Vincent Salandria (March 28, 1928 – August 23, 2020) was a Philadelphia attorney who researched, wrote, and lectured about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Salandria was one of the most influential of the so-called "first-generation" Warren Commission critics who immediately questioned the findings of the U.S. government's official inquiry into JFK's murder. After spending several years identifying what he viewed as serious problems with the Warren Report's legal case against accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, Salandria came to believe that the government had conducted a deliberately shoddy investigation, that the assassination was in fact an assertion and display of power by the national security state. He articulated this theory in a series of lectures and articles, collected in his 2004 volume, False Mystery.
Early years Vincent Joseph Salandria was one of eight children of Italian immigrant parents who had settled in Philadelphia. As the first-born son in the family, Vincent was encouraged by his parents to become either a doctor or lawyer. He chose the latter profession and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1951. He specialized in labor law and civil liberties issues, and volunteered his legal services to the American Civil Liberties Union. He also obtained a teaching credential and by the autumn of 1963, was teaching social studies in the morning at Philadelphia's John Bartram High School, and working in the afternoon and evening at his private law practice.
JFK assassination On Friday afternoon, November 22, 1963, Salandria was driving from Bartram High School to his law office when he heard a radio bulletin that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas, Texas. Salandria watched the TV news coverage that weekend with his brother-in-law Harold Feldman (Salandria's wife Livia was the sister of Feldman's wife Irma). The two men were instantly wary of the information being reported about prime suspect Lee Harvey Oswald. They did not believe that Oswald, with his repeated denials of guilt, fit the historic profile of a lone assassin. In his Introduction to the False Mystery anthology, Christopher Sharrett wrote that Salandria quickly suspected the assassination "reeked of a governmental coup, and that the confirmation of his suspicion would be the murder of the alleged suspect while in custody." When Oswald was in fact murdered in a Dallas jail on Sunday, November 24, Salandria embarked on a mission to learn more.
In the summer of 1964, he accompanied Harold and Irma Feldman on a trip to Dallas to interview witnesses, including Marguerite Oswald, Ruth and Michael Paine, and Helen Markham. A commemorative article about Irma Feldman who had just died at age 97. Salandria studied the 888-page Warren Report when it was released in September 1964. On November 2, 1964, he published an article in the country's oldest daily law journal, The Legal Intelligencer. His article was titled "The Warren Report Analysis of Shots, Trajectories, and Wounds: A Lawyer's Dissenting View"; it was "the first sustained criticism of the Warren Commission's conclusions on the forensic evidence". Salandria attacked what he considered the physical impossibility of the single bullet theory. He asserted that the Warren Report "would have us believe that a trajectory of a bullet from the sixth story downward...changed direction in mid-air" in order to hit both President Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connally in the presidential limousine. Warren Commission General Counsel J. Lee Rankin disputed Salandria's assertion, stating "there was an alignment" between Kennedy and Connally in the limousine "which made it possible for one bullet to hit both men."
Salandria researched and wrote additional articles, printed in early 1965 in Liberation magazine, explaining what he regarded as glaring inconsistencies between the evidence collected in the 26-volume Warren Commission Hearings & Exhibits, and the Warren Report's summary of the evidence. He cited the descriptions by Dallas hospital staff of the wounds suffered by Kennedy and Connally, and argued that shots had to come "from at least two directions and therefore showed a conspiracy." During this period, The New York Times observed that while "public charges of conspiracy have just about ceased" vis-à-vis the JFK assassination, there were a handful of critics, such as Salandria in his recent Liberation articles, who were keeping the controversy alive.
1966 was a transitional year for Salandria. He published his last pieces devoted to specific aspects of the government's case against Oswald—"The Impossible Tasks of One Assassination Bullet", "The Separate Connally Shot", "Life Magazine and the Warren Commission"—and turned his attention to the political implications of the crime, and the American people's reactions to it. In an August 1966 article by Gaeton Fonzi in Greater Philadelphia Magazine, Salandria was quoted as saying: "If [the assassination] had happened in Smolensk or Minsk or Moscow, no American would have believed the story that was evolving about a single assassin, with all its built-in contradictions. But because it happened in Dallas, too many Americans were accepting it." By the end of 1966, he had shifted his focus to the "Big Picture", i.e., why Kennedy was killed rather than how he was killed.
When Salandria began lecturing about the assassination's "larger forces"—including the CIA and U.S. military—his views were met with skepticism. In a Page 1 profile of him in January 1967 in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Joe McGinniss wrote:
Salandria was featured in a 1967 article by Calvin Trillin in The New Yorker about the early group of Warren Commission debunkers. That same year, Salandria reluctantly gave up teaching "because his fellow teachers at Bartram High School stopped talking to him; they couldn't abide his conspiracy theories, which Vince shared openly and constantly with his students." He went into administrative work for the Philadelphia School District, eventually becoming its assistant legal counsel.
