Free The Kennedy Half-Century by Larry J. Sabato Page A

Library; Tina Houston, Regina Greenwell, Claudia Anderson, Allen Fisher, Liza Talbot, Barbara Cline, Eric Cuellar, Lara Hall, Brian McNerney, Christopher Banks, and Margaret Harman at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum; Greg Cumming, Jonathan Roscoe, and Jon Fletcher at the Richard Nixon Library; Nancy Mirshah and William H. McNitt at the Gerald R. Ford Library; James A. Yancey, Jr., Keith J. Shuler, and Polly Nodine at the Jimmy Carter Library; Ray Wilson, Jennifer Mandel, Shelly Williams, Shelley Nayak, and Michael Pinckney at the Ronald Reagan Library; Robert Holzweiss at the George Bush Library; Herbert Ragan and Lisa Sutton at the William J. Clinton Library; and Christine A. Lutz at the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University.
    We also thank several people at the National Archives and Records Administration, including David S. Ferriero, Archivist of the United States; GaryM. Stern, general counsel; Mary Kay Schmidt and Amy DeLong, archivists working in the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection; Daniel Rooney, supervisory archivist of the Motion Picture, Sound, and Video unit, and Mark Meader, an archives specialist in the same department; Joseph A. Scanlon, FOIA / Privacy Act Officer, Office of General Counsel; the Honorable Frank Keating, a member of NARA’s board of directors; and Kenneth Lore, president of the Foundation for the National Archives. Marc Oliver, production manager at Silver Spring Studios, deserves a special acknowledgment for copying essential audio files from NARA’s College Park, Maryland, repository.
    We relied extensively on the personnel and resources of the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza for our chapters on President Kennedy’s assassination, and we thank Nicola Longford, executive director; Gary Mack, curator; Stephen Fagin, associate curator; Megan Bryant, director of collections and intellectual property; and Pauline Martin and Krishna Shenoy, the Sixth Floor Museum’s chief librarians. Their cooperation was crucial, although they have no responsibility for anything I have written.
    Charles Olsen, a senior analyst at Sonalysts, Inc., assembled an extraordinary team of audio experts to reexamine the Dallas Police Dictabelt recording and the original report put together by Bolt, Beranek, and Newman for the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Mark Bamforth, Malinda Finkle, Jonathan Grant, Richard Hodges, Dr. John Jakacky, Lauren Logan, Scott Martin, Lisa Peringer, and Curt Ramm of Sonalysts teamed up with Brian Sargent of Aberrant Sound in Concord, Massachusetts, to produce a ground-breaking scientific study. These gifted men and women deserve the gratitude of everyone who has ever researched the Kennedy assassination.
    A companion documentary based on the findings of this volume will air on PBS stations throughout the nation. We wish to acknowledge Curtis Monk, president and CEO of Commonwealth Public Broadcasting; John Felton, vice president and general manager of WCVE in Richmond and WHTJ in Charlottesville; Gene Rhodes; Mark Helfer; Leslie Custalow; and Paul Roberts, independent filmmaker.
    Most of all, I am deeply appreciative for the fine team we assembled at the University of Virginia to work on this book. The team leader was Dr. Andrew Bell, a historian with a keen grasp of the subject, who worked directly with me on almost every aspect of the research. Andrew was the first to read each of my draft chapters and to fill in critical details that had escaped my attention or memory. Further, Andrew worked with Sean Lyons, who skillfully helped us conduct interviews, and he supervised a crack team of graduate and undergraduate interns and researchers. Several interns spent far more hours thanthey should have, but we are ever so grateful that they became a bit obsessed with the project. They include Josh Bland, Sophie Arts, Jonathan Elsasser, Nicholas Blessing, Valerie Clemens, Jack Jessee, Emma Paine, Blake Wheelock, James Yu, Cameron