My New Article on The Housewives Underground
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July 27, 2026L
Today, The Future of Freedom Foundation is featuring my new article about a new book entitled The Housewives Underground: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the JFK Assassination Our Most Enduring Mystery by a woman named Kaitlyn Tiffany, who works for The Atlantic.
Her book is about three women who were part of the first generation of researchers or “critics” who questioned the official lone-nut narrative of the JFK assassination. The book is extremely well-written and gripping. Once I started reading it, I couldn’t put it down.
But I have a big disagreement with the author relating to the significance of her book. I believe that her book has a much deeper and profound significance than she does. It’s that disagreement that forms the thrust of my article.
Since my article is almost 10,000 words long, I figured that I would spare you all an additional blog post to read today. I would instead simply invite you to read my article about Kaitlyn Tiffany’s book, notwithstanding its length. I think you’ll enjoy it and find it constructive. It is posted here.
The Housewives Underground
by
July 27, 2026
I just finished reading a new book relating to the JFK assassination entitled The Housewives Underground: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the JFK Assassination Our Most Enduring Mystery by Kaitlyn Tiffany, who is a staff writer at The Atlantic. It is a great read and, in fact, once I got into it, I couldn’t put it down.
The book tells the story of three women — Sylvia Meagher, Shirley Martin, and Maggie Field — who were part of the first generation of assassination researchers who questioned the official narrative of the JFK assassination.
Written in the context of the turbulent social and political climate of the 1960s and 1970s, the book is a very well-written human-interest story about how these three women came to challenge the official version of the assassination, how they discovered each other, how they became close friends, and how their friendship ultimately came to an end.
But that’s all it is — just a very nicely written human-interest story, nothing more — that is, if we accept the conclusion of the author and other people who subscribe to the lone-nut theory of the JFK assassination.
Mind you, that’s not my conclusion. I was fascinated by Tiffany’s account of these three women because their story and this book actually have a deep and profound significance that I will set forth in this article.
I won’t delve into the details of the book itself. There are already some great reviews that have been published that I can’t improve upon. So, I’ll just list a few reviews here for readers to peruse. Suffice it to say that they all profusely praise the book.
New York Times
Kirkus
New York Post
A Capella Books
I’d rather write about the significance of the book itself.
As Tiffany details in her book, the three women gradually became part of a larger group of people who were questioning the circumstances surrounding the JFK assassination — people such as Mark Lane, Howard Weisberg, Vince Salandria, Penn Jones, Jr., and Josiah Thompson — who later became known as the first generation of assassination researchers.
The leader of the group was Mark Lane, a New York City lawyer who garnered the most publicity through sold-out lectures, an offer to the Warren Commission to defend Lee Harvey Oswald, his representation of Oswald’s mother Marguerite, and his 1966 book Rush to Judgment, which became a New York Times bestseller.
Once the Warren Commission came out with its official report of the assassination, the “Warrenologists” or “critics” or “researchers” or “conspiracy theorists” spent countless hours reading and studying the Warren Report. Disclosing contradictions, anomalies, inconsistencies, and what seemed to them an obsessive focus on the accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald to the exclusion of leads pointing in other directions, the first generation of researchers, including Meagher, Martin, and Field, contended that the commission’s investigation and final report were deeply flawed.
But so what? Nothing’s perfect, as lone-nut theorists would point out, especially an extensive investigation involving hundreds of people and thousands of exhibits. In fact, in a podcast entitled The Murder Sheet, in which Tiffany recently was interviewed, one of the two co-hosts, Kevin Greenlee, who himself is a lone-nut theorist, made that point. Tiffany said that she agreed with the point and stated that the Warren Report is “mostly right.”
Then what’s the point of the book? Simply to show how three women became friends because of the JFK assassination and then wasted a major part of their lives conducting an investigating that accomplished nothing? It would seem so.
In fact, during the interview the other co-host of the podcast, Áine Cain, told Tiffany that she was terribly frustrated as she was reading her book. The reason? Because these brilliant and talented women were devoting much of their lives to a senseless cause and one that, Cain said, could arguably be said to have led to our current climate of never-ending conspiracy theories. In other words, a total waste of time, energy, and money, especially given that they didn’t succeed in ever proving a conspiracy in the JFK assassination.
Tiffany’s response? She pointed out the deep dedication of the women. She highlighted their passion and deep sense of commitment. Convinced that they were on the right track, they persevered notwithstanding the fact that they were being insulted, humiliated, and ostracized by the press, their friends, and oftentimes their families.
Tiffany is obviously attracted to these women for those reasons. In fact, even though it comes across at the end of her book and in that interview with Greenlee and Cain that she has ended up being a lone-nut theorist, I have a hunch that there is a conflict taking place within her. After all, why write a book about three women she obviously deeply admires who spent their lives in a cause that ostensibly went nowhere?
I have another reason for my hunch — which is based on another interview that she did, this one with her boss at The Atlantic, a man named Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of the publication.
In that interview, there were two times where Goldberg, who himself is a lone-nut theorist, obviously tried to nudge Tiffany into acknowledging that in the end the Warren Report got it right, notwithstanding the inconsistencies, anomalies, and contradictions that the assassination researchers came up with.
He pointedly says to Tiffany: “Correct me if I’m wrong … you and me both are in the camp that Oswald was a mentally ill person who killed John F. Kennedy and it’s one of those things, right? They were looking for broader, deeper explanations and theories of conspiracy. They didn’t actually succeed in proving anything, did they?”
Tiffany could have responded “I completely agree with you” but she didn’t, which causes me to think that she’s still conflicted internally notwithstanding her apparent commitment to the lone-nut theory of the assassination.
Sort of deflecting the question, she answered: “Right, well, I think the reason that Sylvia Meagher in particular is, you know — she’s not a household name — but she is renowned in circles of people who study the assassination.… She does a very good job dismantling the Warren Commission’s process and making it clear that that investigation was not what the government presented it as. Whether or not they came to the right conclusion anyway is a different issue. But what she did was very impressive.”
Another example: Goldberg suggests that this was when people began mistrusting government and defaulting to “implausible and complicated explanations — almost occult explanations — for public phenomena.”
Tiffany’s response surprised me, which, again, causes me to wonder whether she is internally conflicted over whether those three women who challenged the lone-nut theory of the assassination were right after all.
