About the time that my two colleagues plotted a trajectory toward the Dallas symposium [ASK 1993], I was relieved that PIR's telephone had stopped ringing, and there was some light at the other end of the TV specials. Yet another media feeding frenzy during yet another assassination anniversary. "I hope I'm not around for the 50th," I told researcher Scott Malone when he called a few weeks earlier to check on something or other that I've since happily forgotten.
    After Peter Dale Scott's exhausting "Deep Politics and the Death of JFK," I needed a rest before starting on the other worthwhile 1993 JFK book, Gaeton Fonzi's "The Last Investigation." By now I've only a vague idea of the number of JFK books in NameBase, but the notion that it's enough already is increasingly distinct. Fortunately Fonzi's book was easy reading, and early on a zinger perked me up. Fonzi describes a visit to Vince Salandria in 1975, the earliest assassination researcher who at one time was a mentor to many starting out in the field:

"I'm afraid we were misled," Salandria said sadly. "All the critics, myself included, were misled very early. I see that now. We spent too much time and effort microanalyzing the details of the assassination when all the time it was obvious, it was blatantly obvious that it was a conspiracy. Don't you think that the men who killed Kennedy had the means to do it in the most sophisticated and subtle way? They chose not to. Instead, they picked the shooting gallery that was Dealey Plaza and did it in the most barbarous and openly arrogant manner. The cover story was transparent and designed not to hold, to fall apart at the slightest scrutiny.... We must face that fact -- and not waste any more time microanalyzing the evidence. That's exactly what they want us to do.... They'll keep you very, very busy and, eventually, they'll wear you down." (p. 29)

The name Vince Salandria was not familiar to me; I knew only that he had assisted in the Garrison investigation. Fonzi mentions that Salandria has never written a book, never capitalized on his research, and by 1975 had faded into the background. I found an address for Salandria and wrote a letter explaining that I thought his perspective deserved a wider audience. He graciously sent 60 photocopied pages of articles he had written from 1964-1977, and mentioned in his cover letter that "I still feel that shifting the analysis from a micro to a macro approach is essential to freeing the bona fide critics from a quagmire."
    Half of the copies were of articles he wrote from 1964-1966, by way of showing, as he described in his letter, that "I was perhaps the earliest person to attack the Warren Report microanalytically." This isn't a boast, it's a confession. By December 1971 he described himself as "among the earliest and GUILTIEST of the researchers in my protracted analyses of the shots, trajectories and wounds of the assassination.... While the researchers have involved themselves in consuming preoccupation with the microanalytic searching for facts of how the assassination was accomplished, there has been almost no systematic thinking on why President Kennedy was killed."
    In this article and another written in 1977, Salandria looks at the assassination with a fresh set of assumptions. He borrows from his friend Professor Thomas Katen, who characterized the Warren Report as a "transparent conspiracy" rather than a cover-up. The deeper you look into the evidence, the clearer it becomes. The clues are buried, diffused, and time-released so that those who look hardest become the most fragmented and demoralized. And savvy political leaders, who might normally feel that something can be done, are the very ones who get the message most clearly: "The cryptocracy is in control, so go along if you expect to get along." Then there are those who need to deny, or refuse to see, or just enjoy grotesque minutiae -- for them, bread and circuses and murder mysteries are sufficiently harmless.
    After talking with Salandria in 1975, Fonzi flew back to Miami. "I didn't quite grasp exactly what he was talking about, but I had the uneasy feeling he was advancing some awesomely frightening theories. Then it crossed my mind that, perhaps this time for sure, Salandria was crazy." By 1993, of course, Fonzi is much more concerned that his friend ISN'T crazy.
    I instinctively refused when my colleagues urged me to attend the 30th anniversary symposium with them. But it wasn't until I heard from the Warren Commission's first micro-critic, the man who stopped being there sometime around the 8th anniversary, that I began to understand why.

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