Vince Salandria, Esq.
BK NOTES: While this Philadelphia Magazine article degrades Vince Salandria as a "conspiracy theorist," when in fact he was one of the first real researchers who inspired hundreds if not thousands of others, it is a significant piece in that it describes the lunch Vince had with Arlen Specter at the Philadelphia Oyster House, where they buried the hatchet after a half century of bitterness. I will be writing my own tribute to Vince Salandria as soon as possible, but since most of the other tributes to him missed this, I thought I would bring it to the table.
To Arlen
Specter “Vince explained what he hadn’t realized back in 1964: that the
American people weren’t prepared to accept that military intelligence had
assassinated the President in a coup.”
Vince
Salandria: The JFK Conspiracy Theorist
Fifty
years ago Arlen Specter and the Warren Commission told America that Lee Harvey
Oswald had acted alone in the assassination of JFK. Vince Salandria has spent a
lifetime trying to debunk that conclusion. Shortly before his death, did
Specter hint that Salandria just might be right?
THREE
YEARS AGO, Vince Salandria got a phone call from Arlen Specter, a man he didn’t
know. Salandria had been in the Senator’s company only once before, but that
was almost a half-century earlier, at a public event. When he called, Specter
wasn’t running for anything—he had recently been voted out of office. All he
had was a simple request of Salandria, who was 83 years old, a retired
Philadelphia school-system lawyer: Would you have lunch with me? They
eventually met at the Oyster House, on Sansom Street in Philadelphia. The lunch
would turn out to be one of strangest meetings of Salandria’s life.
Vince is a man of high energy; he’s still doing pro bono lawyering in labor
relations for the city’s schools. He’s small—all of 137 pounds—with a large
balding head that narrows toward his jaw. He has an impish smile, and it would
be easy to call him cute. But he isn’t, by nature, impish or cute—Vince is
intense. And that was especially true when, as a young man, he attended an
event held in Arlen Specter’s honor.
In
October 1964, the Philadelphia Bar Association invited Specter, then a young
prosecutor in the D.A.’s office, to speak about his work as an investigator for
the Warren Commission, which had been formed to come up with a definitive
answer to who assassinated President John F. Kennedy. Specter was assigned to
figure out the basic logistics of the shooting: how many shots, how many
gunmen, where did the bullets come from? The commission’s report had just come
out, declaring Lee Harvey Oswald the lone killer, and the bar association had
Specter address about 150 people one evening in a City Hall courtroom.
Afterward, he asked if there were any questions.
Vince
Salandria—who in 1964 was a history teacher at Bartram High School in Southwest
Philly—stood up that night in City Hall and said he had some questions. Though
really, his questions were more like statements. He said that Specter’s
analysis—specifically, that a bullet had gone through the President’s neck and
into Texas Governor John Connally in front of him, where it penetrated his back,
smashed his right wrist, wounded his thigh, and then ended up on a gurney in a
Dallas hospital in pristine condition—was a fabrication. An impossibility. An
absurdity. A concoction that amounted to fraud.
Vince
stood up and said that to Arlen Specter, back in 1964, before anyone else had.
How could Specter come to a conclusion that was so clearly and patently wrong?
Specter
was taken aback, though he remained calm. Things did get a bit testy when Vince
said the commission owed it to the public to reenact “the performance of
Oswald” with a rifle on moving targets; Arlen Specter wondered whether Vince
would have them kill a man in order to perform a ballistics test. Vince ignored
the joke; he didn’t find murder funny. Dummies, he said to Arlen Specter.
Dummies could be used.
Some
lawyers came up to Vince Salandria when it was over and told him he should
write up his critique, that it might be important. If that bullet didn’t do
what Specter said it did—travel through the President and then take a
circuitous route in Connally—there had to be a second gunman, and the
assassination was then a conspiracy. Which would make the Warren Commission’s
lone-gunman conclusion utterly wrong.
