The Housewives Underground
- Fred Litwin
- 1 day ago
- 17 min read
I wrote Ms. Tiffany an email introducing myself and I provided a link to my blog post about the Schlesinger memo which had just been unredacted. She replied that she had come across my blog in her research and that she looked forward to read my post.
I then wrote Tiffany again in October 2025 when I first heard that she was writing her book. I wanted to make sure that she knew about my many articles on Sylvia Meagher. I thought I could provide some help before her book was publsihed. Once again, Tiffany replied saying that "I'm very familiar with your site and found it incredibly helpful when I was starting my research." We never did talk. I gave her my number, but she then had a sore throat and couldn't call, and she never rescheduled.
So, I am little disappointed that my books and blog posts are not mentioned at all in her new book, The Housewives Underground. Tiffany focuses on three female critics from the 1960s -- Shirley Martin, Maggie Field, and Sylvia Meagher -- although Meagher is clearly the star of the show. And, in fact, there was no need to include Martin and Field in this book -- what Sylvia got right, what she got wrong and her influence is an important enough story by itself.
John Kelin mined much the same material for his book, Praise from a Future Generation: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy and the First Generation Critics of the Warren Report. If inside baseball is your thing, then you will enjoy this book. There is one thing missing from Tiffany's book -- the truth about the JFK assassination (conspiracy or not) seems almost incidental to the book. Readers of her book who really know the JFK assassination will love her stories about the early researchers. But general readers will wonder just what story about the assassination is true and what is false. Too much is just left up in the air.
Let me give you some examples: (page 334 in the Kindle edition)
So Sylvia did not have much to say about the fact that her friend Cyril Wecht, visiting the National Archives in August, had become the first critic allowed to look at the X-rays and photos from JFK’s autopsy. Nor was she interested when he caused an uproar by telling the press that Kennedy’s brain was missing. (It had been given to the Kennedy family in 1965 and was apparently not among the autopsy materials that they’d turned over to the National Archives in 1966.)
Tiffany does not tell her readers that Wecht concluded that the shots that hit Kennedy came from behind. And, yes, that conclusion did interest Sylvia Meagher.
Meagher asks Wecht about his conclusion that the shots came from the rear.
Here is what Tiffany said about the Clinton witnesses that testified in the Clay Shaw trial: (pages 307 - 308 in the Kindle edition)
After Spiesel, Garrison’s team presented a series of far more convincing witnesses from Clinton, Louisiana, whose testimony placed Shaw, Ferrie, and Oswald there at the same time in late August or early September 1963. These included employees of a state hospital who remembered Oswald applying for a job there, as well as two people—including the town marshal—who claimed to have noticed Oswald at a voter-registration drive in Clinton. Like Bundy, they mentioned having seen Shaw in a limousine. Two of the witnesses also said they had seen Oswald and Ferrie in the limousine with Shaw. A Time reporter who wrote about this phase of the trial observed Clay Shaw “chain-smoking and taking notes” and listening “with the gaze of a man who has not yet figured out what has happened to him.”
The testimony of the Clinton, Louisiana, people, who appeared to be normal and to have no obvious reason to lie, represented the high point of the proceedings for the prosecution.
No analysis, no nothing. It is important to note that there was no discovery in Louisiana courts at the time of this trial. And so, Clay Shaw's attorneys never had a copy of Garrison's case files. The Clinton witness statements were full of inconsistencies and would have given Shaw's attorneys lots of material for cross-examination.
Part Ten: Corrie Collins continually changed his story about what happened in Clinton.
Part Twelve: Henry Earl Palmer told a ridiculous story about Oswald claiming he was living with a doctor in Jackson.
Part Fourteen: Henry Earl Palmer told Andrew Sciambra that Judge John Rarick was there when the black Cadillac visited Clinton. Author Don Carpenter mailed Rarick in 2007 to ask him. His answer is revealing.
Part Sixteen: Some witnesses saw other people in Clinton that day; Manchester's poor memory; and a look at whether the Cadillac's registration was checked in Baton Rouge.
And Tiffany doesn't mention the Klan background of some of these witnesses.
