Sunday, August 30, 2020

Vince Salandria 1926 - 2020

VINCE SALANDRIA  1926 - 2020]

False Mystery: Essays on the Assassination of JFK, by Vincent J. Salandria,  1999

              Vince Salandria 

The recent passing of Vince Salandria, of a heart attack at the age of 92, while he was walking his dog, has inspired a number of tributes, three of which are posted here:


Philadelphia school teacher and attorney Vince Salandria was a major inspiration to generations of JFK assassination researchers, including myself, who continues Salandria’s pioneering work on the Air Force One radio transmissions.  


Salandria rightly notes that three respected journalists – Theodore H. White (The Making of a President, 1964), William Manchester (Death of a President), and Pierre Salinger (With Kennedy), were all given access to an unedited transcript of the Air Force One radio transmissions of November 22, 1963, and quote portions of the transcript that are not on the existing radio tapes that I personally transcribed.

Those unedited transcripts have since disapeared.


Some of the other articles I wrote on this subject:

Combined Tapes annotated,

the whereabouts of Air Force Chief of Staff General LeMay on 11/22/63,
- the background of his aide Col. George S. Dorman,
- the identity of “Stranger” and the Missing Code Books
- Maj. Harold Patterson aka “Stranger” Commander of WH Situation Room
- the return of Oliver Hallet in the White House Situation Room
- radiomen after action reports

Dear Bill,

    Thank you for your articles. You have done so much good work and in doing so have demonstrated a mastery of the art of understatement.  You have in superabundance what I have in very short supply, patience. 

You make reference to David Talbot's book"The Devil's Chessboard."  Of course, the New York Times saw no reason to review that fine work. Talbot proves that if the JFK assassination had to be ascribed to a "Lone Wolf," that Lone Wolf was Allen Dulles who coordinated the coup on behalf of our national security state. Please continue your arduous efforts to reach others with the true meaning of the JFK assassination which David Talbot and James Douglass have firmly established.

     Fondly, Vince Salandria

While Salandria lived in Philadelphia, just across the Delaware River from my Camden, N.J. hometown, I failed to meet him until he gave his landmark Keynote Speech at the 1998 COPA conference in Dallas.

I assisted John Judge in preparing for that conference, and we recognized that Salandria had never made such a conference appearance before, so he was given two hours to make his presentation, and permitted to allow E. Martin Schotz to preceed him.

Schotz’s The Waters of Knowledge verses the Waters of Uncertainty: Mass Denial in the Assassination of President Kennedy.


 Salandria’s The JFK Assassination: A False Mystery Concealing State Crimes (COPA, Dallas, 1998)


Afterwards Salandria was given a standing ovation from the crowd, and was honored with the COPA Lifetime Achievement Award.

As he was leaving I walked out with him and requested a copy of his speech, that he handed me, and graciously signed. I later retyped the entire speech and posted it on line. John Kelin was there as well, and requested a copy and began an interaction with Salandria that led to the publication of a book Praise From a Future Generation – about the first serious researchers into the assassination. Dave Ratcliff, at radical.org also posted many of Salandria’s articles on the assassination that gives you a good idea of the breath and depth of the man.


Unfortunately, with the death of John Judge, those who controlled his estate wrongfully assumed that he “owned” both COPA - The Coalition on Political Assassinations, and the Hidden History Museum foundation Judge established. Both were meant to be independent institutions that belonged to no one individual but were to last longer than any one. Even though they were in different tax leagues, their moneys were wrongfully and probably illegally co-mingled, COPA was disbanded and the Hidden History Museum moved to the boondocks of rural Pennsylvania, despite John Judge’s desire that it be located in Washington D.C.

So some of the original COPA founders, including the Chairman Dr. Cyril Wecht and myself, formed a new organization – Citizens Against Political Assassination (CAPA), that we hope can continue the work that began with COPA nearly thirty years ago.

In the course of our re-organization I asked Vince Salandria to serve on our Board of Advisors. This was one of the last correspondence I received from him.
           
Dear Bill,

        First, allow me to state clearly that I much admire you and your Kennedy assassination work.

Therefore, it pains me to decline your kind invitation to serve on the board of advisors to enforce the JFK Act.  Bill, it would be hypocritical for me whose essays are entitled a "False Mystery" to join a group which seeks to have the U.S. government release more records on the state crime, a coup, which that government has plainly perpetuated. I view the work of Douglass and Talbot as dispositive of the question of who killed Kennedy and why. I do not see the need for the killers, our national security state, to supply us the answers to a non-existent mystery. When I read the "Warren Report, " I felt that the U.S. government had released more than enough data in that report to convince any objective person that the national security state had killed President Kennedy and was transparently advertising it by inducing dunces such as I to write about the killing and to debate it for more than a half a century. 

I have written on the subject, but I never accepted that invitation to debate, and no one has ever invited me to debate the JFK assassination.  I am satisfied to remain out of this interminable interchange.

So, I am compelled to decline your kind and courteous invitation despite the fact that I have for you only great respect, admiration and Warm regards, Vince.

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