The Housewives Underground

The Housewives Underground, by Kaitlyn Tiffany, is the story of three women central to the first generation of Warren Commission critics: Sylvia Meagher, Maggie Field, and Shirley Martin. The book is new from Crown Press, and is a worthy addition to JFK literature.

Sylvia Meagher once turned down an offer to review Léo Sauvage’s The Oswald Affair because of a potential conflict of interest. Sauvage had written some kind (and deserved) things about her in the Afterword to his book’s American edition, and she thought this might compromise her objectivity.

Because I lent Kaitlyn Tiffany the tiniest bit of help during her own research phase, she wrote some kind things about me in her book’s back matter. Since this could easily lead to clouded judgment, what I’m writing here is not a review, in the usual sense.

That said, Kaitlyn Tiffany, a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author or co-author of several other books, has done a magnificent job illuminating the lives and work of her subjects. Meagher and Field, in particular, developed encyclopedic knowledge of the Warren Commission’s voluminous published material. Shirley Martin traveled to Dallas within a year of the assassination and, among other things, interviewed witnesses ignored by authorized investigators, witnesses whose observations seriously conflicted with official accounts.

The Housewives Underground is rich in the kind of background data I’m addicted to. The search for such data has led me to private archives, rare book rooms, and dank library basements with high-density mobile shelving. Now this book brings it to me. There is much I didn’t know; more than once I asked myself, “Why didn’t I find that out?”

I didn’t, but Kaitlyn Tiffany did, and her work leaves readers with a clearer understanding of three women whose contributions to our knowledge of the crime of the twentieth century are immeasurable.

(The book’s title, incidentally, comes from a chapter in a dubious 1967 tome called The Scavengers and Critics of the Warren Report – a hatchet job, if there ever was one, on the earliest assassination critics. Its two authors used the phrase scornfully, attempting to belittle three early critics, all women, with terminology demeaning even by the standards of the day.)

This may not be a review, but I highly recommend The Housewives Underground.