The Eternal Allure of the Rabbit Hole
· The Atlantic
Sylvia Meagher was 44 years old in the fall of 1965 and lived alone, except for her cat, Allegra, named after the ballet dancer Allegra Kent. She commuted from her one-bedroom apartment in the West Village to the United Nations, where she’d been working for nearly two decades at the World Health Organization. Although Meagher was a bureaucrat, her sensibilities were bohemian. She was acquainted with many of the painters, musicians, and writers who lived near her. In her foyer, Meagher displayed a painting of a nude figure given to her by a neighbor, the expressionist Alexander Dobkin. But the focal point of her living space was a bookcase laden with 26 reference volumes bound in dark-blue cloth. These were the supplemental materials of the Warren Commission Report. Only a few hundred private citizens in the United States purchased a copy of the 18,000-page, 54-pound series as soon as the Government Printing Office made it available. Far fewer had read it end to end. Perhaps only Meagher had nearly memorized it.
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Released in September 1964, the Warren Report was the government’s official story of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The report’s key finding was that an odd, angry, 24-year-old assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had acted alone, for reasons nobody could quite figure out. The public evidence—exhibits, hearings, et cetera—was piled into the supplementary volumes. The government did not furnish an index, making casual inquiry incredibly difficult.
During the year since she’d received delivery of her crate of the volumes, Meagher had been reading and rereading. She’d remade her living room into an office, with filing cabinets for notes and correspondence, and a large desk positioned near the fireplace. She took a volume on the subway each day and made notes on a clipboard; she worked during her commute, during her lunch hour, at night when she got home, and every weekend. One of her friends, the French journalist Leo Sauvage, called her “the only person in the world who really knows every item hidden in the 26 volumes of Hearings and Exhibits.”
Meagher was neither a conspiracy theorist nor a wannabe detective. She considered herself a “critic” of the Warren Report. A New Deal liberal with a far-left social circle, she had been subjected to questioning by a loyalty board during the Red Scare, putting her at odds with her government. When the president’s assassin was identified as a pro-Castro Marxist—not a segregationist or a radical right-winger, as many initially assumed—she felt compelled to walk through the existing evidence, piece by piece, and demonstrate where things fit and where they didn’t. She spent more than a year creating an index for the 26 volumes. At the same time, based on her clipboard work, she wrote her own analysis of the case, which was published in 1967 as Accessories After the Fact: The Warren Commission, the Authorities, and the Report. And much later, hundreds of her letters and most of her personal notes ended up archived at Hood College, a small liberal-arts college in Maryland.
Through twists and turns of curiosity (and mid-pandemic boredom), I ended up reading Meagher’s papers and becoming obsessed with her obsession. Digging into the Warren Commission’s evidence, in Meagher’s time, was regarded as something more than eccentric. A journalist called people like her—the bookkeepers and graduate students and stay-at-home moms who journeyed to the National Archives in search of answers about the assassination—a “keening pack of speculators.” It was generally considered antipatriotic and morbid to interrogate the official account.
Today, there is nothing fringe about checking the facts or “just asking questions” of an official story. Everybody does it. You could credit the critics of the Warren Report for a great act of citizenship, but you could also credit them with inventing an American pastime: They discovered that there is something thrilling about a document dump, and picking through boxes and boxes of government files. We have often associated these habits with conspiracy theorists, truthers, and the nation’s most paranoid, but in the modern era of digitized records, anyone can jump down a rabbit hole anywhere, anytime, even on their phone. Online influencers can invent careers by plumbing the court docket in a celebrity lawsuit (see the Blake Lively–Justin Baldoni case). Members of Congress can make national headlines by demanding minutiae from the Hunter Biden–laptop saga. The public can scroll through thousands of pages of records related to the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein, looking for mentions of President Trump.
Even when there is no promise of revelation, the search can be its own justification. Mine took me into a semisecret world that I could barely explain to my friends and family. The conspiratorial view of American history was both enticing and maddening, and I sometimes felt like the more I learned, the more I didn’t know.
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The federal government’s records on the Kennedy assassination are housed in one of the largest archival facilities in the world: the National Archives at College Park, Maryland. In contrast to the dark and uncomfortable spaces that Warren Report critics would have visited in the original Archives building, on Pennsylvania Avenue, the reading room in Maryland is a dream. It has fantastic natural light enabled by so much glass—two-story windows wrap the entire space—that it was closed one morning while I was there because of a tornado warning.
On my first day there, to work on a book about Meagher and her friends, I learned that the JFK files are much more annoying to access than many of the others in that building. Only select Archives employees are permitted to go into those stacks; one staffer suggested to me that this is because anyone can disappear in there, sucked down rabbit holes, if there are no guardrails.
