Great post Steve!
Here are a couple of exerpts from the obituary that I found to be of particular interest:
His work for the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, which the F.B.I. considered subversive, later led to efforts to remove him from the Warren Commission; Chief Justice Earl Warren, the chairman, refused.
Edward Redlich said his father’s self-effacing style was often tinged with a sense of humor. People would sometimes tell him how brave he was to defend people’s civil liberties in the 1950s, during the time of the blacklist, when a mere hint of Communist sympathy could cost people their jobs.
“Brave?” he would reply. “I was working in the family business.”
Redlich is seldom mentioned by the conspiracy believers - those who think the WC was a coverup - because it makes no sense that someone with his strong civil libertarian/liberal beliefs would coverup for essentially a rightwing coup of the country. For crissakes, the man took on Joe McCarthy. He's not going to go along with something like a military overthrow of the government.
Hoover wanted him off the Warren Commission because he, Redlich, has worked with leftwing groups in the 1950s and 60s, particularly (as you cited from the obituary) the "National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee. In fact, the FBI had a thick file on Redlich that accused him of being associated with "subversives." The FBI viewed the committee as a "communist-front" organization.
Gerald Ford was informed of Redlich's ties to these leftists groups and raised the question of whether it was appropriate to have him on the Commission. Warren defended Redlich and the commission agreed to let him continue his role.
Redlich was in charge of a sort of "clearinghouse" for all of the information that the WC received. It all went through him; he read it all, kept up on it all. He was working 18+ hours a day, even on weekends, and was probably THE most important member of the staff. As I said above, he wrote the first six chapters of the Report, the one detailing the actual assassination.
So again: if someone believes the Warren Commission Report was a lie, a fraud, a coverup of the assassination then it's impossible to believe that Redlich wasn't the key person in pulling off this act. He was in the very center of the investigation. All of it ran through him.