Death of Richard Popkin

[John Simkin]

Richard Popkin died from emphysema last week. He was one of the first people to criticize the Warren Report. As he was one of the world's leading philosophers, this was an important factor in people having doubts about Warren's conclusions. In 1966 he wrote an important article in the New York Review of Books about the assassination. This was followed by the book The Second Oswald. Few of the obituaries this week have mentioned this work.

This is what the New York Times had to say:

Forswearing philosophy for a spell in the 1960's, Dr. Popkin joined the chorus of doubters who prominently disputed the Warren Commission Report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In an article in The New York Review of Books and in a paperback he argued that the commission's single-assassin solution was not just implausible, but also impossible in terms of the commission's evidence.

The book, "The Second Oswald" (Avon, 1966), promptly came under attack. Eliot Fremont-Smith, in a review in The New York Times, called it "a very hasty book, but fascinating reading."

You can find a brief biography on my website (ranked number one at Google).

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKpopkin.htm

You can find the original article in the New York Review of Books here:

http://karws.gso.uri.edu/JFK/The_critics/P...ond_Oswald.html

[John Simkin]

Popkin was not the only philosopher to attack the idea of a lone gunman. This is what Bertrand Russell had to say about the case in 1964.

http://karws.gso.uri.edu/JFK/the_critics/r...ns_Russell.html