Acknowledgements

We owe thanks to the many additional hands who made this work possible. Susan Weetman and William Combes, in the Department of State’s Bureau of Information Programs and Services, coordinated clearance of essential unreleased records. Among our Office of the Historian colleagues, research assistant Dawn Whitehead assembled a spreadsheet of documentary releases before the Civil War that greatly aided analysis of the pre-FRUS era. Forrest Barnum assisted in conducting the research on the 1861 FRUS volume. Evan Dawley generously conducted research in the Bernard Noble and Bryton Barron Papers while on leave. Ambassador Edward Brynn, David Herschler (both now retired), Stephen Randolph, Sara Berndt, Seth Center, Elizabeth Charles, Melissa Jane Taylor, James Wilson, and former colleagues John Collinge and Ted Keefer provided useful comments on significant portions of the draft manuscript. In addition to commenting on the text, Joint Historian Michael McCoyer facilitated Central Intelligence Agency clearance of documents essential to support the last several chapters of the book. Joseph C. Wicentowski and Joshua Botts exerted significant effort to render the finished manuscript into multiple digital formats for maximum reader utility and to streamline the printing process. Longtime FRUS editor Rita Baker shared helpful insights gleaned from her service in HO and copy-edited the final manuscript.

Historian-colleagues outside the office also provided invaluable assistance. In 2011, we benefited from the comments of discussants at a number of professional meetings. The Society for History in the Federal Government provided an early opportunity to share preliminary findings. Aaron W. Marrs presented a paper on the inaugural FRUS volume at the conference “Civil War—Global Conflict” hosted by the College of Charleston, receiving helpful suggestions and documents from Don Doyle, Niels Eichhorn, Amanda Foreman, and Jay Sexton. The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) meeting sponsored two sessions yielding useful insights from presenters Michael Hogan, Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, Richard Immerman, Howard Jones, J.C.A. Stagg, and Sacha Zala. The University of Virginia Miller Center held a roundtable discussion that provided very helpful input, especially from the organizer Brian Balogh, and panelists Melvyn Leffler, Will Hitchcock, and Marc Selverstone. At the 2013 SHAFR conference, Mary Dudziak, Robert Jervis, Melvyn Leffler, and Robert McMahon provided a public review of the entire draft manuscript that gave us several valuable suggestions for our final revisions.

The dedicated staff at many archival sites also aided our work. Eisenhower Presidential Library archivist Herb Pankratz helpfully assisted in securing copies of material from the John Foster Dulles Papers. Tim Holtz, an archivist at the Ford Presidential Library, also provided expeditious assistance. Lisa Jones at the Reagan Library alerted us to records of NSC staff discussions about FRUS. Prudence Doherty of the Special Collections staff at the University of Vermont Library proved exceptionally helpful to research conducted in the George Marsh Papers. The staff at the Library of Congress Manuscript Division provided their usual helpful research guidance and efficient delivery of material. Rod Ross offered expert guidance at the National Archives and Records Administration’s Center for Legislative Archives.

We wish to extend special acknowledgement to Archivist David A. Langbart of the National Archives and Records Administration Textual Archives Services Division. His encyclopedic knowledge of Department of State records proved immensely valuable, he was always willing to discuss where else to look for documents, and his diligent searching ferreted out records essential to making our story comprehensible. In particular, he discovered crucial documentation about the critical transition period for FRUS, covering the first decade of the 20th century through the 1940s, in miscellaneous, unindexed, and other difficult-to-penetrate records. He also read the entire manuscript and offered detailed comments and suggestions that measurably improved this book. Mr. Langbart exemplifies the dedicated public servant-expert, without whom we are all impoverished.

Finally, it is important to recognize our forebears. Today’s cadre of compilers, reviewers, editors, and declassification coordinators owe a great debt to the dedication of generations of Department officials and staff who, since the 1790s, have labored to realize the promise of FRUS. We hope this work honors their contributions to the continuing quest to provide the American people a thorough, accurate, reliable, and instructive account of their past.