Vincent Salandria discussing the Kennedy case, JFK Jr (Fairytale Interrupted)

Vincent Salandria was a history teacher at Bartram in the 1960s; he was also a Penn-trained lawyer who spent decades independently investigating the JFK assassination and believes the CIA assassinated Kennedy with the military’s approval because he was moving toward ending the Cold War with the Soviet Union and the war in Vietnam. Vince began to feel his safety was at risk—he had received threats and he'd 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, 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.” “We need to become more American,” Vince 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 warning him of a potential threat.

Vince Salandria: The job for the American media was, to make this case look so complex, so prolix, so difficult to comprehend, so subject to debate, that the public would weary of trying to know. When in fact, the public did believe, always did believe that there was a conspiracy. And the public was permitted to believe, but it was not permitted to know the obvious. Only the center of the American power structure could have effectuated this conspiracy and expected that the American press would play along with it. Only the CIA could manipulate us internally and seek to provide hegemony over the whole world in terms of American military power. We would become more militarized. We would become more aggressive, more imperial. And at home we would become just a façade of a democratic structure.

David Starks: Why is this case still so important three decades later?

Vincent Salandria: I think it’s most relevant to our society. I think that what happened in Dealey Plaza was that a duly elected President was fired. Because this affects not only this country, but around the world. Perhaps a million South Vietnamese died as a consequence of what happened in Dealey Plaza. The world, hanging always, between peace and war. And it’s the interests of the people who killed Kennedy of maintaining war. That the constitutional process was relegated to a paper-thin façade. That what was left at that time, to American democracy, was relegated to theatrics; to the theatre of the absurd. And that what is happening now is a continuation of what was set forth then and that is, that we became more a militarized society. Under the guise of Cold War we were told that the increase of governmental expenditures to the military sector of the economy was necessary. So we began to spend on the order of 300 billion dollars of national wealth per year on the military industrial complex which caused us to neglect the private sector, neglect education, neglect health service delivery to the poor, neglect increasing poverty, neglect an effort to make the society fair, and to make the wealth of the country more equally and equitably distributed so that we’d have a state which we could be proud of, where the needs of our people would be met. Whether it be upward social mobility, which I enjoyed, and the future of the society could enjoy. Instead, we became militarized. Instead, rather than being competitive economically and maintaining our competitive edge and being able to maintain the highest standard of living in the world, we have been slipping. And now we have slipped to eleventh or twelfth in our standard of living. The number of poor increases. The injustice of this unequal distribution of wealth escalates. Public education is neglected. And we see that although the Cold War has dissipated, the military expenditures remain pretty much flat, hanging close to a 300 billion dollar a year point. That’s why it’s so significant. The people who seized power, November 22, 1963 at Dealey Plaza, are still in power and are still distorting the quality of the American constitutional structure and are still destroying the quality of life in this society. That’s why it’s so important. Additionally, some FBI files on Oswald from 1959-1960 remain classified, and could give us a better understanding of what the CIA didn’t want to relay to its Mexico station.

Democracy means you can believe anything. But if you purport to know this government is illegitimate because it is really controlled by the military industrial intelligence complex, and you act accordingly then the media will deal with you and then you’ll feel the weight of American governmental power. Allen Dulles was involved in a clear crime and covering it up. When Harold Feldman wrote that article, “Oswald and the FBI,” that prompted a secret executive session of the Warren Commission, during the course of this executive session, someone makes mention that Marina Oswald was going to testify before the Commission that Oswald was a double agent. Allen Dulles said, ‘That’s not going to happen.’ Issac Don Levine, who was an old Czarist right-winger, came to the United States and had solid US intelligence connections. Dulles said, ‘Isaac Don Levine has been assigned by LIFE magazine to write an article about Marina.’ Incidentally he never wrote such an article. He was assigned—I’m sure by American Intelligence, not LIFE magazine—to Marina Oswald to keep her quiet. Dulles said of Levine: ‘I have known him. I will talk to him. She will not so testify.’ That’s suborning perjury. That’s a crime. So Allen Dulles was clearly a criminal. The leading candidate for the killing of Kennedy always was the CIA. None other. Preserving democracy by destroying democracy was important. Preserving Vietnam by destroying My Lai and its people. This is the reasoning of the Military-Industrial Complex. This is the reasoning of these people of enormous power, enormous arrogance and murderous in their instincts.

The power of intelligence agencies increases in direct proportion to the degree of sickness of a nation. A healthy and united people can localize the cancer of a power-usurping intelligence agency and eventually extirpate its malignant cells from the nation’s political life. Therefore, the intelligence apparatus which killed Kennedy has a need to keep our society in turmoil. It has — in order to maintain its power — to generate a high degree of chaos. Chaos is required to make a people willing to accept such strong medicine as is administered by the secret police in order to restore order and to stabilize a disintegrating society. It takes an acutely sick society to be able to accept as palatable the terrible cure — totalitarianism. Source: ratical.org