Vince
went home that night and wrote his analysis, and the first detailed critique of
Specter’s Magic Bullet Theory appeared in Philadelphia’s Legal
Intelligencer two weeks later.
That was
just the beginning. Vince quickly became part of a small, loose collective of
Warren Commission debunkers. He wrote more articles and shared his thinking
with fellow researchers; Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney
portrayed in Oliver Stone’s JFK, asked Vince to edit one of his books.
Vince is front and center in Calvin Trillin’s 1967 New Yorker portrayal of
conspiracy researchers. He made speeches. And if anything, his conclusion—what
he surmised almost immediately when the President was murdered—has only grown
firmer over the years: Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA and the U.S.
military, not Lee Harvey Oswald.
Specter,
meanwhile, went on to become … Arlen Specter. The bulldog senator who brought
us the infamous battles over Robert Bork and Anita Hill. Specter never seemed
to shy away from a good fight, and throughout his 30-year reign in the Senate,
the Magic Bullet Theory followed him everywhere. It became theater at every
public event and campaign stop where Specter fielded questions, the Senator
pantomiming the movement of Commission Exhibit 399 through the President’s
neck, out his tie knot in front and so forth. The questions never abated; his
response was always the same: one gunman.
Specter
would realize early on that he could thwart a lot of public animosity by asking
a Magic Bullet skeptic if he had actually read the Warren Commission Report.
Almost always, the answer was no.
But
Vince Salandria had read it. He read the entire report—all 888 pages—within a
couple of weeks of it coming out. So he was ready for Arlen Specter at the
meeting in City Hall back in 1964.
The two
men had never discussed that night when Vince accused Specter of fraud—they had
never even had a conversation before Specter called Vince out of the
blue to ask him to lunch. They met in January 2012 at the Oyster House, one
year after Specter’s five terms in the Senate were over. Later that year,
Specter would be hit by a third round of cancer. By that October, he was dead.
At their
lunch, Arlen Specter had a question for Vince Salandria.
ON NEW
YEAR’S EVE 1963, Specter got a call from a Yale Law School classmate,
Harold Willens. Willens, a Warren Commission staff member, was searching for
lawyers to work on the investigation. Already known as a tough prosecutor in
Philadelphia, Specter had caught the attention of Attorney General Bobby
Kennedy when he sent local Teamster boss Raymond Cohen to jail. It didn’t take
Specter long to say yes to Willens, and from that moment forward he was working
for the American government, seeking not just the answer to who killed the
President, but also for a way to assure the American people that what had
happened in Dallas wasn’t a harbinger of the Cold War getting out of control,
that the world order hadn’t suddenly gone haywire.
Vince
Salandria’s take on the assassination—and his mission—was quite different. But
JFK’s killing would become central to his life, perhaps just as much as it was
to Arlen Specter’s.
When the
President was killed, Salandria was sure of something immediately: If Lee
Harvey Oswald didn’t make it through that weekend alive, it meant the U.S.
government was complicit in the President’s murder.
Like the
rest of the nation, Vince watched on TV as Jack Ruby shot Oswald that Sunday.
“I realized then that we didn’t have a democracy, we didn’t have a republican
form of government anymore,” Vince says now, 50 years after the fact. “I knew
that no innocent government would have permitted Oswald to be killed.
Because if he was in fact guilty, they would want the world to know about him,
and he would be convicted with due process, and we would show off our
democratic justice system. So I realized that … our government did it. At the
very highest level.
“I
realized that it was dreadful for the nation, and dreadful for me, because
I felt that somehow or other I was fixated on it and would have to investigate
it. Would I live through this?”
Vince
Salandria was a busy man in 1963. He was 35, married, with a young adopted son,
and teaching history at Bartram; he was also a Penn-trained lawyer who did
legal work on the side. But Vince had a problem. He landed almost immediately,
he says, on why he believed President Kennedy was murdered: The
military wanted him rubbed out because he had started getting friendly with
Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev after the two leaders’ flirtation with
holocaust, and because Kennedy wanted to get out of Vietnam; both those things,
from the military’s point of view, would be bad for business. So the CIA killed
the President at the military’s behest.