She responded, “Yes and no. I think I was also struck by how much of people’s suspicions and disdain were warranted … in the 60s and especially in the 70s once all these things started to come out. It was in the late 60s that people discovered that the government was conspiring with the Mafia to kill a foreign leader. That’s something that sounds absolutely ridiculous and was true. So, I do understand kind of why people started to feel that anything could be true at that time.…”
Moreover, in her book, Tiffany wrote, “This would be a tall task, as a Gallup poll taken in late November showed that only 29 percent of the population believed Oswald had acted alone, with most assuming that he was part of a conspiracy.”
But then she added the following parenthesis that truly surprised me because of its obvious connotation: “(The poll didn’t even ask about the possibility that he was innocent.)”
I find her inclusion of that parenthetical very interesting but I think most people would find it shocking. That’s because the issue in the mainstream press is almost always phrased as “Did Oswald act alone or as a part of a conspiracy?” The third possibility — that he was totally innocent — doesn’t even enter most people’s minds, especially within the mainstream press.
Interestingly, however, most, if not nearly all, of those first-generation assassination researchers were convinced that Oswald was innocent — that he hadn’t shot anyone and hadn’t conspired with anyone.
As an aside, I couldn’t help but smile at Goldberg’s predicament in deciding to interview his employee Kaitlyn Tiffany. Since she is a longtime employee of The Atlantic, I’m sure he felt it was incumbent on him to highlight and promote her book with an interview, especially given that her book is being reviewed and highly praised in the mainstream press. But as I was watching him, I got the distinct impression that he was trying to do everything he could to assure his readers and himself that Tiffany was not a conspiracy theorist.
In fact, if Tiffany had said to Goldberg that she had concluded that those three women were ultimately proven right and that Kennedy was assassinated as part of a U.S. national-security regime-change operation, my hunch is that Goldberg would have abruptly ended the interview, would never have posted it online, and would have immediately terminated Tiffany’s employment. He just doesn’t strike me as the type of person who is going to have a dreaded “conspiracy theorist” writing for The Atlantic. After all, what would people think?
But I have to confess that I am thoroughly amused at the position in which Tiffany has placed Goldberg and other lone-nut theorists, especially those in the mainstream press who would never publish a review of a pro-conspiracy book relating to the JFK assassination. Owing to her excellent writing skills, Tiffany has unwittingly put them in the position of having to praise a book that praises JFK conspiracy theorists. That’s awesome! Sometimes life can be quite amusing.
The psychology of lone-nut theorists
Lone-nut theorists like Goldberg seem to always raise a psychological point regarding people who challenge the official narrative of the JFK assassination. They always want to know what motivates people to do that. They inevitably ask: Why can’t people simply accept the fact that a little man like Oswald killed a big man like Kennedy and move on with life?
I too am interested in the psychological aspects of this phenomenon albeit in the opposite direction. I ask: What is it that causes many lone-nut theorists to automatically defer to authority and accept the official narrative of events, notwithstanding the fact that there is an overwhelming amount of evidence to the contrary?
I used to think that this phenomenon demonstrates the power of public (i.e., government) schooling. Relying on a state system of army-like conformity and regimentation, the purpose of public schooling is to produce the “good, little citizen,” one who defers to authority and places deep and abiding trust in his public officials.
While many people complain about the dismal results of public schooling, the fact is, as Sheldon Richman points out in his book Separating School & State: How to Liberate America’s Families, public schooling has actually been a tremendous success by producing a nation of “good, little citizens” who defer to authority and automatically accept the official narrative of public events. The JFK assassination is just one good example of this phenomenon.
Over the years, however, I’ve concluded that there is a deeper, more profound reason for this deferential mindset. With the adoption of the welfare-warfare state in the 20th century, the federal government essentially became people’s daddy, one that takes care of them with programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, education, subsidies, grants, bailouts, and other welfare.
Through the national-security state, the federal government keeps people safe from the communists, terrorists, drug dealers, illegal immigrants, Muslims, Russia, China, Cuba, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, WMDs, and other scary things.
In the process, the American people have become child-adults — looking to government to take care of them as a daddy and also to keep them safe from the boogeyman.
But there is one big problem: Their daddy is an abusive daddy — a very abusive, violent daddy, one that Martin Luther King called “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”
Imagine a boy who is 8 years old who comes home from school every day and sees his father get drunk every night and beat his mother. Even worse, imagine that the boy witnesses his violent alcoholic father murdering a man. What is the boy to do? If he objects, in his mind his father might kill him. He naturally chooses to remain silent. He accepts whatever lies his father tells him. His father’s lies gradually become the boy’s truths.
While I still believe that the indoctrination and training that Americans receive in their government schools successfully converts them into good little citizens, I believe that the child-adult phenomenon is a much better explanation for why so many people are unable to ever challenge or question an official narrative like in the JFK assassination.
In fact, I couldn’t help but smile when I read in Tiffany’s book that Shirley Martin took her kids out of public schools so that she could homeschool them. Remember: this was the early 1960s, before homeschooling became “respectable.” Everyone in the rural town of Hominy, Oklahoma, where the Martins lived, was convinced that the Martins were crazy for doing that. Of course, their reaction to such independent thinking was that of standard good little citizens and child-adults.
Are Goldberg, Greenlee, and Cain good little citizens and child-adults? I don’t know. They might be and they might not be. Only they can answer that question.
The weirdness that motivated the researchers
One of the key questions that Goldberg asked of Tiffany was what motivated those three women to initiate their own individual, personal, and independent investigations of the JFK assassination.
I found Tiffany’s answer quite unsatisfying. She pointed to the fact that Meagher and many of her leftist friends had been targets of the U.S. government’s anti-communist crusade during the Cold War. She said that Martin was a bored and lonely housewife who had an independent political mindset and who deeply admired JFK. She said that Martin was also insecure intellectually and saw this as an opportunity to elevate herself in that regard. She said that Field, a wealthy socialite who lived in California and often traveled to Paris for vacations, idolized Camelot and Jackie Kennedy and had the financial means to set up an informal assassination center in her home.
With all due respect, that’s ludicrous. After all, there were lots of Americans who fell into those categories and didn’t become assassination critics.
