Читать книгу Fri Nov 22 00:00:00 CST 2019 - Bryan Woolley - Страница 7

Author’s Note

ALTHOUGH THE TRAGEDY at the core of November 22 actually occurred, this story is fiction, and most of its characters are figments of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance between them and any real persons, living or dead, is coincidental. However, a few of the secondary characters are persons who lived in Dallas on that fateful day. They are Stanley Marcus, Barefoot Sanders, Jesse Curry, Will Fritz, and M. N. McDonald. I owe it to them and to the reader to emphasize that although they are real, the scenes in which they appear and the words they speak in November 22 are fictitious.

On the other hand, the events taking place within the presidential party—related here in the italicized passages between the chapters—are history, and I have tried to be accurate in my description of them.

The author of a story of this nature necessarily owes debts to those who have written before him, I wish to acknowledge my larger ones. They are to the reporters of the Dallas Times Herald, whose coverage of the assassination of John Kennedy and its aftermath is preserved in the newspaper’s files; the report of the Warren Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy; Warren Leslie’s Dallas Public and Private; and William Manchester’s definitive history, The Death of a President, which is the source of most of the italicized passages here. The editorial attributed to Byron Hayes in “The Twenty-first Hour” actually was written by A. C. Greene and appeared in the Dallas Times Herald on November 23, 1963.

I also wish to thank several friends who helped me in various ways with my task. They are Charles J. Sopkin, Gloria Safier, A. C. Greene, the late Preston Jones, Elaine Walden, and my wife, Isabel Nathaniel.

In addition to those who helped me deliver the first edition of November 22 in 1981, I offer this additional note of gratitude to those who have helped bring this new edition into being. They are Bob Mong, Lisa Kresl, Tom Huang, and Michael Merschel at the Dallas Morning News, where I spent many of the happiest and most productive years of my journalism career, and Milli Brown, Cindy Birne, and the other amazing, creative people at Brown Books who gave my book its new life.