Vince
wasn’t so bold, though, as to think his investigation would lead anywhere. If
his theory was true, he was fighting very powerful forces. And the Warren
Commission’s conclusion that the assassination was the work of Oswald—and only
Oswald—made the sledding that much tougher for Vince; in 1964, the American
public tended to trust that big-name Washington commissions could find, and
then would be willing to reveal, the truth.
Vince
didn’t believe that, though, and he couldn’t stop himself. He had graduated
from Penn Phi Beta Kappa in three years, then stayed to get that law degree at
age 23, but he’s fond of pointing out that he comes from Italian peasant
stock—his father emigrated from a Southern Italian village by himself at age
13—and that his conspiracy claims stem first from intuition and then from a
review of the facts, which he insists in this case aren’t very complicated. As
to why he’s so driven in the way he’s driven, that seems innate.
“I was
born with an almost underdog complex,” he explains. “I identified with the
underdog from the beginning.”
Vince
grew up in a South Philly rowhouse across from St. Agnes Hospital, one of eight
children. His job as a boy was to deliver clothes uptown for his father, who
was a tailor. One day, when he was 13, Vince was cutting through the ghetto and
came upon two white cops savagely beating a black man. Blood poured from the
man, and the cops kept right on beating him.
“That
shocked me,” Vince says. “Power can’t treat human beings like this.”
At the
same age—in 1941—Vince would go to school one day in December and regale his
math class with the real meaning of what had just happened in the Pacific: The
Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor was orchestrated by the American government,
he told his classmates. It was President Roosevelt’s way of drawing a reluctant
nation into war. That’s the way Vince thought at 13.
It’s
quite easy, in fact, to imagine him lecturing his young classmates about the
nature of American power, because now, at 85—at the other end of his life—the
passion and sureness still flare. There’s no doubting Vince’s sincerity, nor
his rage: The President’s assassination scared him, he says, “and it angered
me. Angered me! I was furious!”
So off
he would go, to Dallas in the summer of 1964—even before the confrontation with
Arlen Specter in City Hall—to see what he could learn.
Specter,
meanwhile, was hard at work with the Warren Commission, upon which there was
enormous pressure. President Johnson had played on the fear of a highly nervous
time in wooing high-level Washington figures to join the investigation.
Commission head Earl Warren, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, shared
Johnson’s message with his staff: Conspiracy theories involving Russia, Cuba,
the military-industrial complex, and even Johnson himself were already in play;
if they were believed to be true, the President warned, the Kennedy
assassination could lead America into a nuclear war that could kill 40 million
people.
Lee
Harvey Oswald panning out as a lone assassin would, of course, solve those
problems. Earl Warren, even as he warned his commissioners that they weren’t
advocates, that their conclusions would be based on wherever the evidence took
them, had another directive: Make it snappy. The commission was under serious
time and budget constraints. Warren would sit in on some testimony Arlen
Specter would take from key witnesses, and he had an annoying habit: The Chief
Justice would loudly tap his fingers, his signal to Specter to stop asking
questions, to be done with it.
THE
DEEPER HE DELVED into the assassination, Vince Salandria says, the more
strange things began to happen to him.
In the
summer of 1965, Vince made his second trip to Dallas, this time with Shirley
Martin, a fellow assassination researcher who lived in Hominy, Oklahoma. He
picked her up in his 1955 Buick one night, and the trip would immediately give
them a harrowing sense that they weren’t traveling alone.
As they
were leaving Hominy, with Shirley at the wheel, a local cop stopped them and
wondered where they were going. On a trip, Shirley said.
“Watch
your speed,” the officer told her. “Watch where you’re going.”