I’ve got a better explanation for why these three women — and the rest of the people in the first generation of researchers — immediately questioned what was taking place: The assassination was deeply mired in and enveloped by weirdness. Most Americans simply put their heads down and passively accepted the weirdness. Many of them undoubtedly convinced themselves that it wasn’t weird at all and that all the weirdness was totally normal.
Let’s examine some of the weirdness surrounding the assassination:
1. After the Cuban Missile Crisis had brought the United States and the Soviet Union to the precipice of all-out nuclear war, Kennedy achieved a breakthrough that enabled him to see that the Cold War was nothing more than a deadly, destructive, and very dangerous racket.
Thus, in June 1963 — four months before he was murdered — in his widely publicized Peace Speech at American University, Kennedy essentially declared war on the U.S. national-security establishment — i.e., the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA — by announcing an end to the Cold War and stating that the United States would henceforth move in an entirely different direction — toward friendly and peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union and the rest of the communist world.
Pursuant to JFK’s breakthrough, the U.S. entered into a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviets, over the fierce objections of the national-security establishment. He also ordered a partial pullout of troops from Vietnam.
Now, it would make sense if a right-wing fanatic — and there were plenty of those in right-wing dominated Dallas — had shot Kennedy. After all, the right-wingers considered him to be a traitor, an appeaser, and a coward not only for his settlement of the Cuban Missile Crisis but also because of his refusal to help out the CIA’s Cuban exiles who invaded Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961. For example, take a look at this “Wanted for Treason” poster that right-wingers were distributing in Dallas on the day JFK was assassinated. Or take a look at this one-page advertisement in the right-wing Dallas Morning News welcoming JFK to Dallas.
But Oswald was no right-winger. On the contrary, he was ostensibly a dyed-in-the-wool communist. Why would a communist want to kill a president who was making peace with the communists, especially when his vice president, Lyndon Johnson, was on the same anti-communist crusade on which the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA were on? Is that not a bit weird?
2. Why would U.S. officials shut down the investigation immediately after Oswald was assassinated by Jack Ruby? Is that normal? Far from it. When someone kills any federal official, the federal government is going to quickly mobilize to find every single person who conceivably could be a part of the assassination plot. Sure, officials might ultimately conclude that the assassin was a lone nut but that’s not the point. The point is that they are going to pull out all the stops to conduct a full and complete investigation to determine whether anyone else was involved.
That’s not what they did here. Instead, they immediately announced a total shutdown of the investigation and immediately concluded that Oswald was a lone-nut assassin. That is very weird.
3. Oswald was shot dead and thereby silenced by someone who somehow was able to get through tight security as Oswald was being transferred to another jail. That was weird.
4. After supposedly shooting the president from the sixth floor of the Texas School Depository, the assassin supposedly took the time to hide his rifle, knowing full well that the room would ultimately be completely searched. Why would he take the time to do that instead of quickly getting away? That’s weird.
5. After his arrest, Oswald steadfastly claimed his innocence and actually went further than that. He said he was a “patsy” — that is, someone who was being framed by someone else for the crime. That was weird.
6. There were numerous witnesses in Dealey Plaza, where the president was shot, including police officers, who were certain that shots had been fired from the grassy knoll, which lay in front of the president. Oswald, the supposed lone assassin, was in the rear of the presidential limousine. That was weird.
7. There were men who were on the grassy knoll displaying Secret Service badges keeping people away. The Secret Service established that it had no agents during that time on the grassy knoll. That was weird.
8. Two of the president’s treating physicians at Parkland Hospital, Dr. Malcolm Perry and Dr. Kemp Clark, held a press conference shortly after Kennedy was declared dead. They stated that Kennedy had a bullet-sized entry wound in the front of his neck and a large exit-sized hole in the back of his head, both of which implied shots having been fired from Kennedy’s front. Oswald, again, was in the president’s rear. That was weird.
9. A team of Secret Service agents intentionally violated Texas law by prohibiting the Dallas County Medical Examiner, Dr. Earl Rose, from conducting an autopsy on JFK’s body. That was weird.
10. JFK’s body was flown to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, where it was delivered into the hands of the U.S. military to conduct the autopsy. What jurisdiction did the military have over the autopsy? That was weird.
11. Indeed, what jurisdiction did the federal government have over the investigation itself, given that the assassination was simply a murder case under Texas state law? That was weird.
12. Kennedy was a leftist, progressive Democrat, one who believed in the welfare-state way of life that President Franklin Roosevelt foisted onto the American people in the 1930s, especially with the crown jewel of American socialism, Social Security. Moreover, JFK was planning on enacting two more massive socialist programs, Medicare and Medicaid. Why would a supposed communist want to kill a socialist-oriented president? That’s weird.
13. Kennedy was a friend and admirer of Martin Luther King, who the FBI and the national-security establishment were convinced was a communist agent. Why would a supposed communist want to kill a close friend and admirer of another supposed communist? That’s weird.
The Warren Report
Let’s now move to the Warren Report, which Meagher, Martin, Field, and the rest of the first-generation researchers immediately began scouring as soon as it came out. Let’s examine just a small amount of the weirdness that pervaded that report.
But before doing that, I think it’s worth observing that there was never any reasonable possibility whatsoever that the Warren Commission would ever be able to pierce any assassination conspiracy that involved the CIA. There are three reasons for that: (1) the people who were appointed to the commission, including former CIA Director Allen Dulles, who Kennedy had fired after the CIA’s Bay of Pigs fiasco, and Earl Warren, the Chief Justice of the United States, were not exactly the type of people who would accuse the military-intelligence establishment of a domestic regime-change operation, especially at the height of the Cold War and the anti-communist crusade; (2) the commission had to rely on the FBI and the CIA for its investigation into the assassination, which, at the risk of belaboring the obvious, ensured that there would never be the type of aggressive investigation that would be necessary to pierce a top-secret military-intelligence state-sponsored assassination, especially one orchestrated by the CIA; and (3) the CIA was simply too powerful and, thus, could block any investigation that targeted it. See, for example, the statement that former HSCA attorney Dan Hardway submitted to Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s congressional Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets. You can read it here.
The following is some of the weirdness contained in the Warren Report:
14. Oswald was ostensibly a U.S. Marine communist. How many of those have you known? That’s weird.
15. Oswald became fluent in the Russian language while serving in the U.S. military. How did that happen without the assistance of the military’s language experts? That’s weird.
