Sylvia Meagher

    Sylvia Meagher was a research analyst at the UN’s World Health Organization in New York for twenty years. A widow living in Greenwich Village, she applied her administrative skills to evaluating the full 26 volumes of the Warren Report, and in the process produced her Subject Index to the Warren Report and Hearings and Exhibits, the work for which she is perhaps best known, in 1965. She followed this with her book Accessories After the Fact in 1967.
    Senator Richard S. Schweiker wrote in a 1975 preface to a later edition of Accessories that these two works “clearly establish Sylvia Meagher’s major contribution to understanding this tragic incident in our nation’s history.” Of Accessories he wrote in the same preface, “Sylvia Meagher’s Accessories After the Fact was instrumental in finally causing a committee of Congress—with full subpoena power, access to classified documents, and a working knowledge of the nuances of the FBI and CIA—to take a second official look at what happened in Dallas November 22, 1963.” The careful reader of Accessories will find, however, a work that is harsh, often shrill in tone, and one that actually proposed that the Warren Commission actively covered up the conspiracy to kill the president.
    The JFK critical community came to regard Meagher with awe, as one of the most influential early critics in the group that included Vincent Salandria and Josiah Thompson, among others. Richard Warren Lewis in The Scavengers and Critics of the Warren Report called her the best of the “Housewives Supersleuths,” the others being Mrs. Shirley Harris Martin and Mrs. Maggie Field.
    Perhaps because the JFK critical community owes such a debt to Meagher, they have seldom described her objectively. For example, they rarely note that she came from a background of UFOs. Edward Jay Epstein, an admirer, recounted how on one visit to her apartment he noticed a huge amount of UFO books on her shelves, and his heart dropped (in Chapter II of Lewis’s book).
    Sylvia Meagher was, like so many of the other early critics, leftist by inclination. A revealing quote from Shirley Harris Martin is also recounted in Lewis’s Chapter II: “The people who carry the ball on this thing are bound to be criticized. They’re the people on the left—Sylvia Meagher, Ed Epstein, Harold Feldman, Mark Lane, Thomas Buchanan…Underneath all of the comments I get from them, however, there’s this bitterness against the Kennedys. So it’s kind of taken the heart out of me. I was telling the kids recently: ‘I just don’t even feel like going down to Dallas anymore.’ It seems like this is becoming a political thing, almost as though the people who are investigating the case want to hurt Robert Kennedy more than anything else.”
    Meagher’s leftist leanings can be seen in quotes from her. For example, the dedication to her book reads: “This book is dedicated to the innocent victims of a society which often inflicts indignity, imprisonment, and even death on the obscure and helpless.” She wanted an “end to the cold war and a beginning of genuine peace, for equality and mutual respect among men, for the rule of law and an end to brute violence.” A passage on page xxiii of her Foreword also shows her leanings: “On the day of the assassination the national climate of arrogance and passivity in the face of relentless violence—beatings, burnings, bombings, and shootings—yielded in some quarters to a sudden hour of humility and self-criticism. The painful moment passed quickly, for the official thesis of the lone, random assassin [False characterization of the Commission’s thesis—lack of an obvious motive hardly means a random assassin—KAR] destroyed the impulse for national self-scrutiny and repentance. Thus, the climate of cruelty and barbaric hatred was restored after what was scarcely an interruption, and it was possible for Cuban émigrés—virtually with impunity and without regard for the hundreds of people who might be killed or injured—to fire a bazooka at the United Nations Headquarters building to express displeasure at the presence there of Che Guevara. Thus it was possible for American Nazi thugs to assault peaceful citizens assembled at a public meeting in Dallas at Christmas 1965. This it is possible for Americans to look upon the napalmed children of Vietnam and listen to their terror nightly over the television tubes, and to go about their daily business as usual.”
    From the minute the assassination was announced, it seemed improbable to her, and she became “instantaneously skeptical” of the official explanation. She was convinced that the government’s story was false and that they (including the Dallas authorities) would try to pin it on a Communist. This suspicion was reinforced when Oswald’s name, background, and guilt was announced. She felt that the Dallas authorities piled evidence on Oswald too fast. In response, she started to read on the assassination and save every article she could find on it. She attended several of Mark Lane’s lectures in NYC but reserved judgment until the Warren Report appeared. Feeling that she could not possibly understand the Report as is, she created her own index, a work that took several months and 152 pages. The results convinced her that the Warren Commission’s detailed evidence contradicted its general conclusions. Three years of study convinced her that she had been right.
    A critique of Mrs. Meagher’s work might stress that although she may have known the evidence in the Warren Report better than anyone, she tended to cite only the parts that supported her conclusions. To the end, she remained impassioned that the WR was false, in spite of the facts that (a) she admittedly had no training as an investigator; (b) she admitted making serious errors, such as in falsely declaring the photograph of LHO holding a rifle to be a forgery when it turned out that she didn’t understand the principles of perspective; and (c) she admitted that neither she nor any other of the Housewives had made any breakthroughs. Her basic position remained the logically untenable one that she didn’t know the truth but was sure that it was not what the Warren Commission claimed.
    Throughout her work on the Kennedy assassination, she gave generously of her time to help other researchers. For example, she checked the footnotes and compiled the index for Edward Jay Epstein’s Inquest. She worked closely with Roger Feinman for years. She and David Lifton appear to have had a stormy relationship, however. Apparently she helped him for quite a while, but then soured on him. According to Feinman, he later referred to her as "extremely domineering," having "steely suspicious eyes, "boiling over" with envy, and "confused" about the Warren Commission, whom she felt had covered up the real nature of the crime.
    In addition to her books, Mrs. Meagher reviewed books for other publications. She also wrote “Notes for a New Investigation” for the same December 1966 issue of Esquire that featured the "Primer of Conspiracy Theories" and an article by Edward Jay Epstein entitled “Who’s Afraid of the Warren Report?”
    In summary, Sylvia Meagher was a leftist and untrained in the art of investigating, a person who didn’t consider evidence that ran counter to her position, who transferred a passion for flying saucers to a passion for the JFK assassination, whose leftism leaned her toward an answer very early, and who found that answer nurtured by the influence of Mark Lane.