They
drove all night, making it to Dealey Plaza in Dallas at about 6:30 the next
morning. As they walked around the site of the assassination, a big man with a
beard, wearing sandals, probably in his mid-50s, came out of a building and
approached them.
“How’s
Mark Lane?” he said to Vince. Lane, who would become well-known for his
assassination research, had already written a few magazine pieces questioning
the Warren Commission. Salandria and Lane had exchanged information.
Vince
didn’t answer the man.
“Do you
know what this is?” the man said, gesturing to the buildings around them. “It’s
a WPA project. Tell Mark Lane to put in his next article that President
Kennedy, a socialist president, was killed in a socialist plaza.”
The man
moved off, leaving Vince with no idea how he’d known who Vince was.
Shirley
and Vince next went to see Michael and Ruth Paine, a couple who had befriended
Oswald in 1963. Michael Paine didn’t know Vince—and didn’t, Vince says, know he
was coming with Shirley, who had set up the visit—but Paine immediately said to
him, “Why don’t you continue your work in civil liberties and civil rights?”
Vince had been a volunteer lawyer for the ACLU for a number of years. “Why are
you doing this?”
Vince
and Shirley drove to Fort Worth to see Marguerite Oswald, Lee’s mother.
“She
made it quite clear,” Vince says, “that her son was a CIA agent—she was quite
proud of it.” She said that she went to Washington after Lee had supposedly
defected to Russia, visited the State Department, and they gave her the
red-carpet treatment.
So Vince
learned something important, but mostly what he took from this foray to Dallas
was a message from, he believed, his government. “I got a thorough
understanding of how impotent I was and how much in control they were,” he
says.
Arlen
Specter made his own trips to Dallas, to ask questions of a different sort.
Darrell
Tomlinson was the senior engineer at Parkland Memorial Hospital who allegedly
found on a stretcher the bullet that, Specter would argue, had hit the President
and then Governor Connally—the Magic Bullet. But Tomlinson became a difficult
witness when Specter questioned him under oath, saying he really wasn’t sure
he’d found the bullet on Connally’s stretcher. After much back-and-forth over
gurneys, Specter pressed:
SPECTER. Now,
before I started to ask you questions under oath … I told you, did I not, that
the Secret Service man wrote a report where he said that the bullet was found
on the stretcher which you took off of the elevator—I called that to your
attention, didn’t I?
TOMLINSON. Yes;
you told me that.
SPECTER. Now, after I tell you that, does that have any effect on
refreshing your recollection of what you told the Secret Service man?
TOMLINSON. No it really doesn’t—it really doesn’t.
A moment
later:
TOMLINSON. I
don’t remember telling him definitely—I know we talked about it, and I told him
that it could have been. Now, he might have drawed his own conclusion on that.
Specter
pressed a bit more, and got this response:
TOMLINSON. I’m
going to tell you all I can, and I’m not going to tell you something I can’t
lay down and sleep at night with either.
Nevertheless,
that bullet, the commission concluded, was found on Connally’s stretcher.
Specter
certainly won some points. He got Malcolm Perry, the Parkland Hospital doctor
who cut into President Kennedy’s throat wound for a tracheotomy, to say that
the wound could have been caused by an exiting bullet; it was crucial
to Specter’s thesis that a bullet entering from behind Kennedy had come
out his throat. Before Specter questioned him, Perry had already said publicly
that the injury was an entrance wound, and years later he would regret his
testimony to the commission, because he had no doubt: Kennedy had been shot
from the front.
Specter
was even accused by one witness of making outright threats. Jean Hill was sure
she heard between four and six shots in Dealey Plaza, meaning there had to be
more than one gunman. Specter, Hill wrote in a 1992 book with Bill Sloan about
the experience, told her before he took her testimony that he knew all about
her; Specter accused Hill of engaging in a “shabby extramarital affair” and
said that unless she cooperated, she would be “very, very sorry.” She wrote
that Specter threatened to make her seem as crazy as Marguerite Oswald, Lee
Harvey’s mother. Hill’s testimony as released by the Warren Commission, which
she claimed was inaccurate, is a study in ambiguity.
