Released on the 100th anniversary of the birth of John Fitzgerald Kennedy,
this is an expanded digital edition of False Mystery: Essays on the
Assassination of JFK by Vincent J. Salandria, edited
by John Kelin.
The book cover is a sculpture
by Auguste Rodin of Pierre De Wissant, a man who chose to sacrifice
himself in the chaos of the Hundred Years’ War to save his
town from destruction. He was one in a group of six that Rodin
was commissioned in 1884 by the mayor of Calais, France to create
a monument for as a tribute to the citizens of the French port
town.[†][‡]
Photograph by Joe Green.
Vince Salandria is the greatest teacher we have on JFK.
His False Mystery is our classic foundation for understanding
President Kennedy’s assassination by his national security
state for choosing peace. Read it and learn.
In the murderous decades of C.I.A. and National Security State
“deep politics”, Vincent Salandria held high the
torch of truth. In the darkest of times, his courage, compassion,
and conscience created a beacon of truth for all people of good will.
Vincent Salandria is a gift for all time, a gift of Truth in a dry
white season of Lies! Take heart, U.S. Americans, for in our land
there is One Just Man.
—John Schuchardt, early JFK researcher, Swarthmore College Dean, and one of the Plowshares 8
Vincent Salandria is a master of the citizen investigation of state
crimes. But once a crime has been solved, he says, we must stop
debating details and interpret the crime, thereby understanding our
situation and gaining power over our future. Endless false debating
of false mysteries makes us complicit in the very crimes we abhor.
These are lessons we need as we face the serial state crimes and
frauds of the “war on terror.”
Dave Ratcliffe’s digital edition of the essays of Vince
Salandria on one of the watershed moments of modern U.S. American
history, the assassination of JFK, is itself a milestone. The
essays themselves are multifaceted and incisive, and they bear
witness to the attempts of a canny citizen who pursued the truth
tooth and nail and in so doing came up against a kind of macabre
behemoth not only in the State he was exposing, but in those of
the so-called Left who refused to admit to the obvious. And for
those of us who were alive at that fatal moment, the murder of
JFK stands as a kind of perverse beacon into the machinations of
government and power—their ruthlessness and the utter
hypocrisy and cynicism regarding actual democracy. Those today
who have been similarly shocked into recognition of a criminal
Elite by the events of 9/11, may draw a tidy line back to the
death of Kennedy. Thus the importance of Salandria’s work is now
even greater and more necessary than ever. The voice of this
citizen lawyer in our times of astonishing State criminality and
lawlessness deserves to be heard by as many as possible.
—Emanuel E. Garcia MD, Philadelphia-born poet, novelist, essayist and physician residing in New Zealand
I have enormous respect for Vincent Salandria’s ground-breaking
work as one of the earliest Warren Commission critics.
Salandria’s False Mystery distills a lifetime of
critical analysis surrounding the most disturbing murder of the 20th
century.
The first-generation researchers of the JFK assassination
who broke the investigative ground and the brave citizen
witnesses who told the truth are the only true heroes of this case.
Vincent Salandria, the brilliant and fearless Philadelhia lawyer who quickly
grasped the true and profound significance of the unfolding events
of the assassination weekend, is among the handful of citizen
researchers who laid the foundation for all of us who study the case
today. Salandria’s lucid, logical, penetrating analyses played a critical and inspiring
role in laying bare the mechanisms of the state crimes involved in
this coup d’état and coverup that forever changed our nation. We owe
a great debt to him and to David Ratcliffe for collecting his essays in this
riveting and ever-timely collection.
