The Housewives Underground: A Guest Post by Kaitlyn Tiffany

Hidden history comes to light in this engrossing story of the women who fought for the truth in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Kaitlyn Tiffany on writing The Housewives Underground. 

By the time I was sneaking away from my family on a beach vacation to call Ruth Paine—one of the Warren Commission’s most important witnesses, at that time 89 years old—I knew I was headed happily down the rabbit hole.

The Kennedy assassination was at first a pandemic-era fascination. I bought a copy of the Commission’s Report as a joke and read it while in quarantine. Then I read a couple of books analyzing the Report. Then I came across a stray mention of a group of women who had dedicated their lives to studying it, one of whom was a New Yorker like me and who had donated thousands of pages of correspondence to a small archive in Maryland. Those letters could be had, I learned with an inquiring email, if only I’d send a flash drive and self-addressed envelope.

After that, I was spending every evening in a reading chair with my laptop open, following along with the incredible drama between these women, who lived nowhere close to each other—one in California, one in Oklahoma, one in the West Village—yet were in touch nearly every single day about points of evidence. They were also in touch to gossip about their fellow “critics” of the Warren Report, often men who relied on their research work and then hogged the glory of presenting it in public. They wrote to each other to philosophize, strategize, fight, laugh, and eventually to fracture.

The more I read, the more I was surprised by how much effort they were putting into their research and into the maintenance of these long-distance friendships. They wrote eight, nine, ten-page letters on their lunch breaks or after putting their children to bed, and they perused multiple newspapers each morning to keep up with the case. They would spot each other money to make photocopies at the National Archives, and any time one of them made it down to Dallas to pry an interview out of another Dealey Plaza witness, they would make pain-staking, hand-typed duplicates of the transcription.

As I came to know these women through their letters to each other, I came to feel as though their contributions had been overlooked. These women had stirred much of the initial criticism of the Warren Report and one of them, Sylvia Meagher, had eventually become the undisputed expert on the Commission’s evidence—she almost certainly knew it better than the Commission members knew it themselves. The women, including Oklahoman Shirley Martin and Beverly Hills’ Maggie Field, had been stalked by the FBI and mocked by journalists as pathetic busybodies. But they’d changed the course of American history.

Their work arguably gave birth to modern conspiracy culture. Their effort was a stunning example of dedication and citizenship, as well a classic tale of opening Pandora’s Box. The story of the group that the press maligned as a “housewives’ underground” was a fun, funny, at times absurd story, as well as a tragic one. It still hasn’t let me go.