As JFK assassination files are released, a look back at the Philly lawyer who was an early Warren Report critic

Since President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, little has quelled the questioning of the official story on what happened in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

A year after Kennedy’s murder, the Warren Commission, which investigated the killing, found that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin in Dealey Plaza. For more than six decades, conspiracy theorists and assassination researchers have questioned that explanation, pinning the killing on everything from the Mafia to the government itself.

Now, the American public is getting a look at the remaining classified documents in the case following an executive order issued by President Donald Trump days after he began his second term. Trump made a similar move during his first term, but held some files back at the request of the CIA and FBI.

Whether the newly released documents — more than 2,000 in total — will quiet the decades-long questioning remains to be seen, but experts have said no bombshell information is likely to emerge.

» READ MORE: Unredacted JFK assassination files released, sending history buffs hunting for new clues

However, at least some of that questioning can be traced back to a Philadelphia lawyer who was one of the first public critics of the Warren Commission.

In 1964, Vincent Salandria, a Philadelphia native who earned a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania, emerged as a staunch critic of the official story on Kennedy’s killing. He would remain an ever-present voice among his fellow critics until his death in 2020.

Salandria, who worked as a history teacher at Bartram High School before moving into administrative work with the school district, is considered a pioneer among assassination critics and researchers. Here is a look back at Salandria’s story through Inquirer coverage and his own writing.

Salandria’s role as one of the earliest Kennedy assassination researchers can trace its roots to October 1964. That month, Salandria attended a Philadelphia Bar Association meeting at City Hall that feted Arlen Specter, then an assistant district attorney at the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office who had recently finished his work with the Warren Commission, following the release of the Warren Report.

Specter is famously credited with developing the so-called single-bullet theory, which states that Kennedy and Texas Gov. John Connally were wounded by the same projectile at Dealey Plaza. Salandria, who had visited the assassination site and read the Warren Report ahead of Specter’s appearance at the event, took great issue with that conclusion and confronted the future Pennsylvania senator.

Salandria, at the behest of his colleagues, would later write an article detailing his criticisms of Specter’s conclusions. Only weeks after the meeting, the article appeared in a November 1964 issue of the Legal Intelligencer, the country’s oldest law publication, and is considered to be among the first published criticisms of the Warren Report’s forensic findings.

During their October confrontation, Salandria wrote, Specter asked whether he would have had the commission kill a man in a reenactment of the assassination.

“The joke fell upon ears which detect no humor in murder,” Salandria wrote.

In his article, Salandria used a technical analysis to rebut the commission’s explanation of the number of shots, their source, and the wounds Kennedy suffered. The killing, Salandria concluded in his piece, was not the work of Oswald — or at least not Oswald alone.

Evidence in the case, he said, pointed to multiple shooters, and therefore meant a conspiracy.

It was, he would later contend, a coup d’etat.

By 1967, Salandria had already garnered a reputation as a “pioneer critic” of the Warren Report, The Inquirer wrote. Salandria had continued publishing articles questioning the official story of the assassination, and giving lectures. The local media began to take notice, but not in a favorable way.

The Inquirer recounted Salandria’s beliefs on the assassination in a January 1967 column, headlining it “The Fine Edge of Believability.” In it, Salandria told the columnist his take on Kennedy’s killing, contending that CIA and military leaders had Kennedy killed because they feared he was planning to end the Cold War by improving the United States’ relations with Russia.

Such reconciliation, Salandria said, would have ended or severely diminished the power of the military-industrial complex. So, Kennedy had to go, and with Oswald lined up as the “perfect patsy,” the deed was done, Salandria said. And, what’s more, he added, everyone knew it.

“People know what happened. They’ve always known,” Salandria said in 1967. “They just needed someone to bring it out into the open. That’s what I’m trying to do.”

While Salandria acknowledged his ideas may have been controversial, The Inquirer’s columnist seemed to dismiss them, writing that “the sad part was that Vincent Salandria really believed in everything he said.”

“No, I’m not a nut,” Salandria said at the time. “I arrived at this scientifically. It’s not crazy. It makes a lot of sense.”

A key element of Salandria’s work on the Kennedy assassination was that while he believed the president’s killer was not Oswald, the identity of the actual killer was not all that relevant — and we likely would never know it, anyway. Instead, what mattered was the implication of Kennedy’s murder.

“We have been enormously manipulated and controlled since that time,” Salandria told the Daily News in 1978, the 15th anniversary of the assassination. “The inquiries [into Kennedy’s death] have been utilized by the power structure to damage the psyches of America, to destroy the capacity of the American people to govern themselves, to cripple their ability to analyze and render them impotent as citizens.”

Americans, he added, were “barbarized” by the assassination. Kennedy’s presidency, he said, represented “the last center of the old politics,” and with an official explanation of his murder, however questionable, the country was offered stability.

“Abandon all hope — you know what the truth is, but you’re not going to get it from your government,” Salandria said.

With his release of the political thriller JFK in 1991, director Oliver Stone brought mainstream cultural attention to conspiracy theories around the Kennedy assassination. The film, The Inquirer wrote following its release, seemed to be “a murder mystery aimed at detonating the 26-volume Warren Commission report.”

The movie focuses on Warren Report critic and assassination researcher Jim Garrison, who like Salandria believed Oswald was a scapegoat and the killing was the result of a deeper conspiracy.

Salandria supported Garrison’s work and, with the film’s release, asked the former New Orleans district attorney to pass along a message to Stone lauding the director’s “pivotally important” work, The Inquirer reported in 1991.

Nearly 50 years after Kennedy’s assassination, in January 2012, Specter and Salandria had a final meeting with a lunch at the Oyster House in Center City. Salandria recounted the lunch in an article published by the Coalition on Political Assassinations about a month after Specter’s death that October.

At the meeting, which Salandria described as courteous and respectful, Specter asked Salandria about their 1964 confrontation. According to Salandria, Specter said that in that meeting, he had been accused of corruption over his conclusions about Kennedy’s murder. Now, in 2012, Salandria said, Specter wondered whether the charge could instead have been “incompetency.”

“I told him that I could not change it to incompetency because I knew then from his public record, as I know now, that he was not incompetent,” Salandria wrote. But, he added, if he had to do it all again, he would have changed his “harsh criticisms” of the former senator.

While he viewed the Warren Report as a lie, Salandria noted that its findings worked to “calm the U.S. public in a period of great crisis.” Had any serious countermovement emerged in the wake of Kennedy’s murder, he contended, there would have been a “catastrophic loss of life.”

Salandria died in August 2020 at age 92, while walking his dog in Philadelphia. Tributes remembered him as having provided the foundational work from which much of the contemporary criticism of the official story on Kennedy’s killing has since emerged.

Perhaps unexpectedly, however, during the previous dump of Kennedy assassination documents during Trump’s first presidency in 2017, Salandria was unimpressed. As he told CBS News Philadelphia that year, little was likely to come of the new releases.

“We became militarized and now we’re involved in perpetual war,” Salandria said. “I don’t think the American people want to accept the idea that the vital aspects of our republic were shot away at Dealey Plaza and we have a militarized society.”