Edward Jay Epstein, 88; investigative journalist and skeptic wrote on various topics
Edward Jay Epstein, an independent investigative journalist who has died at 88, was an unusual figure among his profession’s diggers and sleuths, a reporter without portfolio who straddled the establishment and the skeptical world of doubt beyond.
In a raft of widely read books, as well as in articles in publications including The New York Times and The New Yorker magazine, he delighted in puncturing accepted narratives and, in some cases, the media outlets that in his opinion lazily gave them life.
Dr. Epstein probed topics as varied as the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, US intelligence and counterintelligence, the international diamond trade, the business of Hollywood, and the data leak in 2013 by National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealing a massive domestic surveillance program.
In the view of his critics, Dr. Epstein was a conspiracist or something close to one. In the eyes of his admirers, he was a dogged reporter who combined a keen mind and shoe-leather hustle with highbrow taste, the latter on display at the lavish parties he hosted for VIPs at his Manhattan home.
A salon of sorts not remotely like the typical home of a workaday scribe, Dr. Epstein’s rentcontrolled Upper East Side penthouse attracted the likes of former secretary of state Henry Kissinger and Tom Wolfe, a journalistic contemporary of Dr. Epstein’s who could be found there at times conversing in his signature white suit.
Dr. Epstein had a “kind of independence of mind which is pretty rare,” said journalist and author Michael Wolff, a longtime friend of Mr. Epstein.
“Nobody was telling him what to think,” Wolff continued. “There was really no point in all of his long New York life in which he had to conform, and so he just kind of went merrily wherever his interests took him.”
Dr. Epstein was found dead on Jan. 9 at his apartment, according to his nephew Rick Nessel. He said Dr. Epstein had recently tested positive for the coronavirus but that the official cause is not yet known.
He was born Edward Jay Levinson on Dec. 6, 1935, in Brooklyn. In a 2023 memoir, “Assume Nothing: Encounters With Assassins, Spies, Presidents, and Would-be Masters of the Universe,” he described his father as a financier in the fur trade and his mother as a sculptor.
He was 7 when his father died and later took the surname of his stepfather, Louis J. Epstein, a shoe manufacturer, who adopted him.
Dr. Epstein was raised in privilege and enrolled at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., where one of his professors was Vladimir Nabokov, the author of the novel “Lolita.” Mr. Epstein wrote that Nabokov paid him $10 a week to view newly released movies and advise him and his wife on which ones were worth their time.
Dr. Epstein did not take to college, however, and by his account was invited to leave Cornell. When he turned 21, he came into a sizable inheritance from his father’s estate and set sail for Europe. He later returned to Cornell, where he received a bachelor’s degree in 1965 and a master’s degree in 1966, according to the university.
Under the guidance and on the encouragement of a government professor, Andrew Hacker, Dr. Epstein wrote his master’s thesis on the official government investigation into the Kennedy assassination. His thesis became the book “Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth” (1966).
Book critic Eliot FremontSmith, reviewing the volume for the Times, described “Inquest” as “the first book to throw open to serious question, in the minds of thinking people, the findings of the Warren Commission,” which identified Lee Harvey Oswald as the sole assassin. Mr. Epstein interviewed every member of the commission except the chairman, Chief Justice Earl Warren.
The book raised its questions “not as an outraged polemic, convincing only to the already convinced,” the review continued, “but as a sober, scholarly case study of how an extraordinary government commission goes about its work — the conception of its job, the nature of internal and external pressures on such a commission and the effect these may have on the conduct and quality of the investigation, selection and evaluation of evidence.”
Dr. Epstein’s later books on the Kennedy assassination included “Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald” (1978) and “The JFK Assassination Diary: My Search for Answers to the Mystery of the Century” (2013).
He continued his graduate studies at Harvard, where he received a PhD in government in 1973, and was mentored by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a professor and later a Democratic senator from New York.
Dr. Epstein taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California Los Angeles before deciding, he said, that “researching and writing books was a far more educational enterprise.”
His doctoral dissertation became the book “News From Nowhere: Television and the News” (1973), Dr. Epstein’s first major work of media criticism, an abiding theme of his career.
Michael J. Socolow, a professor of journalism at the University of Maine, said the book “added depth and complexity to public discussion of objectivity in journalism” by examining the economics of commercial broadcasting, in which networks often faced pressure from conservative-leaning advertisers and local affiliates.
In other works of media criticism, Dr. Epstein rejected the notion of a crusading press without which all government misconduct would go uncovered.
“A sustaining myth of journalism holds that every great government scandal is revealed through the work of enterprising reporters who by one means or another pierce the official veil of secrecy,” he wrote in Commentary magazine in 1974, shortly before the resignation of President Nixon in the wake of the Watergate affair.
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the reporters who led The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the scandal, were cast in the popular imagination — as well as in a film “All the President’s Men” (1976) — as the underdog in a David-and-Goliath struggle against a corrupt White House.
But “in the end,” Dr. Epstein argued, “it was not because of the reporting of Woodward and Bernstein, but because of the pressures put on the conspirators by Judge John Sirica, the grand jury, and Congressional committees that the cover-up was unraveled.”
Nicholas Lemann, a former dean of Columbia Journalism School, cited Dr. Epstein’s writings on Watergate as an example of his tendency to “pick apart prevailing liberal narratives about things and dig deep into the evidence and produce a counternarrative.”
Dr. Epstein investigated police killings of Black Panthers for The New Yorker. He wrote books about the war on drugs (“Agency of Fear: Opiates and Political Power in America,” 1977) and about the diamond trade (“The Rise and Fall of Diamonds: The Shattering of a Brilliant Illusion,” 1982).
He examined US intelligence in “Deception: The Invisible War Between the KGB and the CIA” (1989), and the inner-working of Hollywood in “The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood” (2005) and “The Hollywood Economist: The Hidden Financial Reality Behind the Movies” (2010).
In recent years, Mr. Epstein drew attention for his book “How America Lost Its Secrets: Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft” (2017). He argued that Snowden was not a righteous whistleblower but rather a possible spy for Russia, where Snowden eventually was granted shelter and citizenship, and where Mr. Epstein traveled in the course of his work.
Barton Gellman, a former Post journalist who was one of several reporters to whom Snowden leaked his data, and who helped reveal the surveillance program in reportage that received the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, dismissed Dr. Epstein’s claims.
Reviewing Dr. Epstein’s book in the Times, Lemann described it as “an impressively fluffy and golden-brown wobbly soufflé of speculation, full of anonymous sourcing and suppositional language.”
Dr. Epstein was once asked about the future of investigative reporting.
“If investigative reporting is indeed on the wane, the fault lies not in a lack of diligence, enterprise, or intelligence by younger journalists but in the changing world,” he said, according to his memoir. “Today access to sensitive information is so tightly protected by communications officers, litigious lawyers, nondisclosure agreements, and PR teams that investigative journalists face a truly daunting barrier.”
Material from The New York Times was used in this obituary.