16. Oswald was permitted to remain in the military even after disclosing his supposed communist proclivities. That’s weird.
17. The U.S. Navy assigned Oswald to a U.S. military base in Japan from which a top-secret U.S. spy plane was being flown, notwithstanding the fact that he was supposed to be a communist. That’s weird.
18. After defecting to the Soviet Union and openly declaring that he intended to share U.S. military secrets with the Soviet communists, Oswald was permitted to return to the U.S. without indictment, condemnation, or even just an interview. This was during the time of the anti-communist crusade and the Cold War racket, when they were investigating Sylvia Meagher and thousands of other American citizens for possibly having connections to communism. Why leave a genuine communist, one who has defected to the communist-controlled Soviet Union and presumably disclosed military secrets to the communists, alone? That’s weird.
19. The FBI’s report on JFK’s military autopsy stated that a bullet hit him in the back and failed to exit. That necessarily meant at least four bullets fired at the president, which automatically meant a conspiracy. To fix that problem, the Warren Report simply moved the bullet wound upward so that it would hit both Kennedy and Gov. Connally. That’s weird.
20. After supposedly hitting both men and breaking multiple bones, the bullet ended up in pristine, never-been-fired condition. That’s weird. And magical too.
21. The Warren Report stated that it was “not necessary to any essential findings of the commission to determine just which shot hit Governor Connally.” Are you kidding me? The magic bullet was essential to the supposed 3-shot scenario that was necessary to the official narrative of the assassination. That’s weird.
22. Chief Justice Earl Warren, the head of the Commission, announced that much of the evidence in the case would not be revealed during people’s lifetimes. Really? Why not? If this was truly just a lone-nut assassination, why all the secrecy? That’s weird.
23. In fact, why were many of the Commission’s proceedings conducted in secret, including the top-secret meeting at which the Commission received information that Oswald was a U.S. intelligence operative? That’s weird.
Now, maybe lone-nut theorists find none of this to be weird. For them, maybe it’s all very normal. Nothing to see here, folks. Just keep moving along. Just defer to our political daddy, notwithstanding his proclivity toward violence, abuse, and lies, and conform our minds to his official narrative.
Independent-minded, courageous women
The mindsets of lone-nut theorists Greenlee and Áine were reflected in their discussions regarding the FBI’s actions toward Shirley Martin, who was conducting her personal investigation of the assassination by traveling repeatedly to Dallas to interview witnesses.
As Tiffany details in her book, the FBI began monitoring her activity, keeping a file on her, and even paid her multiple visits at her home. FBI agents also visited her husband’s former employer in Hawaii and asked who the Martins had socialized with while living there. A friend of Shirley’s daughter Vickie was paid a visit by FBI agents while in college in California.
In their interview of Tiffany, Greenlee and Cain came across as sounding like the FBI’s actions were innocent and funny. They are obviously unable to see the dark implications of a national police force that is intimidating a private citizen who was investigating something that U.S. officials obviously didn’t want investigated.
Maybe Greenlee and Cain, who appear to be in their early 30s, have never head of the FBI’s infamous Cold War program called COINTELPRO, a program of surveillance and intimidation that was intended to scare people into remaining silent about — and not protesting against — governmental misconduct. (It’s not the type of U.S. dark history that is generally taught in America’s public [i.e., government] schools.)
Much to the chagrin of U.S. officials, especially on the Warren Commission and in the CIA and FBI, there were some independent-minded Americans who found those things very weird and who refused to let go of the matter. They were determined to figure out what was going on. And they didn’t let intimidation or insults by the FBI, the mainstream press, and others dissuade them. To the everlasting credit of Shirley Martin, she courageously refused to succumb to the FBI’s efforts to intimidate and scare her. She essentially told them to go stuff it. She continued investigating.
In an effort to understand and resolve the weirdness surrounding the assassination, Meagher, Martin, Field and the rest of the critics began subscribing to newspapers and cutting out and saving every assassination-related article they could find. And then later they closely studied the Warren Report in an effort to figure out what was going on.
Meagher, the most intelligent and educated of the three women, went further. As Tiffany points out, soon after the assassination she wrote up some notes to herself referring to “coups widely considered to be USA-inspired or supported.” She specifically mentioned the assassination of Congo leader Patrice Lumumba, the overthrow of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, and the coup ousting Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam. Of course, she wouldn’t have known about the CIA’s assassination partnership with the Mafia to murder Cuban leader Fidel Castro since that information was still being kept secret.
Meagher wasn’t the only one. Among the first generation of critics was a brilliant attorney and teacher named Vince Salandria. Immediately after the assassination, Salandria identified the assassination as a national-security state regime-change operation.
In fact, he pointed out the plotters’ brilliance in framing an ostensible communist. Salandria reasoned that this would ensure that no right-wing or even left-wing group would question the official narrative, for fear of being labeled a communist sympathizer during the height of the national-security establishment’s Cold War racket and its anti-communist crusade.
In fact, when it became clear that Salandria, who was an ACLU representative, was a “conspiracy theorist,” the left-wing ACLU made it clear that it was not pleased. Notwithstanding Salandria’s longtime deep commitment to civil rights, the ACLU quickly accepted his resignation. I highly recommend reading the transcript of an excellent and insightful speech that Salandria delivered at a JFK conference in 1998. You can read it here.
The significance of Tiffany’s book
Let’s now turn to why Kaitlyn Tiffany’s book is so significant, even if she herself doesn’t recognize its full significance. No, contrary to what she and other lone-nut theorists have convinced themselves, the significance of her book isn’t simply the passionate efforts of a group of housewives who became friends because of their decision to become dedicated amateur citizen investigators. Tiffany’s achievement with this book goes much further than that, even if she doesn’t realize it.
What Kaitlyn Tiffany has done in writing this book is explain the role that three independent-minded, courageous women played in ultimately convicting the U.S. national-security establishment of the crime of assassinating the president of the United States — on grounds of protecting “national security” from a president whose policies and actions were not only supposedly threatening “national security” but also threatening the legitimacy of the entire national-security state governmental apparatus that replaced America’s founding governmental system of a limited-government republic after World War II.
