Edward Jay Epstein was
an early critic of the Warren
Commission. His
book, Inquest: The Warren Commission and
the Establishment of Truth (1966), Epstein accepts that
Lee
Harvey Oswald was
guilty of killing President John
F. Kennedy.
However, he is not convinced by the "single-bullet" theory
and believes that there is evidence to suggest that more than one
gunman was involved in the assassination.
Iin 1977 George
De Mohrenschildt
approached Epstein complaining
that he was short of money. Epstein offered him $4,000 for an interview.
During their talks De Mohrenschildt
admitted that in 1962 he had been contacted by J. Walton Moore, who
was employed by the Central Intelligence Agency
in Dallas. De
Mohrenschildt was
asked by Moore to find out about Oswald's time in the Soviet
Union. In return he was given help with an oil deal he was negotiating
with Papa Doc Duvalier, the Haitian dictator.
In
March 1963, De Mohrenschildt got the contract from the Haitian government.
He had assumed that this was because of the help he had given to the
CIA.
On 29th March, 1977, Epstein
and De Mohrenschildt, broke for lunch and decided to meet again at
3 p.m. George De Mohrenschildt
returned to his room where he found a card from Gaeton
Fonzi,
an investigator working for the Select
House Committee on Assassinations. George
De Mohrenschildt's body was found later that day. He had
apparently committed suicide by shooting himself in the mouth.
In his book Legend:
The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald (1978) Epstein argued
that Oswald was a KGB agent. Much of the
book is based on interviews with James Angleton
and Yuri Nosenko.
Other books by Epstein
include Agency of Fear: Opiates and Political
Power in America (1977), Cartel
(1979), Deception: The Invisible War Between
the KGB and the CIA (1989), The
Assassination Chronicles (1996), The
Secret History of Armand Hammer (1999) and News
from Nowhere: Television and the News (2000).
Edward
Jay Epstein
Open
Debate on the Kennedy Assassination
Debate on Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald
Namebase: Edward Epstein
(1)
Edward
Jay Epstein,
Esquire Magazine (December, 1966)
In
January of 1964 the Warren Commission learned that Don B. Reynolds,
insurance agent and close associate of Bobby Baker, had been heard
to say the FBI knew that Johnson was behind the assassination. When
interviewed by the FBI, he denied this. But he did recount an incident
during the swearing in of Kennedy in which Bobby Baker said words
to the effect that the s.o.b. would never live out his term and that
he would die a violent death.
(2)
Edward
Jay Epstein, The
Warren Report: Part 2,
CBS Television (28th June, 1967)
Well, there were
three, I think, levels of complaint. The first one was the institutional,
you might say: the general problem that a government has when it searches
for truth. The problem of trying to have an autonomous investigation,
free from political interference, and at the same time, it's dealing
by its very nature with a political problem.
The second level might
be called the organizational level of - was the Warren Commission
organized in a way that prevented it from finding facts? And here
my findings were that by using a part time staff and by the Commission's
detaching themselves from the investigation - in other words, not
actively partaking in the investigation - it raised some problems
as to whether the Warren Commission's investigation went deep enough,
so that if there was evidence of a conspiracy, they would have in
fact found it.
The third level of my
criticism concerned the evidence itself, and this concerned the problem
of when the Warren Commission was come - confronted with a very complex
problem. For example, the contradiction between the FBI summary report
on the autopsy and the autopsy report they had in hand - how they
solved this problem, whether they simply glossed over it or whether
they called witnesses,
and - and this - this, of course, brought up the questions of - of
a second assassin.
(3)
The
Warren Report: Part 2,
CBS Television (28th June, 1967)
Edward Jay Epstein:
art of the job of the Warren Commission was restoring confidence
in the American Government. And for this he had to pick seven very
respectable men, men who would lend their name and lend probity to
the report. And so that the problem was, in any seven men he picked
of this sort, they would have very little time for the investigation.
They would also have two
purposes. One purpose would be to find the truth, all the facts. The
other purpose would be to allay rumors, to dispel conspiracy theories
and material of that sort.
Arlen Specter: My view
is that there is absolutely no foundation for that
type of a charge. When the President selected the commissioners, he
chose men of unblemished reputation and very high standing. The Chief
Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States would have no reason
whatsoever to be expedient or to search for political truths. Nor
would Alien W. Dulles, the former head of the CIA, nor would John
McCloy, with his distinguished service in government, nor would the
Congressional or Senatorial representatives.