Salandria spoke in Central Park on June 9, 1968, on the occasion of the Robert F. Kennedy assassination and the escalation of the Vietnam War. During his remarks, he listed U.S. foreign policy reversals that occurred after JFK's murder and said, "the military fired President Kennedy." Text of speech delivered by Salandria in Central Park. Salandria's thesis was that the murder was a "Cold War killing—the bloody work of the U.S. military-intelligence system and its supporting civilian power elite"—to halt Kennedy's moves toward disengagement from Vietnam, and rapprochement with the Soviets and socialist Cuba.Salandria, Vincent (2004). "The JFK Assassination: A False Mystery Concealing State Crimes". In Kelin, John (ed.). False Mystery: Essays on the Assassination of JFK. Louisville, Colorado: Square Deal Press. pp. 147, 173. .
In the run-up to the 1969 trial of Clay Shaw, Salandria aided New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison by identifying and exposing a government agent who had infiltrated Garrison's legal team. Salandria helped prepare the assistant district attorney, Alvin Oser, for his two-day cross-examination of JFK autopsy pathologist Pierre Finck. With Salandria's guidance, Oser was able to get Dr. Finck to admit on the witness stand that the autopsy was not controlled by chief pathologist Dr. James Humes, but instead by high-ranking military officers in attendance. In his 1970 book, A Heritage of Stone, Garrison's first acknowledgment was to Salandria. Garrison later sent a pre-publication copy of On the Trail of the Assassins to Salandria with the inscription: "To my intellectual mentor and friend."
In a 1971 address at a peace conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Salandria offered what he called "a model of explanation which fits the data of the [JFK] assassination and explains the why of it." In the December 1971 Computers and Automation issue in which "Model of Explanation" was first published, Salandria summarized it as "a hypothesis, supported by considerable evidence, about why the President was assassinated and how the implications of that action were to be signaled to those who could read the signals." He said what happened in Dallas and its aftermath was a "transparent conspiracy".: Salandria credits Professor Thomas Katen of Philadelphia for helping him develop his ideas of "transparent conspiracy". He cited the Zapruder film and how it seemed to clearly indicate that an assassin was positioned in the right front of Kennedy and not (as the Warren Report insisted) behind him. Salandria then posed the question: "Why would the federal government on the one hand wish to provide us with data which prove a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy and simultaneously contend on the other hand that there was no conspiracy?" He determined that the assassination was "A Warning to Opponents": "The new rulers carefully and selectively orchestrated revelations of their bloody work, so as to gain therefrom the deference to which they felt they were entitled by their ascendancy to absolute power."
In a 1975 interview with Gaeton Fonzi, Salandria explained how he had come to realize that his initial research and writing about the assassination, which were aimed at revealing Warren Report contradictions regarding bullet trajectories and other low-level details, were beside the point: Salandria told Fonzi that JFK's assassination was similar to the murder of Italian socialist Giacomo Matteotti in 1924, adding that "Mussolini did everything but admit his complicity in the murder and then defied the authorities to prosecute him. When they did not, he went on to declare himself dictator." In an April 1977 essay, "The Design of the Warren Report, to Fall to Pieces", Salandria elaborated on his argument of a brazen state crime being committed as a demonstration of power.Salandria, Vincent (2004). "The Design of the Warren Report, to Fall to Pieces". In Kelin, John (ed.). False Mystery: Essays on the Assassination of JFK. Louisville, Colorado: Square Deal Press. pp. 134–146. .
Personal life In the 1950s, Salandria married the former Livia Ciancaglini, and they adopted a son, Ernest, born in 1959. By 1982, Salandria was divorced and found himself in the news again after Ernest, a longtime methamphetamine addict, privately confessed to his father that he was the perpetrator of the previously unsolved murder of Melvin Lee Jordan in August 1981. Regarding his decision to turn in his son, Salandria is quoted as saying, "I would do it again and again. When I first suspected Ernest killed a person, my first concern was not for Ernest as a son. My first concern was for the sanctity and privilege of human life." Salandria subsequently said that he felt "a moral obligation to go to the police", and so he telephoned a Philadelphia homicide detective with the information. Ernest was arrested and pled guilty to third-degree murder. He was sentenced in February 1983 to 6 years. Newspapers reported that Salandria's decision to turn in his son "climaxed an estranged relationship between father and son over Ernest's drug use".
In a 2012 article, Salandria alluded to the fact that he was remarried, and that his second wife was a Jewish woman whose father had been a leftist subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee, but details were not provided as to his wife's identity.
Later years