In other words, Tiffany’s book shows the foundation of efforts that would ultimately lead, step by step, in a straight line toward finally establishing beyond any reasonable doubt the guilt of the Pentagon and the CIA in the murder of John F. Kennedy. That’s why her book is so extraordinary and so profound. The irony is that she can’t see that, which is why she limits herself to thinking that the only thing profound about her book is that it highlights the friendship of three passionate, even obsessive, women who, in the final analysis, accomplished nothing with their ardent investigative efforts.
The straight line from research to guilt
The fact is that the courageous independent-minded efforts of Sylvia Meagher, Shirley Martin, Maggie Field, Vince Salandria, Mark Lane, Howard Weisberg, Penn Jones, Jr., Josiah Thompson, and others were the foundation on which later efforts were made that ultimately succeeded in breaking this murder case wide open.
Let’s examine those steps in this straight line from the first generation of critics to the ultimate conviction of the national-security establishment in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
The Clay Shaw trial (1969)
In the late 1960s, the district attorney in New Orleans, Jim Garrison, became convinced that the Kennedy assassination was a national-security state regime-change operation. The problem is that he used a highly illegitimate criminal prosecution of an innocent man, Clay Shaw, in a effort to disclose to the world the real nature of the assassination. There is no question but that Garrison deserves condemnation for grave prosecutorial abuse.
Permit me a slight digression. In the interviews that Tiffany recently had with Goldberg, Greenlee, and Cain about her book, both she and the interviewers focused on the idiosyncrasies, faults, and character flaws of various people in the JFK saga, especially Garrison and an assassination researcher named David Lifton. But the fact is that everyone, including lone-nut theorists, is flawed in some way. It’s the human condition. What’s important is that we look beyond the character flaws of people and keep our focus on what they accomplished.
Sometimes life brings good out of bad. That’s what happened in Garrison’s prosecution of Clay Shaw. During the trial, one of the military pathologists who conducted the autopsy on JFK’s body, Army Col. Pierre Finck, testified as a witness. He stated under oath that Navy pathologist James J. Humes telephoned him at 8 p.m.on the night of the assassination to invite him to come to the Bethesda National Medical Center morgue, a military facility, to help with the JFK autopsy.
Finck testified that during that conversation, Humes informed him that they already had X-rays of the president’s head.
That’s a problem. Why? Because the official entry time of the president’s body into the Bethesda morgue was precisely 8 p.m. How in the world could they already have X-rays of the president’s head at 8 p.m. when the president’s body was being brought, ostensibly for the first time, into the morgue at 8 p.m.? We will see later how significant that point is.
That’s not all. During his testimony, Finck was asked why he had not dissected JFK’s neck wound, which, as you will recall, was described as an entry wound in the press conference that Dallas treating physicians Malcolm Perry and Kemp Clark held soon after the president was declared dead. Finck hemmed and hawed repeatedly, in an obvious effort to avoid answering the question. Finally, after the judge ordered him to answer the question, Finck stated that the reason he didn’t dissect the neck wound was because he was ordered not to. When asked who it was who issued that order, Finck claimed that he couldn’t remember. Another possibility, of course, is that he was terrified to death to identify someone who obviously wielded the power to run and control the autopsy.
The House Select Committee investigation (1976-1979)
From the Shaw trial, the line leads to the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the late 1970s, which re-opened the investigation of the JFK assassination, in large part owing to the efforts of Sylvia Meagher, Shirley Martin, Maggie Field, and the other first-generation researchers. In fact, as Tiffany points out in her book, many of them were even summoned to a congressional meeting in which they were asked to provide their input as to matters that they felt needed to be investigated. In my opinion, that’s quite an accomplishment.
Leading up to the HSCA investigation was the Church Committee investigation, which established much of the nefarious, immoral, and evil activity in which the CIA had been secretly involved — on grounds of protecting “national security” of course — including the CIA’s plot to assassinate Congo leader Lumumba as well as its top-secret assassination partnership with the Mafia, which was the world’s premier criminal organization, one that wouldn’t hesitate to murder innocent people.
The Church Committee established that the CIA and the Mafia had conspired (no, not a conspiracy theory but in fact an actual conspiracy) to assassinate Fidel Castro, a leader of a foreign country that had never attacked the United States. The mindset was that the CIA wielded the omnipotent, totalitarian-like authority to protect “national security” by killing any communist or communist sympathizer as part of its Cold War racket to protect America from a Red takeover. Needless to say, that discovery attracted the attention of assassination researchers.
Even though the House Select Committee rejected the lone-nut conclusion of the Warren Report and found that JFK was the victim of a conspiracy, the Committee’s finding was based on an acoustics analysis that was later proven to be flawed. In any event, the Committee confirmed the Warren Report’s finding that Kennedy had been killed by the shots that had been fired from his rear by Oswald.
Thus, at that point, it appeared that the assassination researchers were finished. They had hit a dead end. Their efforts to challenge all the weirdness appeared to have been in vain. For all practical purposes, their efforts had come to an end.
Moreover, Garrison’s prosecutorial abuse had deeply divided the movement, even bringing to an end the close friendship of Meagher, Martin, and Field, as Tiffany details in her book.
The secrecy surrounding the autopsy
What the researchers failed to notice, however, was what started to happen after the House Select Committee investigation had shut down in the 1970s.
Immediately after the autopsy that the military conducted on JFK’s body, the military personnel who had participated in the autopsy were sworn to secrecy as to what they had seen and done. They were also forced to sign written secrecy oaths promising to never reveal any aspect of the autopsy. Making it clear that the autopsy was a highly classified, top-secret operation, the men were threatened with court martial or criminal prosecution if they ever talked.
But the House Select Committee released autopsy participants from those vows of secrecy. That was more than ten years after the assassination and autopsy. Soon afterward, some former enlisted men began talking, disclosing to local media outlets that they had carried the president’s body into the Bethesda morgue in a cheap shipping casket rather than the expensive, ornate casket into which JFK’s body had been placed in Dallas. How was that possible?
David Lifton (1980)
The line toward conviction then leads to David Lifton’s book Best Evidence: Disguise and Deception in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy, which was published in 1980 — almost twenty years after the assassination. While Tiffany and her interviewer Greenlee mock and ridicule Lifton for his “body swap” theory, which they consider is “wild” and “crazy,” they fail to recognize the enormous paradigm shift that Lifton brought about with his New York Times best-selling book.