By the end of the first afternoon, I knew why. I was stumbling across amazing material, just in the boxes they’d brought to me in the reading room. They didn’t shed any light on the Kennedy assassination, exactly, but they shed light on everything around it. For instance, I spent at least an hour captivated by the paper trail left by the FBI as they tried to figure out how Dorothy Kilgallen, a New York tabloid reporter and game-show panelist, had gotten ahold of Jack Ruby’s testimony to the Warren Commission before it was published. The following year, she died in a bedroom of her Upper East Side townhouse at the age of 52, apparently from “acute ethanol and barbiturate intoxication.” Naturally, some people didn’t buy that it was a simple overdose.
I told my fiancé that there was more that I really needed to see, which I thought was true, but really I just wanted to keep looking. I ended up extending my research trip by nearly a week. One detour led me to Paul Krassner, a founding member of the Yippies, a radical (and radically goofy) New Left group. In 1976, Krassner was promising to sue the FBI over a fake reader letter it had sent to Life magazine in 1968, as part of its COINTELPRO anti-subversive program, calling him a “raving, unconfined nut.” This document was in the JFK files because it also mentioned Krassner’s infamous parodic account of the assassination, which depicts Lyndon B. Johnson engaging in necrophilia with JFK’s corpse aboard Air Force One. (Was this relevant to my book? No.)
One day, I was captivated by a story turned up by a Warren Report critic named Shirley Martin, a housewife in rural Oklahoma who was “commonly regarded as a busybody,” according to FBI agents who were monitoring her. While she was hoping to disprove the government’s theory that Oswald had attempted to assassinate the ultra-conservative General Edwin Walker in April 1963, she’d heard a rumor that Walker had entertained his own theories as to who was responsible. He had allegedly hired a private detective to find suspects, and the detective—in a twist worthy of a Coen-brothers movie—offered one suspect $5,000 to try to kill Walker, just to see if he would do it. The suspect asked for a fake passport and a getaway driver, appearing to take the plot seriously, but the detective was convinced that he was merely trying to con him out of the $5,000. (Relevant to my book? Actually, yes. I used the episode to illustrate how close Martin’s digging brought her to real, dramatic events.)
Sylvia Meagher, the woman who memorized the Warren Commission’s evidence, once described the experience of being carried away on a research tangent: “In the search for one document or one fact, the eye discovers and is trapped by a totally unrelated and fascinating document.” Meagher complained that she wouldn’t have enough time to spend on the case even if she didn’t have an actual career. Merely investigating Lee Harvey Oswald’s whereabouts throughout 1963 could’ve been its own full-time job. The alleged gunman had been spotted all over the continent in the last few months of his life, according to a flood of reports fielded by the Warren Commission. People thought they saw him in the guest book at the American Museum of Atomic Energy in Tennessee; checking in to the Skyline Motel in Pulaski, Virginia; passing out Fair Play for Cuba pamphlets in Montreal, “accompanied by a short, homely, heavy woman who took unusually long steps when walking,” according to one citizen. The commission considered a report from a magician-ventriloquist who’d been in residency at Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club for two weeks before the assassination, and was certain that Oswald had been a volunteer for a memory trick that involved 20 audience members shouting out one word each in rapid succession. Meagher kept such reports in a folder she labeled “False Oswalds.” In 1966, she helped the UC San Diego philosophy professor Richard Popkin with his famous New York Review of Books essay “The Second Oswald,” which popularized the idea of Oswald decoys, and she later refined it in her own book.
The concept of multiple Oswalds is central to the plot of Don DeLillo’s 1988 novel, Libra, which is also about archival rabbit holes; one of the book’s characters is an in-house historian at the CIA who sits alone with ever-growing towers of documents, which he refers to as “the data-spew of hundreds of lives.” DeLillo was not the only literary giant to be drawn into that spew. Joan Didion, in her 1987 book, Miami, reprinted footnote 67 of volume X of a 1978 report from the House Select Committee on Assassinations; she identified a connection between a pair of anti-Castro Cuban brothers who fired a bazooka at the UN building in 1964, while Che Guevara was inside giving a speech, and a woman who claimed they had traveled with Oswald to Dallas the previous year.
Norman Mailer hosted an assassination discussion group in the late 1980s called the Dynamite Club, which met in both Washington, D.C., and New York. Among the participants were the Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy; novelists such as DeLillo and James Grady, the author of Six Days of the Condor; and assorted journalists, including Edward Jay Epstein, a New Yorker contributor who published a bombshell book about the Warren Commission in 1966.
The Dynamite Club was more parlor game than detective work. “Interesting conversations,” DeLillo said to me over email in 2024. “But I don’t recall that we reached any particular conclusion.” I’d written to ask if he was interested in Meagher’s work. He replied that he was looking at his bookshelf from his chair, and that her book was up there, along with about 60 other books on the case, plus the 26 volumes of Warren Commission evidence. “Acquiring the 26 volumes was a complicated matter,” DeLillo said, “but helpful to my work on Libra; and the volumes are also a kind of museum of voices—America speaking.” To illustrate his point he included various quotations from Marguerite Oswald, Lee’s mother, in parentheses. (“But, after all, I am going through a whole life, and it is very hard.”)