Tiffany does present some very good material from the second day of the Critics' Conference held with G. Robert Blakey. Meagher took exception to the testimony of the Clinton witnesses and Mark Lane jumped to their defense.
The next reference to the Clinton witnesses is related to the conclusions of the HSCA: (page 368 in the Kindle edition)
Other odds and ends included in the report created more questions than they answered. For instance, the committee located the four witnesses from the Clay Shaw trial that Mark Lane and Sylvia Meagher had argued about during the Critics’ Conference. It believed that these witnesses were “telling the truth as they knew it” and therefore was “inclined to believe that Oswald was in Clinton, Louisiana, in late August or early September 1963, and that he was in the company of David Ferrie, if not Clay Shaw.”
The HSCA investigation into Clinton was extremely poor. They didn't even figure out that Anne Dischler was the chief investigator on Clinton for Jim Garrison; she wasn't called as a witness; and they didn't obtain her notes. And Jonathan Blackmer, who conducted that part of the investigation, didn't subject these witnesses to any sort of cross-examination.
An overview of what the HSCA missed.
The HSCA did not ask Corrie Collins about any of his initial statements because they did not have them.
Tiffany brings up Shaw's denial that he had been to Clinton with David Ferrie and Lee Harvey Oswald: (pages 310 - 311 in the Kindle edition)
Shaw said he had never visited Clinton, Louisiana — where several witnesses had said they’d seen him—although he had a female cousin who lived there. The only time he’d left New Orleans in the summer of 1963, he said, was to visit his ailing father in Hammond, Louisiana. He also said that he’d never been employed by the Central Intelligence Agency (which was true, though not entirely honest—he’d been a paid informant from 1948 to 1956, which would come out later).
Shaw was not a paid informant, and it would have been helpful to readers if she had included a link to my blog post.
Shaw was only an unpaid domestic contact of the CIA.
Tiffany then mentions Guy Banister: (page 368 in the Kindle edition)
The committee also concluded that it was at least a possibility that Oswald had known Guy Banister, the New Orleans power broker who’d provided support to numerous far-right and anti-Castro groups (he’d died in 1964). Oswald and Banister apparently went to the same restaurant for breakfast regularly. But the committee could not tie these threads together.
She makes it sound like Banister and Oswald had breakfast together on a regular basis. Well, Mancuso's Restaurant was at the corner of Camp and Lafayette and Guy Banister certainly ate there. Oswald might have gone there at some time ... but there is no evidence they were there together.
Thus, the committee could find no documentary proof that Banister had a file on Lee Harvey Oswald nor could the committee find credible witnesses who ever saw Lee Harvey Oswald and Guy Banister together.
Julia Ann Mercer and her ridiculous story make the book: (page 278 in the Kindle edition)
By contrast, Sylvia argued, reports that did not involve Oswald were often dropped after only cursory exploration. Just minutes after the assassination, Dealey Plaza witness Julia Mercer told Secret Service agent Forrest Sorrels about a man she’d seen carrying a rifle case and walking up the grassy knoll (she said “hill”) that morning. Sorrels didn’t investigate. He later told a commission staff member that he’d let it go because he’d already received the update that a rifle had been found in the School Book Depository. “It would have been logical at this point to ask Sorrels how he could be sure, within an hour after the assassination and presumably before the arrest of the lone Oswald, that the discovery of the rifle in the Book Depository was sufficient to eliminate other assassins in other locations,” Sylvia wrote. “No such question was asked by counsel for the Commission.”
Josiah Thompson was the first person to debunk Mercer's allegations in his book, Six Seconds in Dallas. (see pages 218 - 219)
All of the material that Thompson cited was in CD 205, which was not included in the twenty-six volumes. But Meagher not only read Thompson's book, he had actually sent her the documents:
And then Tiffany brings up Garrison's mention of Mercer on the Tonight Show: (pages 286-287 in the Kindle edition)
During the interview, Garrison brought up Julia Ann Mercer, the Dealey Plaza witness who’d told the Dallas Police that she’d seen a man get out of an HVAC truck just before the assassination and carry a gun case up the grassy knoll. He claimed that she had told him that the signature on her affidavit was forged. She’d actually seen Jack Ruby carrying a gun case up the knoll.