Ever since the military’s JFK autopsy, there were always strange and inexplicable inconsistencies and anomalies in the medical evidence in the case. Things just never would come together, as they ordinarily do in a criminal case. No one could explain why … until David Lifton’s paradigm-shifting book Best Evidence.
Lifton explained why the medical evidence could never — and would never — come together in a logical, consistent manner. The reason: the military had introduced fraud into the evidence. It was that fraud, Lifton argued, that prevented the medical evidence from coming together as it should have.
As part of his analysis, Lifton drew upon the Navy personnel who disclosed that they had carried the president’s body into the Bethesda morgue in a cheap shipping casket prior to official start of the autopsy. That necessarily meant that JFK’s body had been removed from the Dallas casket and placed in the shipping casket — which Tiffany and Greenlee mockingly described as a “body swap” and “wild” and “crazy.” Lifton posited that it was during that interim of time — between the time the body was secretly brought into the morgue and the 8 p.m. official entry time of the body into the morgue — that the military pathologists introduced fraud into the evidence by altering JFK’s body in such a way as to disguise the fact that Kennedy had been shot from the front.
At the risk of belaboring the obvious, Col. Finck’s testimony at the Shaw trial now becomes highly relevant. Given that JFK’s body was brought into the morgue earlier than the 8 p.m. official entry time, it now made sense as to why Humes would already have X-rays of the president’s head before the body was officially introduced into the morgue at 8 p.m.
Oliver Stone’s movie JFK (1990)
The line from the first generation of critics to conviction of the national-security establishment then goes from Lifton’s 1980 book to Oliver Stone’s Academy Award-winning movie JFK in 1990, which lone-nut theorist Goldberg described as “sociopathic” in his interview with Kaitlyn Tiffany and which lone-nut theorists Greenlee and Cain also slammed in their interview with her.
The three interviewers give short shrift to what Stone’s movie unwittingly accomplished. At the end of the movie, Stone included a blurb stating that the House Select Committee’s assassination-related records were to be kept secret until 2029. The movie urged people to contact their representatives and demand immediate release of the records.
The JFK Records Act (1992)
The public pressure generated by Stone’s movie led to the JFK Records Act in 1992 — almost 30 years after the assassination, which mandated that all federal agencies, including the CIA and the military, were required to release all of their assassination-related records to the public.
The ARRB (1992-1998)
The JFK Records Act led to the 1992 establishment of the Assassination Records Review Board, an independent commission whose job it was to enforce the JFK Records Act.
The ARRB turned out to be the game changer in the JFK assassination, especially with respect to the medical evidence in the JFK autopsy. It was the ARRB that established beyond a reasonable doubt that the autopsy that the military conducted on JFK’s body was fraudulent.
Douglas Horne’s watershed book (2009)
The final stage in the straight line from the first generation of assassination researchers toward establishing guilt on the part of the U.S. national-security establishment came in 2009 with the publication of a massive 5-volume book entitled Inside the Assassination Records Review Board: The U.S. Government’s Final Attempt to Reconcile the Conflicting Medical Evidence in the Assassination of JFK by Douglas Horne, who had served on the staff of the ARRB back in the 1990s. It was Horne who emphasized the significance of Lifton’s paradigm-shifting book Best Evidence. (My book The Kennedy Autopsy is a short, easy-to-read synopsis of Horne’s five-volume work.)
Horne’s book, which revolved mostly around the autopsy, established beyond any reasonable doubt that the autopsy was intentionally, knowingly, and deliberately riddled with fraud. It was the fraudulent autopsy that the military conducted on JFK’s body that firmly convicted the national-security establishment of the assassination. That’s because there is no innocent explanation for a fraudulent autopsy — none! No one has ever come up with an innocent explanation and no one ever will. The fraudulent autopsy necessarily means that the national-security establishment orchestrated and carried out the assassination.
In the course of her conversation with Greenlee and Cain, Tiffany made it clear that her book essentially stops around 1989. She says that she didn’t have much interest in going further and investigating the assassination itself. As she put it, she’d have to spend the next 45 years studying bullet trajectories and other mundane matters to arrive at a firm conclusion as to whether this was, in fact, a lone-nut assassination or a conspiracy. Apparently daunted by the prospect of spending several years studying the assassination, she apparently decided to simply default to the lone-nut theory of the assassination (except for what I think is a possibility that she remains internally conflicted on the matter), which ostensibly has left her with a book that simply is a nice human-interest story with no real deep meaning.
But by effectively stopping her book in 1989, Tiffany ended up without the paradigm-shifting events of the Oliver Stone movie in 1990, the JFK Records Act in 1992, the ARRB from 1992 through 1998, and Doug Horne’s 2009 five-volume watershed book on the autopsy. However, there is one interesting caveat I should mention: In her book’s bibliography, she does list Horne’s book among 50 or so other books. It would be interesting to know whether she actually read the book or just used it for a small reference.
An impenetrable assassination plot
In any event, Tiffany is incorrect in thinking that she would have to steep herself in thousands of books on the assassination to determine what actually happened. In fact, the truth is that one could read every single JFK assassination book that has ever been written and I will guarantee you that he or she would still not be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that the assassination was orchestrated and carried out by the military and the CIA.
That necessarily means that the lone-nut theorists are absolutely right when they refer to anyone who tries to establish guilt by pointing only to the evidence surrounding the assassination as a “conspiracy theorist.” The CIA’s plot has simply been too good to pierce, even after more than 60 years.
In fact, when Meagher, Martin, Field, and the other first-generation assassination researchers were criticizing aspects of the investigation, lone-nut theorists would chide them for not coming up with any evidence of a conspiracy. But how were they supposed to pierce a CIA-orchestrated conspiracy? By walking up to CIA headquarters and demanding to be let in so that why could freely search records and interview CIA personnel? Don’t make me laugh. Not even the House Select Committee on Assassinations were allowed to do that. No one could do that, not even today. (Recall former HSCA attorney Dan Hardway’s statement to Rep. Luna’s Task Force.) Meagher herself was smart enough to recognize that these amateur investigators lacked the ability to pierce a CIA assassination conspiracy and wisely counseled the others to remain focused on the only thing they could realistically do — which was simply to point out the faults and fallacies of the official investigation.