All this
proves nothing one way or another, but Specter’s aggression is certainly quite
… familiar. His Warren Commission work is an early glimpse—Specter was 33
when President Kennedy was shot—of the relentless prosecutor who would emerge
onto a national stage three decades later in those Robert Bork and Anita Hill
hearings.
Vince
Salandria, though, sees Specter’s work for the Warren Commission as quite
simple and clear: There was one intent, to prove that one loony gunman did it.
To build a case. And Arlen Specter was brilliant at building cases.
GAETON
FONZI, a writer for this magazine in the ’60s, had read Vince’s critique
of Arlen Specter’s single-bullet theory in the Legal Intelligencer at
the end of 1964. He thought he might write a short piece “about this crazy
Salandria guy,” he later said. Fonzi, like most people in 1964, believed an
official government report provided us with the truth.
Fonzi
and another Philadelphia staff writer, Bernard McCormick, met up with
Vince in a Wildwood motel room in 1966—the writers were working on a light
piece about the Shore, and Vince was happy to make the trek down. McCormick
remembers the meeting well (Fonzi died in 2012): “Vince was small and gaunt,
and incredibly intense. He looked like a madman. I remember he kept saying,
‘Boys, don’t you see it? Don’t you see it?’ And within 45 minutes, just based
on the physical evidence, he had convinced us the Warren Commission was
bullshit.”
Vince
would later have something else for them: a complete set of the Warren
Commission report, all 26 volumes. Fonzi got hooked. Salandria would prep him
for two long interviews with Arlen Specter the next year about the commission’s
work; Specter’s evasiveness and inability to explain inconsistencies in the
findings are chilling. (A
recording of those interviews can be heard, here.)
The
Warren Commission, for example, didn’t examine the Kennedy autopsy X-rays and
photographs—supposedly in deference to the Kennedy family. That was crucial
evidence, and Fonzi went right after Specter over not having seen it. From
Fonzi’s Philadelphia story, published in August 1966:
“Did I
ask to see the X-rays and photographs?” he [Specter] said, putting his head
down, rubbing his chin and pausing for a long period to phrase his answer.
“Aaaaah … that question was considered by me,” he finally said, “and … aaah …
the commission decided not to press for the X-rays and photographs.”
He
looked up. “Have I dodged your question? … Yes, I’ve dodged your question.”
He got
up and paced behind his desk. Finally, he said quietly, “I don’t want to dodge
your questions.”
Specter
said that he had wanted to see the autopsy photographs and X-rays, but that
“the commission reached the conclusion that it was not necessary.”
Fonzi
asked Specter if he considered resigning over that.
“Absolutely
not,” Specter said. “I would say absolutely not.”
But
Fonzi would go on to dig deeper, talking to other commission staffers, and
found out “that Specter was actually in tears when his argument [to see that
evidence] was rejected.”
Fonzi
left Specter’s office after those interviews with an entirely different level
of trust in the U.S. government. But his devastating piece on Specter speaks,
once again, to the acute pressure the commission felt—pressure that
fell on Specter in particular.
Meanwhile,
through the ’60s, Vince Salandria kept at it. His home, then on Delancey
Street, was something of a meeting place among conspiracy theorists: Mark Lane,
Fonzi, anti-war activist Dave Dellinger. Benjamin Spock showed up one night.
Norman Mailer sent Vince a note on behalf of another researcher, requesting
that Vince hear him out. Marie Fonzi, Gaeton’s widow, can still remember Vince
at the center of it all: “He was like Sophocles,” she says, in the way he could
make a case that not getting to the bottom of the assassination spelled doom
for all of us.
