From my book review in Taki’s Magazine:
Epstein’s Epic
Steve SailerApril 26, 2023
Ever since his 1966 book Inquest documented that the Warren Commission’s own staffers believed that their enquiry into who shot JFK had been too rushed to be reliable, Edward Jay Epstein has been that highly useful rarity: a center-right heavyweight investigative journalist.
Epstein’s new memoir, Assume Nothing: Encounters With Assassins, Spies, Presidents, and Would-Be Masters of the Universe, recounts his Zelig-like career as a confidant of the rich and powerful around the world (even while often going on to reveal their embarrassing secrets).
Epstein, now in his mid-80s, was a star during the legendary Tom Wolfe Era of magazine journalism when nonfiction writers could become moderately wealthy writing for the big New York magazines. In that long-gone era, reporters were expected to subvert power, not be the ill-paid but loyal servants of the system as they are today.
And yet, Epstein’s career flourished because the mighty tended to see him as a potential sympathizer and thus often provided him with abundant human interest material about themselves before he stuck the shiv in.
For example, after Epstein had heard a former chief financial officer of Occidental Petroleum describe his ex-boss Armand Hammer as “the Nijinsky of bribery,” he got himself commissioned by The New York Times Magazine to write a profile on the celebrated oil tycoon. Back then, Hammer was a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize due to that communist capitalist’s friendships with both Kremlin premiers and Republican presidents.
Read the whole thing there.
