The Assassination Chronicles: Inquest, Counterplot and Legend [Paperback]

The Assassination Chronicles consists of three short books - Inquest, Counterplot, and Legend - written over a period of about a dozen years and combined into one volume.

Inquest established Epstein's bona fides on the Kennedy assassination and is the most readable volume. It is essentially an effort to concede criticisms of early and penetrating critics such as Joachim Joesten while preserving the Warren Commission's central findings intact. It contains pretty much nothing that others had not already said by the time of its publication.

Other writing of Epstein's suggests intelligence connections, and his handling of the issues around the assassination tend very much to serve official interests.

If you are informed on the hard facts of the assassination, Counterplot and Legend are almost unreadable. There is a palpable sense of reading a case against an accused without a word from the defense. These are not investigations in any meaningful sense of the word. Epstein assumes the role of Judge Warren without the judicial robes, dressed instead in the deceivingly casual dress of a supposedly authentic critic.

There is no explanation to this day for the secrecy that still surrounds important parts of the Kennedy assassination, and it is this secrecy that blurs and distorts so much of the key evidence. Were this not so, books like Epstein's would not be published. Except for the concessions made in his first volume, Inquest, Epstein simply does not deal with the case's central issues of missing evidence, weak evidence, and implausible evidence. He stands ready to accuse and judge a man who had no motive, almost no means, and against whom what genuine facts we have would never convince a conscientious jury.

Something terribly significant has been kept from the world for more than forty years since the assassination, and books like The Assassination Chronicles, or Gerald Posner's update, aka Case Closed, are significant efforts along the way to keeping it that way.

One can only speculate on the reasons for all the secrecy, including the possibility that the CIA and FBI never understood who was responsible. Now, there was a state secret worth keeping in a time of Cold War paranoia. And the secrecy concerns are still valid. After all, the CIA and the FBI blew it on the imminent fall of the Soviet Union and on the activities of the 9/11 gang who entered the U.S. with legally-issued visas to take flying lessons.

No one should read this book without also reading Anthony Summers' monumental work of genuine investigation, Conspiracy.

Having just skimmed this book, I still offer three stars, with confidence.

Positive: If one has little knowledge of the "early" Lee and marina..this is the place to go. Very readable, very well written and flowing. Oswald in the Marines and Minsk plays like some Gore Vidal serio-comic exposition. I have to admit that I did not originally accept that Oswald could (very possibly) be a true, *lifelong* Marxist.

Negative: So what? The writer at the same time never once (correct me if I'm wrong) concedes that a Marxist can still work (decidedly, indirectly) for the FBI and the CIA, involved in things like assassination teams.

What gets me a tad conflicted is how the writer beautifully lays how the Warren Commission ignored/dismissed many, many very compelling witnesses and theories yet, it the end, concludes Warren still has the "best evidence". and.....?

[Look for a true "Twilight Zone"esque black and white, unretouched, still of John Wayne and Oswald in the Mess halll in Corregidor].

Edward Jay Epstein (born 1935) is an American investigative journalist; this 1992 book is actually a republication of three of his earlier books (Inquest: The Warren Commission and the establishment of Truth, Counterplot: Garrison vs. Oswald, Ferrie, Shaw, Warren Commission, FBI CIA, the Media, the Establishment, and LEGEND: THE SECRET WORLD OF LEE HARVEY OSWALD), along with new material.

He asserts that the Warren Commission investigation was under "time pressure" to complete its report before the 1964 election, and that "instead of conducting the exhaustive, no-stone-left-unturned investigations that had been represented to the public, had presided over a hasty, limited investigation that had not always been able to insulate itself from political and national security considerations. The result was that it had failed to answer the primary questions of whether Oswald had acted alone or in concert with others." (Pg. 13-14)

While he generally praises the "laudable work" of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, he criticizes their conclusion that JFK was "probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy," because he claims the conclusion was "based on a single piece of new evidence"---an audio tape made AFTER the assassination, so that "The committee's experts... had simply analyzed the wrong tape, and the committee's revised 'conspiracy' conclusion, incredibly enough, proceeded from this error." (Pg. 22-24)

He later notes evidence that Oswald was "a poor shot" (Pg. 152); he is strongly critical of DA Jim Garrison's (author of On the Trail of the Assassins) suggestion that that autopsy material was classified by the CIA, or the Johnson administration: "the material was 'classified' ... by the Kennedy family." (Pg. 254)

This is a useful (and economical!) collection of writings, that will be of interest to those studying the JFK assassination.