Edward Jay Epstein, author and stubborn skeptic, dies at 88
Edward Jay Epstein, an iconoclastic author whose deeply researched books challenged conventional wisdom on controversies ranging from whether John F. Kennedy was assassinated by a lone assassin to whether whistleblower Edward Snowden was really a Russian spy, has died in Manhattan. He was 88.
The cause was complications from Covid, said his cousin Richard Nessel. He said Mr. Epstein was found dead in his apartment on Tuesday.
A professional skeptic, Mr. Epstein wrote more than two dozen nonfiction books, many of which contained accusations of government conspiracies and corporate negligence. Some raised more questions than they answered.
In an unlikely start to a prolific career, he made his debut as an author in early 1966 when he turned his master’s thesis at Cornell University into a book, “Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth.” The New York Times called it “the first book that opens the minds of serious people to serious questions,” the conclusions of the presidential panel appointed to investigate the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963.
That same day in 1963, Mr. Epstein had borrowed his stepfather’s car and driven from New York City to the Cornell campus in Ithaca, New York, in an attempt to return to school after flunking out seven years earlier.
“The entire campus seemed eerily deserted,” he recalled in his memoir, “Assume Nothing: Encounters With Assassins, Spies, Presidents and Would-Be Masters of the Universe” (2023), until he encountered a lone student who informed of Kennedy’s death.
Thanks to a mentor, the political scientist Andrew Hacker, whose class was one that Mr. Epstein had taught, Mr. Epstein was readmitted and encouraged to write his dissertation on the murder. This gave him access to every member of the seven-member Warren Commission except for its leader, Chief Justice Earl Warren.
His book raised doubts about the committee’s finding that Kennedy was killed by a lone killer, basing it largely on what Mr. Epstein saw as serious flaws in the panel’s investigation. “Inquest” was published a few months before Mark Lane’s “Rush to Judgment,” another in a tsunami of books suggesting that the commission was hampered by time constraints, by limited resources and access, and by Judge Warren’s demand for unanimity makes its conclusions more credible.
“It was the only master’s thesis I know of that sold 600,000 copies,” Professor Hacker, who now teaches at Queens College, said in a telephone interview.
Ten years after “Inquest” was published, the House Select Committee on Assassinations conducted a much more thorough forensic investigation. The report suggested the possibility of more than one shooter and a possible conspiracy, but concluded unequivocally: “Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots at President John F. Kennedy. The second and third shots he fired hit the president. The third shot he fired killed the president.”
Mr Epstein accepted the findings and acknowledged that they answered the questions he had raised. “In light of the methodical and open nature of this investigation, there was no longer any mystery,” he wrote.
His subsequent books included “News from Nowhere: Television and the News” (1973); “The Rise and Fall of Diamonds” (1982), which exposed the economic impact of the diamond industry in southern Africa; “Deception” (1989), based on his interviews with James Jesus Angleton, the former head of counterintelligence at the Central Intelligence Agency; “The Assassination Chronicles: Investigation, Counterplot, and Legend” (1992); and “The Secret History of Armand Hammer” (1996), which detailed the ties between that American businessman and the Soviet government in the 1920s and 1930s.
He also wrote How America Lost Its Secrets: Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft (2017), which details how Mr. Snowden, as a young American intelligence contractor, exposed hundreds of American classified documents to news organizations and became one of the most hunted fugitives in the world. Mr. Epstein concluded that Mr. Snowden’s defection to Russia and contact with Russian agents made him less a heroic whistleblower than a valuable intelligence asset for Moscow.
While most of Mr. Epstein’s books received critical acclaim for their meticulous research, Nicholas Lemann wrote in The New York Times Book Review that Snowden’s book was “an impressively fluffy and golden brown, wobbly soufflé of speculation, full of anonymous sources and assumptions. language.”
Mr. Epstein’s memoir, “Assume Nothing,” is littered with dropped names (some 650 in the index, many of which he actually knew). They include Jeffrey Epstein (no relation), the disgraced financier and registered sex offender, with whom Mr. Epstein associated at one point.
In his New York Times Magazine column, William Safire once described Mr. Epstein as “the leading writer in the gray world of spies and moles.”
He was born Edward Jay Levinson on December 6, 1935 in Brooklyn to Albert and Betty (Opolinsky) Levinson. His mother was an abstract sculptor, his father a financier in the fur trade who died of a heart attack when Edward was 7. His mother remarried Louis Epstein, a British-born shoe manufacturing executive, who adopted Edward in 1945. grew up in the Midwood section of Brooklyn, where he attended Midwood High School, and in Rockville Centre, on Long Island, where he graduated from South Side High School.
At Cornell, Mr. Epstein was an erratic student. He was suspended after the spring semester of 1956 for failing four subjects, although he had earned good grades in a 19th century European literature course taught by Vladimir Nabokov and an A in Professor Hacker’s class at the United States Congress .
When he returned after 1963, Mr. Epstein simultaneously completed his bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree, both in government, graduating in 1966.
“He was the most interesting student I ever had,” Professor Hacker said. “There was a kind of apparent ingenuity about him. He acted like he didn’t know anything.”
Mr. Epstein received his doctorate in 1972 from the Harvard-MIT Joint Center for Urban Studies, where his courses were supervised by Prof. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the future U.S. Senator from New York.
For three years, Mr. Epstein taught political science at Harvard, the University of California, Los Angeles and MIT, and wrote part-time for The New Yorker. But he decided to return to his hometown to become a full-time author rather than pursue an academic career.
“I wanted to be in New York ever since I met Clay Felker,” the editor of New York Magazine said in an interview with the online magazine Air Mail last year. “He knew the whole world.”
Mr. Epstein lived alone in an opulent, rent-controlled apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. His cousins were his closest survivors.
Under the mentorship of Professor Hacker at Cornell, Mr. Epstein began looking beyond the Warren Commission’s conclusions to investigate how that panel had reached its verdict on the murder. He was 29, he recalled in his memoirs, and had never conducted a single in-depth interview.
“I still hadn’t graduated,” he wrote. “I had no experience in journalism. I had never even worked for a school newspaper and never known a reporter.”
But as Richard Rovere, the veteran Washington correspondent for The New Yorker, wrote in the book’s introduction: “Here we have something that should make scholars proud and journalists jealous and ashamed. Mr. Epstein’s scientific tools happen to be the tools used by journalists day in and day out. But the press left it to a single scientist to find the news.”
Mr. Epstein had an insatiable curiosity, writing about everything from the economics of Hollywood to the rape accusation against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund, by a Manhattan hotel maid in 2011. ( Mr. Epstein suggested it had been a political scheme to embarrass him. Mr. Strauss-Kahn and the maid eventually settled her lawsuit against him.)
Michael Wolff, a fellow maverick investigative author, said by telephone of Mr. Epstein: “He saw his job as a journalist as a challenge, if not subversion, of all conventional wisdom, which he did with a rigor that came from both deep research and and that he knew exactly who to call – because it was part of his job to know everyone.”
He added: “Ed’s politics were the joie de vivre of skepticism. Was he right? Oddly enough, I don’t think he was right. He set out to ask the questions that others avoided or didn’t think about.”