"The White House Communications Agency: A Look into Its Past, and Present ": Acknowledgements

Sunday, October 17, 2021

I wish to thank all of those dedicated White House Communications Agency people, of all branches of the military services, with whom it was my privilege to work and to know both as co-workers, and as life-long friends. I cannot possibly thank you all by name without, inadvertently, missing some of you.

None of us traveled for the White House without taking, almost for granted, that the transportation and the equipment would be there for us -- the DCAU and DCOU teams who made that consistently happen were true warriors, many of whom were unknown to us, behind the scenes, and did not receive the limelight that the few of us on the Air Force One tarmac knew. My sincere thanks to all the "at-home" people who performed our trip support logistics so well.

The many WHCA-supported trips, to anywhere on the globe, for the various presidents, their family members, numerous political candidates and White House staff, could not have been completed successfully without the seamless cooperation extended by the many committed U.S. Secret Service professionals I encountered, without fail. To them, my grateful thanks for making our demanding, respective missions possible, "Difficult jobs, well done!"

As I compile this account, from one person’s perspective after the passage of many years, I want to acknowledge those of you who have made the effort to share your own details with me to make this work as accurate and complete as possible. Many of our experiences, as would be true in any top-secret national security organization, were restricted to us by "need-to-know" qualification and the geographic dispersion of our microwave tower locations. If my account seems lacking in some detail or another, it is not due to any intentional oversight; just probably, it is a lack of my exposure to the missing information.

Many thanks to all of the former WHCA people, the information and pictures from Glenn Laser, Jerry Sutton, Don Cammel, Roger Jones, Tom Roemer, Rodger Zabkie, Ray Millaway, Ken Barbi, Kerry Pinkerton, Jackie Johnson, Derrill Ballenger and Jason Walker, also from consultant Tim Tyler, who has been interested enough to help me fill in the blanks within our collective (and somewhat aging) memories. Many thanks, to Jim Rockwell for all of the photographs, which he contributed from his 2011 trip to Cannonball Tower, to Steve Smith for his photos and for his support on Grand Cay, and to Marty Williams for his photos of the Nixon Library and Birthplace . I also thank Mike Stratton, a former Cactus M/W duty man who worked many weeks with me at Cannonball in the late 1960’s, for editing my document files into ’HTML’ format so they may be read as a single document using only an Internet browser. He contributed minor suggestions for wording changes by having the advantage of a "fresh pair of eyes" and some common WHCA experiences.

The Internet-available information has been a huge resource. It is an abbreviated list which follows to give credit to the main sources of pictures, historical accuracy and the magic of GOOGLE Earthview satellite coverage, without which, this would be a very dry and less complete account. In some cases, the source wording has been used verbatim where my own prose did not add the refinement of experience or add more clarity to the narrative.

In all cases, I want to point out there are many copyright restrictions to my claiming personal rights to any referenced web site content I have included. I neither imply, nor claim any ownership of the copyright material which I have freely duplicated for my non-commercial, private use. [JLC]

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