The national-security plot to kill Kennedy
At this point, let me set forth the broad outlines of the national-security establishment’s conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy. But let me make it clear that there is no way for me to prove my case. As the lone-nut theorists would correctly maintain, it’s just a conspiracy theory. But it is a theory by which all of the pieces to the JFK assassination fall into place and by which all of the inconsistencies, contradictions, and anomalies disintegrate. The following is what happened:
As Douglas Horne details in his book JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated, after the CIA’s Bay of Pigs fiasco the war was on between JFK and the national-security establishment. Kennedy knew that the CIA had knowingly lied to him and had tried to manipulate him into invading Cuba. He vowed to destroy the CIA, which, for its part, concluded that Kennedy was a coward, an appeaser, and an incompetent.
The war then enveloped the military when JFK resisted Pentagon pressure to invade Cuba and then rejected Operation Northwoods, a Pentagon top-secret plan to provide a fraudulent justification for JFK to invade Cuba.
It was after JFK’s resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which effectively left Cuba permanently in communist hands and which the national-security establishment considered to be the biggest defeat in U.S. history, that the U.S. national-security establishment decided that Kennedy had to be removed from office — as a grave threat to “national security.”
By this time, JFK had achieved a breakthrough that enabled him to see that the Cold War was nothing but a deadly, destructive, perilous, and very expensive racket that was pushing the United States and the Soviet Union toward all-out nuclear war.
In his June 10, 1963, Peace Speech at America University, Kennedy effectively declared war on the national-security establishment by announced an end to its Cold War racket and vowing to move America in a totally different direction than the one that the Pentagon, CIA, and NSA desired.
The war between JFK and the national-security establishment was now on. The plot to win the war through assassination was now in full swing.
The plot called for an assassination that would be blamed on an innocent man — a “patsy,” one who could easily be maneuvered into position to take the fall. The plotters cleverly selected a secret U.S. intelligence operative who had been secretly trained to appear as a communist, a young U.S. Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald. Like other secret intelligence operatives, his job would be to infiltrate “subversive” organizations like the Fair Play for Cuba Committee or to ostensibly defect to the Soviet Union to report on conditions within that Cold War enemy.
The plot naturally called for the immediate assassination of the patsy. That’s where the CIA’s assassination partnership with the Mafia came into play. The Mafia’s job was to silence Oswald. The Mafia figure Jack Ruby drew the short straw with respect to that job.
As I say, that part of the assassination proved to be impossible to penetrate. To this day, no one even knows the name of the assassins. That shouldn’t surprise anyone. From the day it was called into existence, the CIA specialized in the fine art of assassination and, equally important, disguising its role in its assassinations.
The fraudulent autopsy
But the Achilles heel of the plot to murder JFK was always the military autopsy that was conducted on his body. They were able to keep that part of the conspiracy secret for three decades … but not forever.
The first step was to get JFK’s body out of Texas without an autopsy, in violation of state law. The next step was to deliver the body to the military at Bethesda National Medical Center, where a fraudulent autopsy could be conducted in secret.
The plot called for shots being fired from the front in order to establish that Oswald’s co-conspirators were Soviet and Cuban assassins. That meant all-out nuclear war. That’s how the plotters got the official investigation shut down immediately — through the pretense of avoiding nuclear war.
The plot entailed an early introduction of JFK’s body into the Bethesda morgue in order to perform pre-autopsy surgery on the body that would hide the fact that shots had been fired from the front.
Please permit me another slight digression. In his interview with Tiffany, lone-nut theorist Greenlee stated that one of his favorite JFK books is Case Closed by Richard Posner. One big problem, however, is that Posner’s book is seriously outdated because it was published before the term of the ARRB, which firmly established the fraudulent nature of the JFK autopsy.
Greenlee also states that another favorite book of his is Reclaiming History by Vincent Bugliosi, which was published in 2007 and which defends the lone-nut theory of the assassination. Horne’s five-volume book, which was published in 2010, ended up tearing Bugliosi’s book to shreds.
One of the most revealing aspects of Bugliosi’s book is with respect to the enlisted men who stated that they carried JFK’s body into the morgue in the cheap shipping casket about one and a half hours before the official 8 p.m. entry time. He referred to those enlisted men as “little” people who were not worthy of belief, as compared to the high military officials who, he asserted, would never lie.
Really? Well, let’s examine one aspect of the autopsy fraud that the ARRB established and that is detailed in Horne’s book — the two brain exams.
The two brain examinations
Everyone would acknowledge that JFK was a smart man but everyone would also acknowledge that as smart as he was, he only had one brain, not two. Yet, the ARRB established that there were two brain exams, one of which involved a brain that wasn’t Kennedy’s and instead was almost certainly one brought to the Bethesda morgue from the nearby Bethesda Navy Medical School.
The autopsy pathologists, who were military officers who Bugliosi extolls as truth-tellers, testified that there was only one brain exam. They perjured themselves. As the ARRB determined, there were two brain exams.
The official photographer for the autopsy was a man named John Stringer, who was the official autopsy photographer at Bethesda and an instructor at the Bethesda Naval Medical School. He told the ARRB that he attended the brain examination a few days after the autopsy, where he photographed the brain in his customary manner using a particular type of film. He said that two of the three autopsy pathologists were present — Humes and J. Thornton Boswell. He said that they sectioned or cut up the brain like a loaf of bread, which was customary to study the trajectory of the bullet.
The ARRB’s general counsel Jeremy Gunn showed Stringer the official photographs of the brain. Stringer said no —that those were not the photographs he took. For one thing, he didn’t use that type of film. For another, those weren’t the particular angles of the photos he took of the brain. For another, the photographs he was shown depicted a full-sized brain, not one that had been sectioned or cut up like a loaf of bread.
The third pathologist, Pierre Finck, told the ARRB that he was at the brain exam, which he said was held about a week after the assassination, not just a few days after the assassination as Stringer maintained. At that exam, he stated, were Humes and Boswell and a photographer that was not Stringer.
That obviously meant two separate brain exams. The military pathologists who conducted the autopsy had lied when they said that there was only one brain exam.
It’s probably also worth mentioning that most everyone agreed that the gunshot that hit Kennedy in the head blew out around 40 percent of his brain. Yet, the brain in the official photographs from the second brain exam depicts a full-sized brain, albeit damaged.
