villanova in the Philadelphia “main line.” My stopover in the city would
frequently be the occasion to meet Salandria at his office, or at his old
address on Delancey Place. We would have lunch (he bristled if I offered to
pay) and walk through town. Salandria would tell me about the case, his
experiences, his concern for America. I often felt like the companion to M.
Dupin in one of Poe’s detective stories. Suffice it to say that Salandria’s
original and penetrating mind made a lasting impression. He fast became one of
the few thinkers whose sense of the world stayed with me. I soon began to chide
him for his self-effacing tendencies; he still refers to himself as “a poor
Italian peasant.” He always knew he packed the gear, and my refusal to accept
his modesty has fueled the humor in our relationship.
We
appeared together once on the radio station of the University of Pennsylvania,
Salandria’s alma mater, and undertook a couple of minor projects before my
graduate education and career took me far away from Philadelphia. I began
lecturing on the assassination in 1975, recounting to college groups, churches,
libraries, and high schools my experience as a researcher, my brief work for
the House Select Committee on Assassinations, and my view of the case. I always
brought up the name Salandria. In 1991, just prior to the release of Oliver
Stone’s film JFK, I realized that it had been almost five years since I
last spoke to Vince Salandria. Among other things for which I must thank
Stone’s historic film is the prompt to get in touch again with a man who has
been so transformational to my political and historical worldview. And I have
benefited at least some, I think, from his enormous humanity and generosity.
I am
grateful to John Kelin for creating this tribute to Vincent Salandria, and hope
these articles will inspire new enthusiasms in the young now with us, and in
future generations.
Christopher Sharrett Seton Hall University July 1999