No, she had not actually "seen Jack Ruby." He was at the offices of the Dallas Morning News at the time.
Tiffany makes a mistake when talking about Meagher and Garrison: (pages 382 - 383 in the Kindle edition)
Around this time [1988], Sylvia received her first and only phone call from the Jolly Green Giant.
But Garrison had first called Meagher in 1967 when he thought he had broken some sort of secret code:
I present all the documents regarding Garrison and his code-breaking ability.
Here is an excerpt from a letter Sylvia Meagher wrote to Raymond Marcus on May 17, 1967:
Tiffany says that Garrison was gracious in that phone call to Meagher in 1988: (page 383 in the Kindle edition)
Garrison called belatedly to thank Sylvia for her honest feedback on his manuscript, and she told her friends afterward that he had been gracious.
But, he was actually bitter about her critique. Here is an excerpt from a letter he sent to his agent in 1987:
I'll be posting the entire letter in a future post because there is a lot in it that deserves comment.
Tiffany took great exception to a CIA memo entitled "Countering Criticism of the Warren Report." ( page 361 in the Kindle edition)
The cable articulated the agency’s concern about the possible influence of a group of writers—it mentioned Mark Lane, Ed Epstein, and Penn Jones by name—who were questioning the Warren Report and included suggestions for combating the spread of these writers’ claims. Agents in the field should discuss the issue with “friendly elite contacts (especially politicians and editors)” and convince them “that the Warren Commission made as thorough an investigation as humanly possible” and “that the charges of the critics are without serious foundation.” It continued with a list of various talking points and arguments that would be useful to this end.
This memo was a splashy news story in 1977, but it would remain a subject of discussion for decades because of one sentence in particular: “The aim of this dispatch is to provide material for countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists, so as to inhibit the circulation of such claims in other countries.” People often point to this memo, erroneously, to prove that the CIA invented the term “conspiracy theorists” in 1967. It did not. (The term is significantly older.) But the word choices in Meyer’s memo were still notable.
Here was an agency of the U.S. government with no mandate to spread propaganda pertaining to domestic issues laying out its plans to do exactly that; it would do it by villainizing American citizens and stigmatizing the simple practices of reading the news and challenging a set of proposed facts with reasonable questions. Funnily, though, Meyer used the term conspiracy theorists only twice. He mostly referred to these unpleasant people, more simply, as critics.
But the CIA was being vilified unfairly around the world. And the memo did not want anybody in the CIA to "initiate" discussion on the JFK assassination:
I strongly urge people to read the memo for themselves. It is actually quite good -- and rather than spreading propaganda, it was actually trying to counter conspiracy nonsense which was quite corrosive.
The memo also said that "parts of the conspiracy talk appear to be deliberately generated by Communist propagandists." This was undoubtedly true, and it remains a topic for additional research.
An article I wrote for Quillette.com about some of the operations the Soviets ran to convince Americans the CIA was behind the assassination.
I should add that the articles included with the CIA memo were actually quite good.
Tiffany is wrong in saying that the HSCA "destroyed the credibility of the Warren Report." (pages 369 - 370 in the Kindle edition)
Though the House Select Committee’s report destroyed the credibility of the Warren Report, much as the critics had hoped it would, many of them couldn’t be happy with it because it also maintained so many of the Warren Commission’s key findings.
Tiffany also says this about the Warren Commission: (page 396 in the Kindle edition)
Today it’s a fact of the historical record that the Warren Commission was not a fully independent and exhaustive investigation of the crime of the century. President Johnson had believed that his task was not to find the absolute truth but to reassure the country and to prevent, in his mind, nuclear war, and he made this objective clear to the men he chose to lead the commission. J. Edgar Hoover had been primarily concerned with making certain that nobody asked why the nation’s largest law enforcement and investigative force had let Lee Harvey Oswald—a person who was known to the FBI—out of its sight. The CIA had been busy covering up its own covert assassination program and had no interest in disclosing much of anything. The national media had not been prepared to interrogate the Warren Report, and it didn’t do so for a long time. In these and other ways, the critics were right.
Yes, the CIA covered up its attempts to assassinate Castro, but so did Robert Kennedy.