Meagher examined only a fraction of the government’s documentation of the Kennedy assassination. In the years after her book was published, millions more pages were declassified, always under pressure from the public. And because government agencies all communicated about the assassination for decades, and brought it up constantly in relation to later events, thousands of extraneous documents were marked as assassination-related. Now the files are a cross-section of U.S. history. If you cut into them and pull out a wedge, you get a little bit of everything. Looking for X, you stumble on Y. Meagher was likely at work at the UN the day that the brothers Guillermo and Ignacio Novo fired their portable rocket launcher at her office building from across the East River; its eight-pound shell, which had been manufactured by the U.S. Army, fell 200 yards short of the target, into the water. It’s easy to develop a conspiratorial view of history, because everything in the past is connected. And the more you read, the more you sense something just beyond your reach.
[Read: What the JFK file dump actually revealed]
Eventually, a rabbit hole will clog with documents. Sylvia Meagher’s one-bedroom apartment became stuffed with files on assassinations beyond JFK’s: Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and the 1972 attempt on Alabama Governor George Wallace. Her friend and fellow Warren Report critic Harold Weisberg filed countless Freedom of Information Act requests and sued the government repeatedly when its responses didn’t satisfy him. He accrued hundreds of thousands of JFK-related documents, which he stored at his chicken farm in Maryland. Meagher’s friend Mary Ferrell remodeled her house in Dallas to hold her assassination-related papers; that collection formed the basis of a monumental online depository that has become an indispensable research tool for generations of Warren Report critics.
In the internet age, such a massive public resource may not seem remarkable. But a culture of collecting, organizing, and searching a trove of government files didn’t create itself. People often point to the JFK assassination as the moment when conspiracy theorizing became an American pastime, but it was also the beginning of the age of documents, Mark Fenster, a law professor at the University of Florida and an expert in government transparency, told me. The Warren Report critics “were part of a direct challenge to the government based on the idea that if we can just get these documents, we can find the real truth,” he said. “Sadly, that is a dream that has never been realized and may never be realized.”
Some people still pursue that dream in the dry, dogged manner that Meagher did. Others, like me, jump in and out, enjoying the indulgence of cutting into something that is somehow both discrete (one batch of files on one narrow topic) and never-ending (more pages than you could possibly read). Across the years that I spent digging into the Kennedy assassination, I accrued dozens of books on the case, each with a somewhat different theory of events, and many of them convincing for an hour, or an afternoon, or a week, or more. Six decades after the fact, even a straitlaced researcher such as myself can still wonder about a thing or two—an ex-CIA guy here, a Cuban paramilitary group there.
Still others prefer to make the pursuit of truth by document into a spectacle. Early in his second term, Trump released more files about the Kennedy assassination, promising that, after 60 years of secrecy, people would now learn “THE TRUTH.” (Due to the hasty declassification, they mostly learned the Social Security numbers of former congressional staff.) And before his reelection, he blithely promised to release government records relating to Jeffrey Epstein, seeming to enjoy the positive response that he received whenever he mentioned the idea. But last summer, the promise blew up in his face: When the Justice Department finally released many of the files, a slew of mysterious redactions and omissions—some having to do with the president himself—prompted more conspiracy theorizing. Trump moved on to UFOs.
When I jumped (quite casually) down the Epstein rabbit hole, I used a free website that re-creates his email inbox—a tacky but useful restaging of years of correspondence with power brokers and cultural luminaries. There, I came across a bunch of emails between Epstein and a name I recognized from my days in the JFK files: Paul Krassner, who had once written unspeakable things about the 35th president’s corpse, and who later published some of the first conspiracy theories to connect the JFK assassination with Watergate. To my surprise, Krassner and Epstein corresponded until May 2019, two months before the latter’s arrest. In numerous friendly exchanges, Epstein expressed interest in Krassner’s writing, including a work-in-progress novel about the late comedian Lenny Bruce.
Starting when he needed dental surgery, Krassner often emailed to ask Epstein for money, which he apparently received. “I hope our contract will continue until I’m dead,” Krassner wrote in December 2017. The two men, in fact, died within weeks of each other less than two years later—Epstein in a jail cell in Manhattan and Krassner at home in Southern California. It was unclear from the emails whether they ever met in person. Their relationship had been totally unknown to the general public during their lives, as far as I could tell, and barely anyone noticed their correspondence once it was discoverable.
No, this discovery didn’t matter much. It was just a sliver of trivia buried in a data dump, a tunnel connecting two rabbit holes. But it reminded me that anything can have a special glow if you’re the one to find it—if you’re the one who thought to look for it. How did I come across Krassner in the Epstein files? It’s incredibly dumb, but you already know the answer. I’d searched Kennedy assassination, just to see.
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