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Before the two assassination attempts on Donald Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. conducted his presidential campaign without Secret Service protection, which for candidates only began after Sirhan Sirhan assassinated his father Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. RFK Jr. also claimed to have evidence of CIA involvement in the assassination of his uncle, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, in 1963. That took place more than 60 years ago, and for generations since born, the default work is Oliver Stone’s JFK, made in willful ignorance of the best books on the subject.

Edward Jay Epstein was a student at Cornell when his government professor, Andrew Hacker, commissioned him to write a thesis on how the Warren Commission was handling the Kennedy assassination. This project became Epstein’s first book, Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth. As the author learned, the commissioners were basically figureheads who left the investigative work to government lawyers. The intrepid Epstein tracked them down, but none would tell him if Robert F. Kennedy had been briefed on the investigation or had any input on the forthcoming report, which the Commission rushed to complete before the 1964 election.

The Commission’s investigation, Epstein learned, had not begun in earnest until nearly four months after the assassination. Epstein asked Air Force historian Alfred P. Goldberg, one of the report’s principle authors, if the Commission began writing the report before the investigation was complete. No clear answer emerged. Goldberg mentioned the “national security dimension” and Epstein asked if that entailed removing material that conflicted with it.

Here Epstein was “treading on very sensitive ground,” Goldberg warned, and nothing about this could appear in his thesis.  Epstein also wondered if the FBI had been briefed on the issues and was told “not all of them,” after which Goldberg fell silent. The Commission’s report concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone. Like many others, Epstein had to wonder, and his inquiries became Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald. The U.S. Marine, an ardent Communist, defected to the Soviet Union in 1959.

Oswald had served at an air base in Japan handling the secret U-2 spy plane, then the primary means of monitoring the Soviet military. This inside knowledge qualified Oswald as a military defector, but the official line was that the Soviets would have nothing to do with him during his more than two years in the USSR. This was maintained by Soviet defector Yuri Nosenkoand accepted by J. Edgar Hoover, whose FBI had failed to track Oswald after his return to the United States.

Nosenko’s story ran contrary to everything the CIA knew about Soviet and American operations. CIA counterintelligence specialist James Angleton suspected that Nosenko was a fake defector sent to plant disinformation. The FBI and State Department resisted this interpretation and Oswald acting alone became the official government line. In 1967 that drew a challenge from New Orleans prosecutor Jim Garrison, whocharged businessman Clay Shaw with “participating in a conspiracy to murder president Kennedy.” Epstein was tasked to write about it.

Garrison got a tip that a former airline pilot named Dave Ferrie had trained Oswald in marksmanship, which turned out to be untrue. Garrison also found a five-digit number in Shaw’s address book that partly matched a number in Oswald’s address book. Shaw’s book contained the same five digits attached to the name Lee Odom followed by PO box 19106 Dallas, Texas. For Garrison, this was a secret code which he solved by transposing the third, fourth and last digit and subtracting the difference.

As it turned out, PO 19106 not only existed but had been assigned to Lee Odom, the exact name in Shaw’s address book. The number in Oswald’s address book could not possibly have referred to the same thing because the number did not exist before it was assigned to Odom in 1965. According to Garrison staffer Tom Bethell, the prosecutor ordered staff not to discuss this embarrassing mistake.

Garrison also charged that “Clay Bertrand” was another alias used by Shaw. According to Garrison’s witness Dean Andrews, who had worked with the Warren Commission, Clay Shaw was “just an unfortunate guy who was grabbed out of the sky by the jolly green giant [the 6’ 6” Garrison] and his wizards and practitioners of voodoo labeled him Clay Bertrand, and bang, he’s been tagged ‘it’ ever since.”

In a year of studying Garrison’s investigation, with full access to his office, Epstein found that the only evidence connecting Shaw to the assassination had been “fraudulent,” some of it devised by Garrison and others “cynically culled from criminals or the emotionally unstable.” This fraud was the basis for Oliver Stone’s movie, which should have been called JCG for James Caruthers Garrison. Stone’s 1991 JFK revived the debates raging since 1963. In 1992, Victor Navasky of The Nation arranged a debate between Epstein and Stone, who believed his movie was entirely factual.

Epstein pointed out Garrison’s flagrant abuse of prosecutorial power, and that Shaw had been acquitted and exonerated. Garrison had arrested more than a dozen people, charged them with crimes, then failed to prosecute. He issued arrest warrants for three members of the press, including David Chandler of Lifemagazine, on charges of libel for claiming that Garrison fabricated evidence. Members of Garrison’s staff claimed he asked them to perjure themselves or plant evidence in return for favors or cash.

Stone’s JFK, Epstein concluded, “diverged so far from the facts that it was nothing short of a total misrepresentation of reality.”  Stone failed to answer Epstein’s arguments and contended that his movie represented “the common man, Jim Garrison, risking a comfortable life to do battle with the forces of overwhelming evil. He can’t triumph because this would mean a successful political revolution against this invisible government. He must fail and become a martyr in his quest for truth.” And it was Stone, not Epstein, who got the standing ovation.

Epstein recounts the debate, and his investigation of Garrison, in Assume Nothing: Encounters with Assassins, Spies, Presidents, and Would-be Masters of the Universe,” released in 2023.Edward Jay Epstein passed away last January but in light of recent events his works remain more relevant than ever. Deception: The Invisible War Between the CIA and KGB, largely ignored in 1989 after fall of the Berlin Wall, might be the most important.

Imagine a feature film on the JFK assassination jostling with defectors, spymasters, and gutless government officials, and starring a literary investigator on track for the truth. For those now seeking to capture the culture, the lesson should be clear. Truth is stranger than fiction and also more dramatically compelling.