"Ah come on, you know I don't deserve it." That was John F. Kennedy Jr.'s answer for why he refused an honorary degree from Maryland's Washington College just two months before his untimely death. That took grace, humility and a sense of perspective, three qualities that exist in short supply. Even Paul Bloustein, JFK Jr's plumber down the street, said that the man wanted to live his life simply. After his untimely death, John Jr went from being the affable son of a fallen president, a hard working district attorney and the editor of a political magazine to a secular savior. JFK Jr. was looking for a new house in New Canaan, Connecticut. He wanted to make his wife Carolyn happy. Perhaps because a privileged brain, charm, a sense of humor and good looks are insufficient explanations, dozens of commentators attributed the source of John Kennedy Jr's appeal to his lack of cynicism. "In many ways, JFK Jr. was on the threshold of a new chapter in his life. George just had been a stepping stone to public office," Michael Beschloss wrote in The Wallstreet Journal: "I think there has been this sort of unspoken assumption that John Kennedy Jr. at one point in his life might have run for president. And if he won, it would be a restoration of the Kennedy era." It should be no surprise that the press has used this tragedy to make John F. Kennedy Jr. "the blank slate for other people's dreams," were the words of NBC's Keith Morrison. JFK Jr was unpretentious, decent, socially aware and a dozen other good qualities. JFK Jr. sought none of his fame yet managed to live gracefully in spite of what must have been an incredible burden. He possessed a quality of character that few could maintain under such a magnifying glass, including his own father. 

John Jr never got caught in any disgraceful scandals, despite being under a magnifying glass his whole life. He didn't take an easy route (Jackie had discouraged his actor career), he persevered and got a law degree and spent 6 years in public service. He was very philanthropic and volunteered with a number of non-profit organizations, along with sitting on the boards of numerous family foundations. Senator Ted Kennedy said in the funeral that John Jr. had "found his shining star when he married Carolyn Bessette. His beautiful young wife -- the new pride of the Kennedys -- would cheer for John's team and delight her nieces and nephews with her somersaults. We dared to think, in that other Irish phrase, that this John Kennedy would live to comb gray hair, with his beloved Carolyn by his side. But like his father, he had every gift but length of years." John Jr had the charisma, the humility and a brilliant mind. But maybe politics, despite being his fate, would had been rough on him, because good men don't usually triumph or survive in a political arena. Source: www.nationalreview.com

RoseMarie Terenzio (John Jr's assistant at George magazine): Every morning, I found John Jr. going through the stack of mail that I had covered in notes with various questions. The whole of Central Park and the Upper West Side skyline was his backdrop as I sat across from him and the office’s wall of windows. I started in on his day: an editorial meeting at noon; lunch immediately after at Limoncello with Jeff Sachs, his friend and the executive director of Reaching Up, the charity they cofounded; then a 3:00 p.m. meeting with Biz Mitchell, executive editor of George. The office had new furniture, big ashtrays, Diet Coke, and a sofa—all the makings of a good lounge. That’s where Carolyn hung out whenever she visited John’s office. She’d flop down on the couch, a whirlwind of handbags and stories, and spent hours leafing through magazines and smoking, so that by the time she left, George’s office looked like a nightclub. The two of us had quickly developed a friendly rapport in the time I had been working for John. We talked almost every day, first brief conversations when she called for John, then longer gossip sessions when she called for me. “Did John apologize?” Carolyn asked. “He came home last night a nervous wreck and I said to him that I couldn’t believe he showed all those other losers the magazine first and left you sitting outside like the redheaded stepchild. I told him, ‘Oh no. You need to go in and apologize to her in the morning.’” Carolyn came to my defense by making John feel bad about what he’d done, which was so typical of her. 

When she first walked into the offices of Random Ventures, she looked like a model, effortlessly perfect in an unstudied yet elegant outfit, with an aura of mystery like Laura Palmer from Twin Peaks. Carolyn held her black patent-leather Prada purse behind her back with one hand, while absentmindedly twisting a lock of hair with the other. She wasn’t trying too hard. In fact, she wasn’t trying at all. From my point of view, John was happier when Carolyn was around him. I hadn't seen him so happy with his previous girlfriends. And Carolyn, like any smart woman, had a way of making John pay attention to sensible matters. She got him to differentiate between the people taking advantage of his generosity and those who needed a little extra attention from him. Once Carolyn treated me to Barneys, and when we were headed to the cashier with thousands of dollars’ worth of merchandise, I realized I couldn’t afford any of it. “You know what, Carolyn? I’m just going to take the shirt,” I said, trying not to be obvious while picking the least expensive thing in the pile. “I don’t need the rest of it.” “No,” she said firmly, and handed her credit card to the salesperson. “We’re going to take all of it.” Carolyn understood how lucky she was to be able to afford beautiful clothes, and she wanted to share the wealth with those she cared about. I loved the clothes and her generosity, even if I was uncomfortable with the extravagance of the gesture. 

Sometimes things could get really heated between John & Carolyn; for example, he would go crazy when she was on the phone all day while he was trying to get through, getting busy signal after busy signal since they didn’t have call waiting; or it upset him when Carolyn, a big-sister type to her friends, would spend an entire weekend dealing with someone else’s problems, which took her attention away from John. But no matter the issue, John and Carolyn always defused the situation with a joke. They never took anything so seriously that they couldn’t laugh at themselves. That, combined with the respect Carolyn had for John (and viceversa), took their relationship from dating casually to seeing each other every week at night to living together within a year. Carolyn was also worried that marriage would change their dynamic. She understood that the formality meant something, especially to John and his lifestyle; he was pretty old-fashioned indeed. As John’s girlfriend, she could skip a benefit or advertiser dinner without her absence being considered an insult. Once she was his wife, everything would have to be more carefully considered and planned. —"Fairytale Interrupted" (2011) by RoseMarie Terenzio