Kaitlyn Tiffany — The Housewives Underground: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the JFK Assassination Our Most Enduring Mystery – with Adrienne LaFrance — at the Wharf
This event will be in partnership with The Atlantic.
The untold story of the women who debunked the Warren Report—a riveting history of obsession, heartbreak, and the myth of the great American century
In the winter of 1967, the official account of the Kennedy assassination was beginning to unravel. A scattered group of Americans had pointed to major problems with the report prepared by President Johnson’s handpicked Warren Commission. Many of the most serious criticisms of the government’s work came from a source that surprised some: women who, within the community of critics, outnumbered the men two to one.
Politicians and reporters dismissed these women, referring to them as “scavengers” and suggesting they were eccentrics with murder-mystery fixations or crushes on the deceased President Kennedy. But in The Housewives Underground, Kaitlyn Tiffany resurrects the story of Maggie Field, Shirley Martin, and Sylvia Meagher, whose collaboration and friendship reshaped both their own lives and our national memory. Field hosted screenings of the Zapruder film and raised money to pursue new leads. Martin traveled frequently to Dallas, enlisted her children to help interview witnesses, and irritated J. Edgar Hoover with her “antagonistic” attitude toward the FBI.
And at the center of the story is Sylvia Meagher—a born-and-raised New Yorker who was devoted to the ballet and the Mets, cultivated fierce friendships and firm grudges, and dedicated twenty-five years to her conviction that the whole truth of JFK’s assassination had not been told.
Painstakingly researched and engrossing, The Housewives Underground takes readers back to the turbulent 1960s and 1970s—a time when Americans’ belief in their government was eroding—introducing readers to the so-called housewives who asked the first, hardest questions about one of the most shocking events in American history.
Kaitlyn Tiffany is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Everything I Need I Get from You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It. She is also the co-author, with Lizzie Plaugic, of the collection On Nobody Famous: Guesting, Gossiping, Gallivanting. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Tiffany will be in conversation with Adrienne LaFrance, the executive editor of The Atlantic. She was previously a senior editor and staff writer at The Atlantic, and the editor of TheAtlantic.com. Before joining The Atlantic in 2014, LaFrance was an investigative reporter for several local and national news organizations, covering politics, technology, and media. She is a former reporter at WBUR, Hawaii Public Radio, Honolulu Weekly, Honolulu Civil Beat, and Nieman Journalism Lab. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and several other newspapers and magazines.