Yet
there was a cost to Vince. He left his true calling, teaching, in 1967, 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. The administration wasn’t the problem—Vince was
shunned by his colleagues. So off he went, into administrative work.
Vince
began to feel his safety was at risk—he had doubled his life insurance before
taking his mid-’60s trips to Dallas. He would eventually learn the FBI created
a file on him. The most daunting warning came, as Vince would tell a writer
chronicling conspiracy theorists, after a panel discussion with Yale professor
Jacob Cohen, who supported the Warren Commission, in Boston in 1966.
Late
that night, there was a knock on Vince’s hotel door. It was Cohen. “I feel
horrible,” he told Vince. “I feel like a crumb. Debating the assassination is
horrible.”
Vince
told him that all he wanted was for the case to break. “We need to become more
American,” he said. “We need to stop trying to act like a police state and go
back to some of our original virtues, like skepticism of government and power.
I can’t live in a police state—not Russian, Cuban or American.”
“It’s
not a question of whether you want to live in a police state,” Cohen said.
“You’ll have to be killed.”
This
idea didn’t sound, to Vince, like an intellectual exercise. It sounded like
Cohen was telling him something.
But in a
curious way, it was a warning that reassured him. “If the government wants to
kill you,” Vince says now, “they don’t tell you about it. You’re dead.”
Vince
also says Cohen, who now teaches at Brandeis and didn’t respond to requests for
comment, told him something else—that Arlen Specter had said to him, “What am I
going to do about Vince Salandria?”
ON
JANUARY 4, 2012, Vince Salandria and Arlen Specter met at the Oyster House
for lunch. It was scheduled for noon, but Specter got there first and was
seated; Vince came in and waited in front. Finally, after 40 minutes or so,
Arlen Specter came out and found him.
They sat
down. There was no one sitting near them. Specter was smiling and pleasant.
He had
contacted Vince out of a random connection through mutual friends. Specter got
Vince’s number and made the call, asking him if he’d have lunch.
But it
was Vince who started talking, and kept talking. Specter listened.
Vince
told Specter that he wanted him to know that if he had been assigned to work
for the Warren Commission, as Arlen had been, and understood what he did now,
that he, too, would have taken the assignment. He thought that Specter had a
job to do as a lawyer.
Specter
didn’t respond.
Vince
said that not to do the work of the Warren Commission would have invited
domestic disorder, and perhaps a dictatorship. The generals would have killed
Vince, he told Specter, as quickly as Stalin would have. Specter probably saved
his life.
Specter
was quiet. His demeanor remained pleasant.
Vince explained what he hadn’t
realized back in 1964: that the American people weren’t prepared to accept that
military intelligence had assassinated the President in a coup.
Vince
added that his wife, a bright and rational woman, didn’t support his obsession
with the assassination.
Specter
listened.
Vince
told Specter his rationale for the assassination—he had read correspondence
between Kennedy and Khrushchev and concluded they were very fond of each other
and were seeking to end the Cold War. The assassins wanted to continue the Cold
War and to escalate the war in Vietnam. Vince told Specter he believed Kennedy
was killed by the CIA with the approval of the military.
Specter
took this in without comment.
Vince
told him that he understood it was a conspiracy when Jack Ruby killed Lee
Harvey Oswald, and that no guilty government would tell us the truth about an
institutional killing of the President.
Vince
went on in this vein a bit longer, explaining more of his insights about the
assassination. Specter asked him—the first time he had said anything in some
time—whether Vince spoke frequently to Mark Lane. Vince said no, he didn’t.
Then
Specter asked Vince what he remembered about their 1964 confrontation at the
bar association event in Specter’s honor. Vince told him he had attended with
his copy of the Warren Report. Specter
wondered how long the report had been available—he thought it had been out only
one week. Vince thought it was a couple of weeks. Specter seemed impressed with
how quickly Vince had digested the report.
Then
Specter said: “You charged me then, at that meeting, with fraud.”
