The members of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board, along with the members of Congress who authorized it, are the recipients of the Coalition on Government Information’s 1999 James Madison Award for protecting and promoting access to government information. American Library Association President Ann Symons and Daniel O’Mahony of Brown University Library presented the award March 12, during a Freedom of Information Day conference at the Freedom Forum in Arlington, Virginia.
All five members of the review board were present to accept the award. Consisting of a judge, a librarian, and three historians, the group served as an independent panel of citizens who worked for more than four years, making 27,000 decisions on more that 4.5 million pages of material at the National Archives.
Accepting the award, Board Chair John R. Tunheim, U.S. District Court judge for the district of Minnesota, remarked that “the tragedy of the Kennedy assassination was compounded by secrecy.”
Posted March 22, 1999.