(4)
Calvin Trillin, The New Yorker
(June 1967)
When the
Warren Report was published, some ten months after the assassination,
most Americans seemed to accept its conclusions, most editorialists
praised it for its thoroughness and clarity, one or two reviewers
criticized it as taking the form of a brief for the prosecution, and
perhaps a dozen obscure citizens, unaware of each other’s existence,
began to pore over it to prove that it was wrong. Eventually, of course,
critical books were written on the Report by professional journalists
such as Léo Sauvage, an American correspondent for Le Figaro,
and Sylvan Fox, the former city editor of the World-Telegram &
Sun; Mark Lane, the author of Rush to Judgment, and Harold
Weisberg, the author of Whitewash and Whitewash II,
became more or less professional critics; Edward Jay Epstein, whose
book on the alleged bungling of the Warren Commission investigation,
Inquest, is generally considered the single greatest contribution
to making criticism of the Report respectable, entered the field through
the orthodox routine of scholarship - in order to earn a Master’s
degree by analyzing the workings of a governmental commission; and
James Garrison, operating on the premise that the Warren Commission
failed to fulfill its duties, launched an investigation of his own
as district attorney of New Orleans. But in the two and a half years
between the assassination and the publication of Epstein’s book,
most of the hours spent examining the official version of the President’s
murder were spent by people who had no professional reason for their
interest and no plans to make a full-time career out of criticizing
the Warren Report. They tend to refer to themselves (and the professionals)
as “investigators” or “researchers” or, most often,
“critics.” They are also known as “assassination buffs.”
(5)
Edward Jay Epstein, Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald
(1978)
The possibility that
Oswald was encouraged or assisted in the act by some unknown party
can certainly not be excluded. But there is one piece of evidence
which strongly argues against the possibility that Oswald was part
of an intelligent and purposeful conspiracy - the note which Oswald
purportedly wrote to the FBI a week or so before Kennedy arrived in
Dallas.
In this note, Oswald threatened
to blow up the local FBI headquarters in Dallas unless FBI agents
stopped harassing his wife. The note itself was never divulged to
the Warren Commission. Instead, after Oswald was shot by Jack Ruby,
the local FBI agent, undoubtedly on orders from his superiors destroyed
the note. Its existence was only admitted by FBI officials in 1975
when FBI employees in Dallas, who had seen the note, revealed its
contents. They testified, moreover, that Oswald had delivered the
note to the FBI office.
If there was a conspiracy,
it is difficult to understand why it should risk revealing itself
to the FBI by having Oswald, their; main actor, walk into the FBI
office with a threatening note. He might have been arrested on the
spot, or at the very least, the FBI could have been expected to warn
the President security force that Oswald, who was employed on the
President's route, had made a violent threat to federal officials.
Even if the conspirators only meant to frame Oswald, the delivery
of the note would jeopardize that plan since it risked having Oswald
arrested prior to the President's arrival. It therefore seems reasonable
to assume that, if the note is authentic, Oswald was not part of a
conspiracy.
(6)
Edward Jay Epstein,
diary entry
(29th March, 1977)
David Bludworth,
The State's Attorney, was a folksy, charming and savvy interrogator.
He began by telling me that De Mohrenschildt had put a shotgun in
his mouth and killed himself at 3:45 p.m. There were no witnesses
- and no one home at the time of the shooting. The precise time of
his death was established by a tape-recorder, left running that afternoon
to record the soap operas for the absent Mrs. Tilton, and which recorded
a single set of footfalls in the room and the blast of the shotgun,
which was found on the Persian carpet next to him. No suicide note
or other clue was found. He said I was probably the last person to
talk to him. Then, he asked whether I had in my possession De Mohrenschildt's
black address book. I replied "No." He politely rephrased
the question, and asked me again - about a half-dozen times, whether
I had the black book.
(7)
Gaeton
Fonzi,
interviewed
on 8th October, 1994.
Q: Do you think that de
Mohrenschildt committed suicide because you were going to see him?
What was your reaction upon hearing of his suicide?
A: Yeah. Again, this is
my opinion. At the time de Mohrenschildt committed suicide, there
were a number of things taking place, and a number of specific factors
that put a lot of pressure on him. The House Committee was getting
started again. He was being asked, I believe, to begin another role
in his relationship to the assassination and his testimony before
the Warren Commission. He was taken, just before he committed suicide,
he was taken to Belgium by a foreign journalist. He was, I believe
he felt he was, being set up. He was supposed to have a meeting with
a KGB official, I believe, but he ran away. He came back to Florida.
He believed he was being set up to make it appear that there was a
link between him and the KGB. And then obviously a link between Oswald
and the KGB because of his link to the KGB. And then, Epstein shows
up. And once again, spends a whole afternoon with him at a hotel in
Palm Beach. And, I think, he's under a lot of pressure. He comes back
home and his daughter hands him my card. I had been there in the morning
and I told his daughter that I wanted to talk to him and that I would
be back in touch. He puts the card in his shirt pocket and goes upstairs
and blows his head off. And so, I think you have a whole series of
linkages there. He hadn't been a well man, mentally. Just months prior
to that he had been treated for mental problems. So I think the linkage
is there in terms of the pressures being put on him. And I do believe
he committed suicide. I don't think there's enough evidence to indicate
that he didn't.
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