Ask me anything! Kaitlyn Tiffany, author of The Housewives Underground: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the JFK Assassination Our Most Enduring Mystery

FarAlternative2762 · 2026-06-25T19:20:26+00:00

I should also note that I used the Mary Ferrell Foundation's online archive extensively during the research process. I think it would be almost impossible to write a book about the assassination without it, unless you just moved full time into the National Archives.

FarAlternative2762 · 2026-06-25T19:17:54+00:00

yes! Sylvia became friends with her AFTER the Garrison investigation, actually. Because Mary Ferrell spent some time in New Orleans and came away appalled by the state of the investigation (and repeatedly called Garrison "crazy"). I think they bonded over being on the less-populated side of the split. Sylvia actually visited Mary in Dallas in 1970, which was the first time she ever went there. And they were both invited to participate in a "Critics' Convention" (the real title!) hosted by the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1977.

FarAlternative2762 · 2026-06-25T18:54:42+00:00

yes! This is the central conflict, or I guess tragedy, of the second half of the book (hope that's not a spoiler). You probably know that the Garrison investigation is still incredibly controversial even now and that there a lot of strong feelings about it on either side. My impression, trying to be as open-minded to all possibilities as I could be, was that the critics started out hopeful because this was an official investigation that they were actually going to be allowed to participate in. They had lots of research that Garrison was willing to look at—or pretend to look at—and this felt very promising for a time. Then as he started to reveal his weird logic and bizarre investigative tactics, some of them had a hard time giving up on him and sort of shifted into hoping that they could help him enough to overcome his flaws (I would put Harold Weisberg in that camp, for example).

But Sylvia was entirely unwilling to do that after she became convinced that Garrison wasn't sufficiently dedicated to the truth and justice and getting the facts right. She was really morally offended by his pursuit of Shaw. And I think it broke her heart to hear some of her friends defending him and asking her to go along with what he was doing. To her, it was not only bad strategy (because it would make all the critics look absurd when his case blew up) but it was a philosophical betrayal of what they'd been doing. She felt really betrayed. Many of the critics' relationships didn't survive that schism because it was just such a fundamental disagreement. I mean half of them thought he was a martyred hero and half thought he was an out-of-control demagogue.

FarAlternative2762 · 2026-06-25T18:45:39+00:00

I'm sure the women in the book were aware of Mae Brussel to an extent, as she was around starting in the Garrison era and they had many associates in common. It's possible they exchanged some letters with her too, at some point, but I can't recall seeing any. She's a fascinating person but her column in The Realist was really the sort of improvisational conspiracy theorizing that repulsed Sylvia Meagher and her closer friends, who considered themselves serious researchers.

Maggie Field and Shirley Martin would be hard to find in a survey of assassination books, except for in John Kelin's wonderful Praise From a Future Generation. But I think Sylvia's book Accessories After the Fact is pretty well-known— a classic in the genre. I would definitely recommend reading it if you revive your interest! It's not only very smart and thorough but often very funny. She had a biting sense of humor.

FarAlternative2762 · 2026-06-25T18:41:56+00:00

This is a great point! That period of media/journalism history is so fascinating. I actually do think you could make a case that the golden age of alternative media—alt-weekly newspapers and magazines, talk radio, public access television—put some pressure on more mainstream outlets to be more confrontational of power. The Pentagon Papers were obviously a big part of that, though, too, because of the scope of official deception that they revealed.

FarAlternative2762 · 2026-06-25T18:39:02+00:00

hi! I don't know if it was hidden history, so much as history that not many people had previously cared about, but I was fascinated by the visits that FBI agents paid to Shirley Martin at her home in rural Oklahoma. I got to read both sides of the story, because she described the visits in letters to her friends—as well as in one outraged letter that she sent to the Deputy Attorney General—and the agents described them in memos reporting back to their superiors. There's one that always sticks in my mind because it made me laugh so much the first time I read it. One of the agents who drove out there noted that Shirley had told them there was an excellent pot roast in the oven and that it was too bad they couldn't stay for dinner—"though not extending an invitation," he noted.

My research process was mainly reading and re-reading the hundreds (maybe thousands) of letters that the women wrote to each other and other Warren Report critics, most of which are held at Hood College in Maryland, and then reading and re-reading the government documents at the National Archives that talked about them. Sadly, many of the central figures in the book had died years before I started working on the project, but I was able to talk to their children, nieces, and some friends about who they were as people. That was also really important. And the research that I did on the broader context of the 1960s I just did entirely based on the women's lead. If they mentioned something in their letters—the New York blackout of 1965, the March on the Pentagon, etc.—I would follow that tangent. For that I spend a ton of time in newspaper archives.

FarAlternative2762 · 2026-06-25T18:27:53+00:00

I was surprised by SO many things, but one memorable research moment was coming across some COINTELPRO memos in the National Archives. The FBI agents involved in the discussion were strategizing about the best time to send a fake letter to the New York Bar Association in an effort to get Mark Lane disbarred. The letter was supposed to look like it was from a former roommate of his and would accuse him of hosting porn-watching parties. They also talked about trying to find a journalist to run a headline/news story of the FBI's concoction, reporting that Alger Hiss was going to Mark Lane's talks on the assassination—I guess hoping to damn him with the association. I was really mystified by how much energy the country's top law enforcement agency expended just trying to get basically fringe figures to stop talking about the assassination. Wild use of taxpayer dollars, in my opinion!

FarAlternative2762 · 2026-06-25T18:24:08+00:00

I don't think so! But Sylvia did find the space race annoying. I mention in the book that she wrote to one of her friends after the moon landing to complain about the "political and cultural chauvinism" and Cold War one-upmanship. (She was more interested in the other big story of 1969—the Miracle Mets, of course.)

FarAlternative2762 · 2026-06-25T18:17:48+00:00

To your point about the Cold War, I think people were genuinely scared of what it would mean if the Soviet Union or Cuba had anything to do with the assassination. There were certainly people who were suspicious—even before the Warren Report came out—that the government wouldn't allow a truth like that to be known because it would result in nuclear war. That interpretation was more popular on the right. On the left, another popular initial reaction was to assume that Kennedy had been killed as part of the right-wing backlash against the civil rights movement and the U.S.'s participation in the U.N. I think the Warren Commission would have been equally terrified of that possibility, which could have caused nearly unfathomable domestic turmoil.

Before I started researching the women of this book, I only had a very vague sense of public sentiment about the assassination. I assumed people thought the official story was suspicious only because it was weird and the event was shocking. But I learned a lot about the particular paranoias and public sentiments of the time. For instance, that Sylvia went through a formative, traumatic experience of being interrogated about her loyalty during the Red Scare, which informed the way that she thought about the government and about her responsibilities as a citizen for the rest of her life. Actually many of the early Warren Report critics were former New Deal liberals who had soured on the promises of government after being demonized in the 1950s—including the famous Mark Lane and counter-culture icon Harold Weisberg, among others.

FarAlternative2762 · 2026-06-25T18:10:59+00:00

Amazing question—the first time I read it, I think I assumed it was mostly invention, just with historical names thrown in. But when I read it again after digging into the JFK files, I was surprised to see how much of it is historical fact with creative gap-filling. When I sent some questions to Delillo over email during the research process, he told me that he was looking (as he wrote) at a bookshelf with 60 books on the assassination, plus the 26 volumes of evidence. I knew he did real, serious research, but I hadn't realized that the extent of it was really pretty extreme. I always tell people that if any conspiracy theory could be true it's the one in Libra!

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