Richard Warren Lewis on Vincent Salandria
The Scavengers and Critics of the Warren Report, pp. 138-142
One of the more strident nouvelle
vague voices belongs to Vincent Salandria, a crewcut Philadelphia lawyer and
consultant to the American Civil Liberties Union. On a four-day visit to the
National Archives, Salandria conducted an exhaustive study of the Zapruder
motion-picture film. He placed two slide projectors side by side, superimposed
pictures of the President suffering his mortal head wound, and discovered that
the President’s head moved backward and to the left. The Commission had stated
that the bullet “…entered the right-rear portion of his head, causing a
massive and fatal wound.”
Salandria has hammered home this apparent head-snap discrepancy in his
speaking engagements and magazine articles ever since. Since he never accepts
any form of payment for public appearances, his motives would seem to be
altruistic.
“Once the American people is [sic] permitted to see what is has a right and duty to see in a society which is still open, to wit: the Zapruder photographic documentation of the rude manner in which their President was dispatched from this world by a team of assassins,” says Salandria, “then the lone assassin theory of the Warren Commission will be reduced to the proper place it deserves in history as patent pap—improper sustenance for free minds. The Zapruder films show interalia that the President was propelled, pounded and pivoted—his whole body was—as a limp, dead thing, smashed abruptly backward and leftward by the force of a bullet aimed from the front and right of him, to wit from the grassy knoll area.
“The speed of the movement and the direction backward cannot be explained as a result of voluntary or involuntary self-propulsion, or any force impinging from the rear. The frames which follow 313 demonstrate that this thumping of the President leftward and backward results in a continuous progression which pounds him to the back of the limousine seat and then bounces him off the seat and into his wife’s lap. What did the Warren Commission see fit to say about this, the most dramatic phenomenon of the assassination? Not a single word was directed to the problem. This silence speaks most eloquently for the Commission’s true function. When these films are released, the process of [heaping] lie upon lie to shore up the punctured single assassin theory will end.”[1]
Salandria ignores the most important evidence, which is the initial
direction and first movement of the President’s head when the fatal bullet
struck. “The initial motion of his head is downward in frames 312-313,”
states Dr. R.A.J. Riddle, Assistant Professor of Physics at UCLA and a member of
the university’s Brain Research Institute. Dr. Riddle commented further when
asked if the head movement was consistent with a shot fired from the
grassy-knoll area. “The initial motion of the head is consistent with a bullet
fired from an elevation of about twenty-five degrees or more.”[2]
But further investigation shows that the extreme top of the knoll is
approximately eleven degrees from a horizontal plane at the approximate height
of the President’s head. There is no possible firing position at
“twenty-five degrees or more” in that area. There exists only open sky.
The initial movement is consistent with a shot fired from fifteen degrees
behind the President’s head. The
sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository lies at fifteen degrees
elevation.
Where Salandria emphasizes the “thumping” which occurs in Zapruder
frames 314-320,
it is not central to what has already transpired in frames 312-313.
In frame 312 the President’s head has already slumped over from the effects of
the bullet that went through his neck. He is practically resting in his wife’s
arms. According to Mrs. Kennedy’s testimony, she had already begun to pull his
body toward her at this juncture. She is cradling him. His head hangs downward.
The point of his chin is nearly resting on his chest, probably near the nadir of
its downward arc.
The President’s head had not been hit by frame 312. The impact from the
fatal bullet striking the right rear of his skull (as the sniper would have seen
it) definitely occurs between frames 312 and 313, a period of about 1/36th
of a second. In frame 313, he has been hit and his head is clearly forced
downward as far as possible. This can be verified by using the type of grid
employed in microscopic photography and superimposing it over that frame. The
spray of blood and brain tissue obscures most of his head, but it is still
possible to see the downward position of his head and chin. Roughly an
additional 1/40th of a second has passed by the end of frame 313.
The total elapsed time from the end of 312 to the end of 313 has reached
the seemingly infinitesimal figure of 1/18th of a second. But a car
traveling approximately 11.3 miles per hour, the estimated speed of the
Presidential limousine, can cover approximately 1.1 feet during that period of
time. And a bullet traveling approximately 1,979 miles per second, the speed of
the fatal bullet fired by Oswald, theoretically could cover almost ninety miles
in that 1/18th of a second.
With a bullet traveling so fast, the instantaneous reaction to that
bullet was impossible to record on Zapruder’s camera. Consequently no one
knows the precise instant the bullet struck the President. Only the effect of
the bullet can be seen. There is no doubt, however, that the President’s head
moved forward and down from its original position in 312.
By superimposing the grid over frames 312-313
and subsequent frames, there is also no doubt about the movements which next
occur. At frame 314, the angle of the bullet striking from the rear has swiveled
the President’s head to the left, causing it to pivot sideways upward and
backward, since it no longer can move downward any further. It just starts its
pivot in frame 314. By 315, it has swung closer toward his wife.
Frames 315 and 316 are of little significance unless one embraces the
double-hit theory, as Salandria does, that two bullets struck the President’s
head at almost the same time, inflicting double damage. But if the President had
been hit by a second bullet from the front, as Salandria and numerous other
superbuffs claim he was, his downward-slumped head would then have had to have
been propelled upward and backward. No second bullets or fragments fired by the
theoretical assassin have even been found. There are no visible marks on the
Presidential limousine caused by this phantom bullet. The bullet fragments found
in the limousine were traced to Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, to the
exclusion of all other weapons. No eyewitness ever indicated that he had seen
two bullets strike the President’s head.
The autopsy surgeons at Bethesda Naval Hospital, furthermore, showed
without doubt that there was a clean entrance wound in the right rear portion of
the skull, to the exclusion of all other areas. They determined decisively that
he was hit only once in the head. There is not one scrap of evidence that he was
hit a second time in the head. Their findings are entirely consistent with the
skull being hit between frames 312 and 313 and then totally disintegrating in
frame 313. “More than one gunman fired at President John F. Kennedy in a
concentrated and synchronized crossfire,”[3]
Salandria still maintains.