It’s also worth mentioning that the autopsy report stated that JFK’s brain weighed 1,500 grams. The weight of an average-sized brain is around 1,300 grams. How was it possible for JFK’s brain to weigh so much given that around 40 percent of his brain had been blown out by the gunshot that hit him in the head?
In his interview with Tiffany, lone-nut theorist Goldberg says that much of governmental wrongdoing can be explained by stupidity or incompetence rather than by malevolent intent. How about it then, Mr. Goldberg. Please explain how these two brain exams can be explained by stupidity or incompetence rather than intentional fraud.
The “body swap”
Moreover, Mr. Greenlee, how about explaining why several enlisted men — the men Bugliosi described as “little” people unworthy of belief — including both Navy sailors and Marines, would concoct a story about secretly carrying the president’s body’s into the morgue in a cheap shipping casket? What would be their motive in concocting such an elaborate lie? Are you actually suggesting a conspiracy among them to pin the crime on the deep state? That would be weird.
Well, you might want to add Gawler’s Funeral Home, the most prestigious funeral home in Washington, D.C., which was in charge of embalming JFK’s body, to the conspiracy. That’s because the ARRB uncovered a Gawler’s memo that was written soon after the autopsy stating that the president’s body was carried into the morgue in a cheap shipping casket rather than the heavy, ornate casket into which JFK’s body had been placed at Parkland Hospital in Dallas.
You might also want to include in the conspiracy the testimony of the Navy X-ray technician who stated that he was heading up to the X-ray development room after X-rays were taken of the JFK’s head when he saw the Navy vehicle carrying the Dallas casket, Mrs. Kennedy, and Bobby Kennedy arriving at the front of the Bethesda Naval Medical Center. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, JFK’s body could not possibly be in that Dallas casket given that it was downstairs in the morgue being X-rayed.
I would be remiss if I failed to mention former Marine Sgt. Roger Boyajian, who the ARRB discovered in the 1990s. He was in charge of the security detail when the president’s body was brought into the Bethesda morgue in the shipping casket. In his After Action Report, which was dated November 26, 1963, a copy of which he delivered to the ARRB, he stated: “At approximately 1835 the casket was received at the morgue entrance and taken inside.”
1835? That’s 6:35 p.m. civilian time. That’s almost one and a half hours before the president’s body was formally brought into the morgue, supposedly for the first time, at 8 p.m. What do you suppose they were secretly doing with JFK’s body during that period of time — that is, from 6:35 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.?
Recall now Finck’s sworn testimony at the Clay Shaw trial. Do you see now why Humes told Finck at 8 p.m., when JFK’s body was officially introduced into the morgue supposedly for the first time, that they already had X-rays of the president’s head?
For anyone who still has any doubts of what Tiffany referred to as the “body swap” and which she and Greenlee derided as “wild” and “crazy,” I refer you to Douglas Horne’s recent masterful documentary entitled The Three Bethesda Casket Entries Revisited, which establishes beyond all reasonable doubt the introduction of multiple casket entries into the Bethesda morgue as part of the military’s fraudulent autopsy.
JFK’s back of the head wound
It’s also worth mentioning that the Dallas treating physicians and nurses stated that JFK had a huge exit-sized wound in the back of his head, which would imply a frontal shot. See, for example, this interview by Dr. Robert McClelland starting at 6:00.
Secret Service agent Clint Hill, who was in the presidential limousine and was seeing that massive wound all the way to Parkland Hospital, said the same thing.
Yet, the official autopsy photos show the back of JFK’s head to be intact. That means either that the Dallas doctors and nurses and Hill were lying or had individually and collectively imagined a non-existent wound or that the military’s official autopsy photographs fraudulently depicted the back of Kennedy’s head.
Perhaps it’s also worth mentioning that when the ARRB showed FBI agents Francis O’Neill and James Sibert those official autopsy photos, they said no — that when they saw JFK’s body in the Bethesda morgue, there was a large wound in the back of his head. One of them even stated that in his opinion, the official autopsy photos they were shown appeared “doctored.”
As a slight digression, I think it’s also worth observing what O’Neill and Sibert stated in their official report: that it was apparent that there had been “surgery of the head area, namely, in the top of the skull.” There was no surgery at Parkland Hospital in Dallas or during the official autopsy at Bethesda. The surgery had to be pre-autopsy.
Need I point out that neither O’Neill nor Sibert were summoned to testify before the Warren Commission? I wonder why.
It’s probably also worth mentioning a Navy petty officer named Saundra Spencer, who worked in the Navy’s photography lab in Washington, D.C., where she worked closely with President Kennedy. She told the ARRB that she had developed the JFK autopsy photos on the weekend of the assassination, on a top-secret, classified basis. She had kept her secret for more than 30 years. When the ARRB showed her the photos depicting JFK’s back of the head to be intact, she said no — that those were not the photos she developed. The ones she developed showed a two-inch or a two-and-a-half inch in diameter hole in the back of JFK’s head.
Horne’s book details all of this autopsy fraud and much more. His book constitutes a determinative paradigm shift in the JFK assassination, one that convicts the national-security establishment of the crime of murdering John F. Kennedy. That’s because there is no innocent explanation for the military’s fraudulent autopsy. The fraudulent autopsy necessarily equates to guilt in the assassination itself.
Thus, while the CIA succeeded in keeping its role in the assassination secret, the military ultimately failed to keep its role in the fraudulent autopsy secret. That’s what ultimately convicted both of them.
Conclusion
A disappointing part of Kaitlyn Tiffany’s book for me is that by defaulting to the lone-nut theory of the assassination, she seems to have taken the easy way out and failed to follow the path of courage and independent thinking that she deeply admires in the women she has written about and that, in large part, motivated her to write this book.
Contrary to what Tiffany thinks, the real significance of her remarkable book is not just some human-interest story about three independent-minded and courageous women who independently began investigating the Kennedy assassination and, in the process, became close friends who ultimately failed in their quest to establish a conspiracy in the JFK assassination.
The real significance of Kaitlyn Tiffany’s remarkable book, even if she doesn’t realize it, is that it tells the story of three independent-minded women whose passion and courage set the foundation for the ultimate conviction of the U.S national-security establishment of assassinating President John F. Kennedy.
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