Dan Alcorn
President
Dan Alcorn, formerly a law partner of AARC co-founder, the late Bud Fensterwald, has served on the AARC board since 1991, and was a founding director of the Coalition on Political Assassinations (COPA) and served on COPA’s board until the end of the Assassination Records Review Board process in 1998. Dan has represented requesters in precedent setting Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) cases in the trial and appellate courts in Washington, D.C., including cases related to the JFK assassination, the Martin Luther King, Jr. assassination, allegations of misconduct in the FBI crime laboratory, death squad activity in Central America, and intelligence abuses, among other issues.
Partner 1985-1999, Fensterwald & Alcorn, A Professional Corporation specializing in Litigation, Constitutional Law/Freedom of Information, International Law, Labor & Employment/Security Clearances. Admitted to the bar, 1980, Virginia. 1984, District of Columbia.
Director: Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, 1990-1996. Vice-Chairman, 1994-1996.
Member: District of Columbia Bar, Virginia State Bar.
Founder, Dulles Corridor Rail Association, 1998.
Director, Assassination Archives and Research Center, 1992- 2023.
President, Assassination Archives and Research Center, 2023.
- DANIEL ALCORN has been listed as an AV lawyer by Martindale-Hubbell.
- Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers Executive Director Stuart Statler called Mr. Alcorn, “a lawyer’s lawyer” after his work on the FBI Crime Lab FOIA case.
On the C-SPAN Networks:
Daniel S. Alcorn, as a Board Member for the Assassination Archives and Research Center is featured on three videos in the C-SPAN Video Library; the first appearance was a 1997 House Committee as a Counsel for the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.
Gary Aguilar M.D.
Board Member
Gary Aguilar, MD, Clinical Professor of Ophtalmology, University of California, San Francisco, is a practicing ophthalmologist in San Francisco. He is one of the few physicians outside the government who has ever been allowed to examine President Kennedy’s still-restricted autopsy photographs and X-rays that are held at the National Archives.
Dr. Aguilar has written and lectured extensively on the topic of JFK’s medical and autopsy evidence. For the 50th anniversary of the release of the Warren Report, Dr. Aguilar presents an overview of the medical and scientific evidence in the Kennedy case in a talk entitled, “Junk Science and the Death of JFK – How Credible Authorities Fumbled the Crime of the Century.”
Malcolm Blunt
Board Member
An independent investigator of the truth with an unbiased instinct for what is important and what is not in the details of President Kennedy’s assassination. He is regarded within the assassination research community as an esteemed authority on the intelligence agencies of the Cold War and the JFK records held at the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, MD. He is the 1998 recipient of JFK Lancer’s New Frontier Award in appreciation for his contribution of new evidence in furthering the study of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He is the subject of Alan Dale’s 2020 book, The Devil is in the Details.
Rex Bradford
Board Member
Rex Bradford is a consultant, essayist, analyst, and electronic archivist. He has pioneered the digitization and online access to JFK records. Approximately 1 million pages of AARC records, as well as documents from other sources, are available online due to his indefatigable efforts. He is the proprietor of History-Matters and President of the Mary Ferrell Foundation. Rex has written extensively on the assassination and its larger political context, and has given talks at conferences held by organizations such as the AARC, the Wecht Institute, COPA, and JFK Lancer.
The transcript of his 2008 address, “Whispers from the Silent Generation ,” and his essay on “The Fourteen Minute Gap” are among his insightful articles which focus upon under-reported areas of JFK related issues. His September, 2014 presentation, The Church Committee and The Warren Commission may be viewed by clicking HERE.
Alan Dale
Secretary
Alan Dale is a full-time professional jazz musician and bandleader, a lifetime student of American history whose parents were active as supporters and volunteers in the political campaigns of John and Robert Kennedy. Beginning in January, 2015, Alan served the noted FOIA attorney, Jim Lesar, as Director of the Assassination Archives and Research Center. He is the host of an online interview program, JFK Conversations, and is responsible for administration and content at aarclibrary.org and https://jfkjmn.com/. He is an administrative and research assistant to Dr. John Newman.
Alan is the author of The Devil is in the Details: Alan Dale with Malcolm Blunt on the Assassination of President Kennedy (pub. November, 2020).
