Edward Jay Epstein
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Edward Jay Epstein was born in New York City in 1935. He attended Cornell
University, where he received a B.A. and an M.A. His Master's thesis in
government became the highly influential Inquest: The Warren Commission and
the Establishment of Truth, which examined the working of the Warren
Commission and was its first real critique. It created a sensation when it first
appeared in 1966 about the same time as Mark Lane's classic Rush to Judgment.
Mr. Epstein followed up Inquest with Counterplot: The Garrison Case
and then in 1978 with Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald,
which was published by Reader's Digest Press. In 1972 he received his Ph.D. in
government from Harvard, and afterward taught political science there as well as
at MIT and UCLA. He later returned to New York, where he works as a writer.
Other books he as written include News from Nowhere, Agency of Fear,
and, more recently, Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer,
published by Random House in 1996.
Epstein's books on the JFK assassination have been the
subject of considerable controversy. People who believe in a lone assassin have
claimed that he slanted his data and conclusions, whereas believers in
conspiracy have tended to praise him. Richard Warren Lewis devoted one of the
chapters of his 1967 book The Scavengers and Critics of the Warren Report
to Epstein and Inquest. Fletcher Knebel devoted nearly his entire article
A New Wave of Doubt, which appeared in the Look magazine of 12
July 1966, to a critical review of Inquest. I will be preparing a
critical analysis of the logic of chapter 3 of Inquest, which is entitled
"The Vulnerability of Facts."
The one article by Epstein on our web so far is his
"Who's Afraid of the Warren Report?", from the Esquire of
December 1966. It was part of a package of several article they published
together under the heading "The Aftermath of the Warren Commission."
This was about the time Inquest appeared, and the article reprises
familiar themes from that book.
Who's Afraid of the Warren Report? (Esquire, December 1966)