Tiffany writes that the "national media had not been prepared to interrogate the Warren Report" but I don't think this is quite true.
The conspiracy books were all over the national media in the mid-1960s. The Washington Post and the New York Times reviewed all the conspiracy books. Norman Mailer loved Rush to Judgment, and he managed to place his review in the Washington Post, as did Edward Jay Epstein who reviewed Accessories After the Fact. You couldn't ask for a friendlier reviewer. Mark Lane was everywhere -- on radio, television, magazines, and newspapers. The publishing industry had a field day with books on the Warren Report. And the New York Times, Life Magazine, and the Saturday Evening Post all called for a new investigation in 1967.
Even Sylvia Meagher liked Calvin Trillin's article on "The Buffs" in the New Yorker.
Of course, the critics weren't happy that many outlets, like CBS News, could investigate the assassination and still find that the Warren Commission was right. Their four-part series in 1967 featured both Mark Lane and Jim Garrison. No one was ignoring the critics.
And Jim Garrison was the elephant in the room. His allegations were a recurring feature of all the major newspapers. Does Tiffany not think that he helped to move public opinion on the assassination and on the CIA? And ultimately he played a major role in turning the mainstream press away from the JFK assassination.
And Tiffany could have been clearer about the files of the HSCA: (page 373 in the Kindle edition)
But as rich as the published texts of the committee were, and as fascinating as they may have been to other people, they were not what the first Warren Report critics had been promised. When they’d gone to Washington in September 1977, G. Robert Blakey told them that all the committee’s files would be made public, with only a few exceptions for things like personnel records. It was not Blakey’s decision, though, and this did not end up being the case. The vast majority of its papers went into the Archives, under seal, and were not available to researchers for many years.
The records of any congressional inquiry are automatically sealed for 75 years unless Congress passes an act to open them to the public. This did not happen with HSCA records largely because of the material on the Martin Luther King assassination. Some of those records were quite salacious and did not belong in the public domain. In fact the HSCA records on the MLK assassination are still sealed to this day.
I could go on and on with other examples from Tiffany's book, but there is a limit.
The Legacy of Sylvia Meagher
So, what is the legacy of Sylvia Meagher?
Here is what Tiffany says about Meagher's book: (page 395 in the Kindle edition)
Both the Subject Index and Sylvia’s major work, Accessories After the Fact, have stood the test of time, as all her peers predicted they would. They are still regarded as starting points for young researchers just beginning to get interested in the case and hoping to stay on the straight and narrow path—away from the sloppy research, the wishful thinking, and the leaps in logic that crept into so much of the other writing on the assassination.
No one knew the twenty-six volumes like Meagher: (page 9 in the Kindle edition, emphasis added)
If the first thing a visitor to Sylvia’s apartment would notice would be the huge windows looking out on the Hudson, the second would be a bookcase laden with mystery and science fiction novels—and twenty-six enormous reference texts bound in dark blue leather. Only a few hundred private citizens in the United States purchased a copy of the eighteen-thousand-page, fifty-four-pound series as soon as the Government Printing Office made it available. Far fewer had read it end to end. Hardly anybody—maybe only Sylvia—had nearly memorized it.
And Tiffany also writes: (page 277 in the Kindle edition)
The strength of her book was that she had. As even her friends-turned-enemies would still admit, she knew the volumes better than any other living person.
OK, so Sylvia Meagher knew the twenty-six volumes better than anybody.
Here is my question:
How can anybody go through those volumes and then believe that Lee Harvey Oswald was totally innocent?
What does that say about her skills as a critical thinker?
As part of my upcoming book on conspiratorial thinking in the JFK assassination, I have gone back and reread the various books from 1966 and 1967. Accessories After the Fact does not hold up well.
The only way Meagher could actually believe that Oswald was innocent was to ignore or downplay the evidence against him. Please have a look at my video review of Accessories After the Fact for several examples.
And I really lost all my respect for Sylvia Meagher because of her involvement with Jim Garrison's book. In 1986, Prentice-Hall asked Meagher to be the referee for Garrison's new book, and she wrote a 27-page critique. While Meagher knew that Garrison's chapters on New Orleans were just plain ridiculous, and that she knew that Garrison was a charlatan, she nonetheless advised Prentice-Hall to publish his book.