Randolph Robertson M.D.
Board Member
Randolph Robertson M.D. has been interested in the assassination for nearly 25 years. He holds B.S. and M.S and M.D. degrees from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. He is a Board-certified Diagnostic Radiologist and the only one outside governmental review panels to have been given permission via the Kennedy family to see the original autopsy materials held at the National Archives. He has testified before the House of Representatives Legislation and National Security Subcommittee on Government Operations on the Effectiveness of the President John F. Kennedy Record Collections Act of 1992 in November 1993 in Washington DC.
He presented his analysis of the post-mortem radiographs at the annual meeting of the National Association of Medical Examiners in September of 1993 in Fort Worth Texas. More recently he presented his synchronization of the Zapruder film and the Dallas Police Department DictaBelt at the LeftForum meeting in 2014 in New York City. He is currently retired from practicing in radiology.
Bill Simpich
Board Member
Civil Rights attorney, author of ground-breaking articles focusing on the hidden intricacies of the CIA, a leading and insightful analyst of the intelligence files associated with Lee Harvey Oswald’s enigmatic episode in Mexico City seven weeks prior to President Kennedy’s assassination. Bill’s eBook, State Secret, was published in 2013 and may be read in its entirety courtesy of Bill and the Mary Ferrell Foundation: State Secret: Wiretapping in Mexico City, Double Agents, and the Framing of Lee Oswald. His 2018 multi-part series, The Twelve Who Built the Oswald Legend, may be read by clicking HERE.
David Talbot
Board Member
David Talbot is the New York Times-bestselling author of “The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America’s Secret Government” and “Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years,” as well as the national bestseller “Season of the Witch.” His recent book, “By the Light of Burning Dreams: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the Second American Revolution,” chronicles dramatic turning (and learning) points in the lives of 1960s and ’70s radical leaders. Jessica Bruder, author of “Nomadland,” wrote that the book “crackles with the radical energy of the 1960s and ’70s. It’s a shot in the arm of bold idealism, an indispensable companion for today’s revolutionaries that reminds us what can happen if we dare to believe in—and fight for—a better world.”
Before starting his career as a popular historian, Talbot founded and edited Salon, the pioneering online publication, and worked as a senior editor for Mother Jones magazine. His articles have appeared in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Time, the Washington Post, the Guardian and numerous other publications, and he was a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. He is married to author Camille Peri, who is writing a dual biography of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson. Their oldest son, Joe Talbot, directed the widely praised film, “The Last Black Man in San Francisco,” which won him the Best Director Award at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.
Donald B. Thomas Ph.D
Board Member
Donald B. Thomas received his Ph.D from the College of Agriculture at the University of Missouri. Following graduation, he held post-doctoral research appointments at the University of Arizona and the University of Nebraska. He is currently a senior scientist with the United States federal government and is on the graduate faculty at the University of Texas. He is a former President of the Coleopterists Society and presently serves as a subject editor for the Annals of the Entomological Society of America.
Dr. Thomas is the author or co-author of more than one hundred scientific journal articles, book chapters and books. His 2001 article in the journal Science & Justice, The Acoustical Evidence in the Kennedy Assassination Revisited led to publication of Hear no Evil, a book which places the acoustical evidence in a larger context. He currently resides in Texas with his family.
Dr. Josiah Thompson
Board Member
Dr. Josiah Thompson, distinguished author, investigator and educator. He is a former professor of Philosophy at Yale and Haverford College. In 1966 he was the author of an incisive commentary on the work of Richard H. Popkin’s reconstruction of President Kennedy’s assassination published in the New York Review of Books. And in 1967, his landmark work, 6 Seconds In Dallas became one of the decade’s most balanced and influential examinations of the assassination. He is the author of two books on Kierkegaard, and in 1998 he published a memoir of his experience as a private investigator, Gumshoe: Reflections In A Private Eye. He is the subject of a series of interviews — referred to as Op. Docs — conducted by Academy Award winning documentary film maker, Errol Morris, and made available through the New York Times website.
Last Second in Dallas, Dr. Thompson’s long awaited follow-up to his 1967 best seller, Six Seconds in Dallas, was published in January of 2021.