THE HOUSEWIVES UNDERGROUND: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the JFK Assassination Our Most Enduring Mystery, by Kaitlyn Tiffany
In the epilogue to Kaitlyn Tiffany’s “The Housewives Underground,” a journey through the world of early John F. Kennedy assassination skeptics, the author makes a pilgrimage to a former boardinghouse in Dallas that has been preserved as a tacky shrine.
This carefully curated dump was the temporary lodging of Lee Harvey Oswald, the forever disputed lone assassin of President Kennedy. “Frankly, it’s a haunted house,” Tiffany writes. “The ancient TV in the living room plays ‘As the World Turns’ every day. A huge crack runs across the ceiling, and frayed wires hang from the walls.”
“As the World Turns” is the spookiest detail. It was during the broadcast of this afternoon soap opera on Nov. 22, 1963, that millions of Americans received the news that would tear the fabric of American life in two. That ancient TV functions as a time portal to a ghostly past brought brimmingly, engrossingly to life in these pages.
Tiffany is a journalist for The Atlantic, and her previous work includes “Everything I Need I Get From You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It,” a pop sociology dive into the community of women whose lives revolved around the boy band One Direction. In “The Housewives Underground,” which focuses on an equally loose and enthusiastic sorority, she has written a social history of novelistic propulsion with fanatical documentation and a sympathetic understanding of what drives the driven. Her book tracks the lives of three very different, but equally zealous women as they evolved into members of an informal detective agency dedicated to investigating the murder of J.F.K.
The trio comprises the Beverly Hills socialite Maggie Field; the Hominy, Okla., housewife Shirley Martin; and Sylvia Meagher, an ardent Mets fan and researcher for the World Health Organization who converted her small apartment in Greenwich Village into an archive center where she took upon herself the monumental task of indexing the entire 26 volumes of the Warren Commission report. It needed to be done and if she didn’t do it, who would?
Meagher’s fervor was rooted in her experiences at the W.H.O. during the height of McCarthyism in the 1950s. When the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security subpoenaed her colleagues for alleged un-American activity, Meagher refused to fink. Many of her co-workers pleaded the Fifth and, she believed, were fired without justification. Senator Joe McCarthy’s crusade eventually lost steam and Meagher kept her job, but, Tiffany writes, “for the rest of her life, she would be suspicious of talk about patriotism and loyalty.”
That suspicion led her to doubt the official narrative of the Kennedy assassination, which suggested that Oswald had been motivated by far-left radicalism. Though reclusive by nature, in October 1965 Meagher hosted the first gathering of what came to be known as the Warrenologists, or more simply the “critics.” The meeting turned ornery, a sign of discord to come, but a network took shape. Soon, Warrenologists were airing out their findings on late-night talk radio.
Though Meagher was sought after as an expert source by CBS, Esquire and The Times of London, the other women of the housewives underground were often dismissed as members of a lonely-hearts club for shut-ins and losers. They became soft targets for the condescension of the press and the scorn of the authorities, derided as a coven of cranks, kooks, rank amateurs and pathetic attention-seeker busybodies reminiscent of the nosy neighbor Mrs. Kravitz on “Bewitched.”
Their personal lives took heavy dents. At the Field household in Beverly Hills, Tiffany recounts, guests “approached conversation with Maggie gingerly, dreading the inevitable moment when she would find an opening to talk about the assassination.”
What was more pervasive, vexing and divisive than a public that was ready to move on was the overweening octopus intrusion of the male ego. The men in the critics’ immediate community were allies, up to a point, but past that point they would often hijack the conversation and angle for shock headlines and wow effect.
The most damaging male bloviator was the New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, a big galoot (6 feet 6 inches) who was nicknamed the “Jolly Green Giant” and who was later valorized beyond all recognition in Oliver Stone’s 1991 political thriller “JFK.” In contrast to the meticulous Meagher, Garrison was undisciplined and erratic. In 1967, he sent an investigator down a sewer hole to see if this might have been Kennedy’s assassin’s escape route. He also delivered a speech titled “The Rise of the Fourth Reich or How to Conceal the Truth About an Assassination Without Really Trying.”
By then, Tiffany writes, the national community of J.F.K. assassination skeptics had broken in half. Field was in the pro-Garrison wing, Meagher firmly in the opposition. An acrid telephone exchange between the two over Garrison put an end to their friendship.
Their falling-out may seem like a trifling matter in the larger scheme of things but the larger scheme of things is made up of people playing their part in the onward commotion of history without the benefit of hindsight or assurance of outcome. Tiffany doesn’t try to oversell the underground’s achievement — they made mistakes, sometimes were led astray, squabbled with one another — but she ultimately salutes the democratic energy that sustained them through the years. “They still believed in some possible future in which the country they lived in could be more like the one they’d been promised,” she writes. “Somehow they never questioned their obligation to participate in its creation.”
THE HOUSEWIVES UNDERGROUND: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the JFK Assassination Our Most Enduring Mystery | By Kaitlyn Tiffany | Crown | 497 pp. | $35
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