Why?
Because he was now claiming that Lee Harvey Oswald was completely innocent, and, to Meagher, that overrode all other considerations. Remember, one of the reasons Meagher was so pissed at Garrison in the 1960s was that he named Oswald as a co-conspirator with Clay Shaw. That incensed Meagher.
Meagher had severe difficulties with Garrison's New Orleans' witnesses:
But Meagher still wanted Prentice-Hall to publish Garrison's book. That she would want Prentice-Hall to publish a charlatan just because he now claimed Oswald was innocent speaks to Meagher's delusional beliefs. That she would countenance the victimization of Clay Shaw for a second time was contemptible.
But here is how Tiffany describes what happened: (pages 382 - 383 in the Kindle edition)
Around this time, Sylvia received her first and only phone call from the Jolly Green Giant. In the mid-1980s, Prentice-Hall had asked her for input on a new memoir and study of the case by Jim Garrison. She’d been diplomatic in her response: Parts of the book were strong, and Garrison had done a thorough job examining the record of the CIA. Other passages were flawed and full of inaccuracies. (Prentice-Hall passed on the book, and it was published by Sheridan Square in 1988.) Garrison called belatedly to thank Sylvia for her honest feedback on his manuscript, and she told her friends afterward that he had been gracious.
Tiffany doesn't even mention that Meagher recommended that Prentice-Hall publish Garrison's book:
Meagher betrayed all of her principles to get a horrible book (what eventually became On the Trail of the Assassins} published because it claimed Oswald was innocent. That is her legacy.
In her last email to me, Tiffany wrote:
I tend to agree with you that Oswald most likely killed JFK alone - my book doesn't actually take a side on that point one way or another, and is more about the impact that the debate has had on American culture over the decades.
Tiffany had a great opportunity to discuss the conspiracism that has racked our culture, and the part JFK assassination conspiracy theorists have played in it. She missed a chance to make her book truly meaningful.
Previous Relevant Blog Posts on Sylvia Meagher
Meagher comments on Garrison's failure to appear on a radio show.
An excerpt from a letter Meagher sent to Thomas Stamm.
Salandria tries to make up with Meagher.
Philippe Labro was a French journalist who covered the JFK assassination for France-Soir.
Fensterwald invites Meagher to join his organization. She refuses because of Jim Garrison.
A scathing review of Flammonde's book about the Garrison investigation.
An exchange of letters about Jim Garrison.
Garrison comes up with a crazy code and Sylvia Meagher calls him out.
Meagher also wrote poetry.
Meagher's very good idea shows that Garrison didn't care to learn the truth.
Thornley tells Meagher about an article illustrating Garrison's pre-occupation with the JFK assassination.
Bethell wrote Meagher about Charles Spiesel and his ridiculous testimony at the Clay Shaw trial.
Sylvia Meagher's terrific letter to Look Magazine in response to their article "The Persecution of Clay Shaw."
She was very pleased with his acquittal.
Meagher writes Clay Shaw a letter and his response is just terrific.
Dr. Wecht didn't think too much of Garrison, either.
Meagher educates Farrell on Jim Garrison.
A plea to Oliver Stone with a compilation of Meagher's writings about Jim Garrison.
Howard Roffman writes a letter to Harold Weisberg about Sylvia Meagher.
This phone call broke their relationship.
An unpublished Meagher memo on the trial of Clay Shaw.
Another unpublished Meagher memo on the Garrison investigation and Warren Report critics.
Sylvia Meagher's letter to the Editor regarding Garrison's interview in Playboy Magazine.
Meagher writes Harold Weisberg with her comments on the verdict.
James Phelan and Sylvia Meagher write Garrison letters about his book.
An exchange of letters between Thornley and Meagher.
Meagher writes Thornley about Lane's comment on RFK.
Meagher writes Thornley with an opinion.
Exchange of letters between Meagher, Arnoni and Garrison.
Meagher writes Weisberg about the damage Garrison is doing to critics of the Warren Report.
Meagher replies to the New York Review of Books regarding Popkin's article on Garrison.
An exchange of letters between Popkin and Meagher.