That was
true. As Vince laid out his case in his first article, the Warren Commission’s
work was speculation conforming to none of the evidence, without the slightest
credibility, with errors in logic and contrary to the laws of physics and
geometry. He was charging Specter with corruption. Of perpetrating a fraud.
And now,
at lunch, Arlen Specter had a request. “Instead of calling me corrupt,” he
said, “can you change it to incompetent?”
Almost a
half-century had passed since the Warren Commission’s work had been made
public; almost a half-century since the event at City Hall at which Vince
Salandria stood up and asked his pointed questions. During that time, Arlen
Specter was forever being asked about the Warren Report and the Magic Bullet.
He was laughed at over his theory. Oliver Stone made a movie in which Specter
was mocked, and the running joke in the Specter household was that his epitaph
would lead with the Magic Bullet.
He had
lived with the assassination, and his role in solving it, forever. And he
hadn’t stopped living with it, upholding his responsibility to explain. Arlen
Specter, those close to him say, believed in that responsibility. He told
friends he was looking forward to 2013, the 50th anniversary of the
assassination, because it was an opportunity to speak about solving the murder
of the President yet again, to engage the issue once more. Specter, they say,
hadn’t backed off one inch.
Vince
Salandria, too, had lived with the assassination for a long time, and he, too,
had paid a steep price. He says now that teaching is far and away his most
important life’s work, his true calling, yet he taught at Bartram High for only
eight years before his conspiracy theories made him an outlier among his fellow
teachers. He’d end up spending three decades as a school-system lawyer. He did
well. It was work he believed in. But it wasn’t the same as teaching.
Long
ago, Vince Salandria said: “No matter what comes of this work”—the
assassination research he and fellow obsessives kept plugging away at—“we have
involved ourselves in the worthiest cause of our lives.”
He says
he still believes that. “Until we really come to grips with the true meaning of
the assassination—i.e., the coup, by military intelligence services of the
country—civil liberties are necessarily restricted,” he says. “Every president
since Kennedy knows what happened to him and why. Therefore, every president
knows he’s circumscribed in terms of what he can do and who he can oppose and
how much he opposes them.”
When
Arlen Specter asked Vince Salandria to change his opinion of him from corrupt
to incompetent, Vince told him that he couldn’t change it. He told Arlen
Specter he knew from the public record that the Senator was quite competent
then—in 1964—and that he was, at all times, competent. He had never considered
Specter incompetent. And he wasn’t incompetent now.
Specter
had no reaction to that, just as he hadn’t reacted to anything else Vince said.
Perhaps
Specter, in asking Salandria to change his opinion, was admitting that the
Warren Commission got it wrong, that the Magic Bullet and a lone gunman really
don’t wash. Or perhaps it was simpler than that, a moment between two men who
had lived with the same profound event for so long, who played such important
and different roles in our understanding of what happened and, well … did
Vince’s opinion have to be so harsh? Perhaps, in other words, it was
merely a personal moment. Whatever he was up to, Arlen Specter certainly opened
the door a crack to yet another debate about what he really believed.
He would
ask Vince another question: Do you think the Warren Commission was a
setup? That is, did Vince think Earl Warren was told that Lee Harvey
Oswald had to be their man before there was any investigation at all?
Yes,
Vince said.
Arlen
Specter had no reaction to that, either, and remained pleasant to the end, even
though, Vince is sure, he’d arranged lunch in order to hear one thing: that
Vince could come to a new opinion about Specter’s work for the Warren
Commission. Whatever personal redemption Specter may have been seeking, he left
without it.
Though
he didn’t leave empty-handed. On the way out of the Oyster House, Vince handed
Specter a copy of James Douglass’s book JFK and the Unspeakable, published in 2008. The book is dedicated
to Vince and another conspiracy theorist. Vince told Specter it was the best
work ever written on the assassination.
First
appeared in the March, 2014 issue of Philadelphia magazine.
