Wolff: JFK and 50 years of conspiracy

Edward Jay Epstein is the first journalist to have investigated the official accounts of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He remains the only one to have interviewed all the members of the Warren Commission — the ad hoc group of political heavies impaneled by then-president Lyndon Johnson to lay to rest all questions in the case — save for Chief Justice Earl Warren himself.

Epstein's book, Inquest, published in 1966, arguably began the modern conspiracy business. The JFK Assassination Diary: My Search for Answers to the Mystery of the Century, his contemporaneous account of his byplay with the commission's members and staff — and later efforts to see the trees though the conspiracy theories — has just been published in time for next month's 50th anniversary of the great crime.

Over lunch the other day, we took a walk through the years since that day in Dallas, and the countless books, theories, iterations, nutcases and opportunists that followed. Epstein had a wry point to make: "The assassination didn't change history — Johnson merely carried out Kennedy's policies — but it did change media."

In the three years following the assassination — before Epstein's book — the media hardly breathed a doubtful word about the commission's conclusions. At least in the telling of the national media, there had never been a more exhaustive investigation. No stone left unturned. Doubts (the off-off Broadway play, MacBird!, claiming Lyndon Johnson had done it; the John Birch society blaming Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev) were risible and hyperbolic. "The margins stayed reliably marginalized," said Epstein. "The authorities stayed reliably authoritative."

Epstein, who would go on to be one of the great investigative journalists of the era, was not a press corps insider. He was an undergraduate at Cornell who wrote a letter to Chief Justice Warren asking to interview the members of the commission, which the national press corps — apparently accepting the official word as b! eyond question — had failed to do.

"None of these lawyers and commission members were bound by any secrecy agreement, as amazing as that might seem nowadays," Epstein continues to marvel. "Why didn't journalists from major news organizations interview these sources? Fifty years later, I still can't answer that question."

His interviews with the commission members — including Allen Dulles, Gerald Ford, Hale Boggs and John McCloy, and its young counsel, Arlen Specter — convinced him not that Lee Harvey Oswald hadn't shot the president, but that the commission's work was "brief, sporadic and incomplete."

"All of the investigators were lawyers, and, as lawyers, they were paid by the hour," says Epstein. Obtaining their pay records, he demonstrated that much of the investigation had taken place in less than 4 months, with important aspects dispatched in a few hours of billing time.

Inquest was a challenge not just to facts per se, but an explication about the nature of information itself. The commission leapt to the easy conclusion that Oswald had fired the gun, but failed to earnestly address the more pressing question: To what extent was the act of his own volition?

Epstein's was an existential debunking: "God was the Warren Report. And the Warren Report was dead."

The media, in one of its first collective spasms of self-doubt and self-defense, turned, in Epstein's word, "nihilistic."

It opened the doors to a near-absurdist level of discussion, glamorizing, among others in the debate, Mark Lane, the left-wing activist lawyer, whose monster best seller, Rush to Judgment, argued that Oswald was a patsy, framed by the right wing. Then there was New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, not just an obvious fraud but likely a demented one, who began prosecuting people for the crime. The national media rushed to New Orleans, remaining until Garrison's investigation collapsed into ignominy and disgrace.

Mainstream media sheepishly moved back to its original! lone gun! man view, lazily labeling all deviations to this position as conspiracy theories. But the cat was out of the bag. In the early 1970s, talk radio began its rise, not least of all as an outlet for Lane, Garrison and a legion of other assassination theorists.

Then politics and technology got added to the story.

Assassination theories converged with political bias (pick your enemy: Castro, LBJ, FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, the Mafia), prompting new congressional investigations using the latest techniques. With audio tools, the House Assassination Committee said it found there were four shots (later debunked by newer technology). The Senate's Church Committee added a nuclear spectroscope to the study of the bullets. Always there was the Zapruder film, whose frame-by-fame study and Rashomon effect foreshadowed the onslaught of video evidence to come.

In the 1980s, from exhaustion alone, the arguments seemed finally laid to rest — until Hollywood revived them in 1991.

With the actual facts long muddied, director Oliver Stone turned Jim Garrison into a hero in his film JFK, going even further than Garrison in charging a massive, highest-levels conspiracy.

It remains the fundamental media divide:

There's the mainstream media, putting everybody who questions the received wisdom of the press on the conspiracy spectrum; and there are the kooks and sociopaths, helping to sew doubt about all received wisdom.

Epstein opened the doors to the deluge but is perfectly content with the loner theory: Oswald took it upon himself to kill the president. (Epstein has a theory of a parallel conspiracy to kill Castro, which, unknowingly, crossed paths with and may have inspired Oswald's lone effort.)

But 50 years later, Epstein is still telling the even larger story of how information, reduced, constrained and obstructed, creates an opposite reaction of information unleashed, compounded and cumulatively fabulized.