Housewives Underground: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the JFK Assassination Our Most Enduring MysteryBy Kaitlyn Tiffany
In the epilogue of Caitlyn Tiffany’s “The Housewives Underground,” a journey through the world of early John F. Kennedy assassination suspects, the author makes a pilgrimage to a former boardinghouse in Dallas that has been preserved as a sticky shrine.
This carefully prepared dump was the temporary home of Lee Harvey Oswald, President Kennedy’s only ever-controversial assassin. Tiffany writes, “Honestly, it’s a haunted house.” “‘As the World Turns’ plays every day on the ancient TV in the living room. There’s a huge crack in the ceiling, and frayed wires hanging from the walls.”
“As the World Turns” is the scariest description. During the broadcast of this afternoon soap opera on November 22, 1963, millions of Americans received news that would tear the fabric of American life in two. That ancient TV serves as a time portal to a haunted past that is brought to rich, immersive 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 a community of women whose lives revolve around the boy band One Direction. In “The Housewives Underground,” which focuses on equal parts loose and spirited agony, she has written a social history of novelist propulsion with fanatical documentation and a sympathetic understanding of the driven drive. Her book highlights the lives of three very different, but equally spirited women as they grow up to be members of an unofficial detective agency dedicated to investigating JFK’s assassination.
The trio includes Beverly Hills socialite Maggie Fields; Hominy, Okla., homemaker Shirley Martin; and Sylvia Meagher, an avid Mets fan and researcher for the World Health Organization, who transformed her small apartment in Greenwich Village into an archive center, where she took on the monumental task of indexing the entire 26 volumes of the Warren Commission report. It needs to be done and if she won’t do it then who will?
Meagher’s enthusiasm was rooted in his experiences at WHO during the height of McCarthyism in the 1950s. When the Senate Subcommittee on Homeland Security subpoenaed his associates for alleged un-American activity, Meagher refused. Several of his co-workers filed a fifth petition and believed he was fired without cause. Senator Joe McCarthy’s crusade eventually ended and Meagher kept his job, but, Tiffany writes, “For the rest of his life, he would be suspected of talking about patriotism and loyalty.”
That suspicion led him to doubt the official story of the Kennedy assassination, which suggested that Oswald was motivated by far-left radicalism. Although reclusive by nature, in October 1965 Meagher hosted the first gathering of people known as Warrenologists, or in more simple terms “critics”. The meeting turned awkward, with signs of discord to come, but a network was formed. Soon, venereologists were broadcasting their findings on late night talk radio.
Although Meagher was sought out by CBS, Esquire and The Times of London as an expert source, the other women of the Housewives underground were often dismissed as shut-ins and members of a lonely-hearted club for losers. They became soft targets for the condescension of the press and the scorn of executives, derided as a bunch of eccentrics, kooks, rank-and-file wannabes and pathetic attention-seeking busybodies reminiscent of Mrs. Kravitz, the nosy neighbor in “Bewitched.”
There was great turmoil in his personal life. Tiffany explains that at the Field House in Beverly Hills, guests “came anxiously for conversation with Maggie, dreading the inevitable moment when she would get the chance to talk about the murder.”
What was more pervasive, annoying and divisive than the public was willing to move forward, was the extreme octopus intrusion of male ego. People in the immediate community of critics were supportive up to a point, but after that point they would often hijack conversations and angles for shocking headlines and wow effect.
The most damaging male bloviator was New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, a big hulk (6 feet 6 inches) who was nicknamed the “Jolly Green Giant” and who was later glorified beyond all recognition in Oliver Stone’s 1991 political thriller “JFK.” Unlike the meticulous Meagher, the garrison was undisciplined and irregular. In 1967, he sent an investigator down a sewer hole to see if it might be an escape route for Kennedy’s assassin. He also gave 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 JFK assassination suspects had been torn in half. Field was on the pro-Garrison wing, Meagher was firmly in the opposition. A heated telephone conversation between the two over Garrison ended their friendship.
Their fall may seem like a small thing in the larger scheme of things, but the larger scheme of things is made up of people playing their part in the further upheavals of history without any foresight of benefit or assurance of outcome. Tiffany doesn’t try to overstate the Underground’s accomplishments – they made mistakes, sometimes got misguided, feuded with each other – but she ultimately salutes the democratic energy that sustained them over the years. She writes, “They still believe in some possible future in which the country they live in might be exactly what they were promised.” “Somehow he never questioned his responsibility to participate in its creation.”
housewives underground: : The untold story of the women who made the JFK assassination our most enduring mystery | By Caitlin Tiffany | Crown | 497 pp. | $35
