Twenty-Six Seconds

by Alexandra Zapruder

  My father’s sister, Myrna, her son Adam (also an attorney, who had worked with my father on the conflict with the government), and my mother all shared this sense of responsibility. Periodically, one of us would raise the subject and all would agree that we should gather the family’s papers, catalog them, and make sure they were stored somewhere safe. I would resolve to take it on, but somehow, the forward momentum always stalled and stasis would set in. Then, months later, I would wake in the night with a sudden panic: The documents were scattered, there were materials in my mother’s attic, what if something got lost or damaged? Who was going to interview my father’s personal secretary, the intellectual property attorney who had represented our family for more than a decade, and my father’s friends, not to mention my mother and my aunt and all the others?

  I would plan to begin again. But before I got very far, I would realize once more the logistical complications of this effort and the massive, daunting nature of the subject matter. I would quickly get overwhelmed and lose heart, and then the whole thing would drift away from me. Along the way, our daughter turned three and our son was born. Life was full and busy. It was not the time, I told myself. I didn’t have the mental wherewithal to organize my refrigerator, let alone the Zapruder family’s history of the Zapruder film, even if it was only for our family and for posterity.

  Which I already knew it wouldn’t be.

  If I’m being truly honest with myself, I have to admit that on some level, I felt that taking even the smallest step in this direction meant taking on more than just organizing the family’s papers. I’m a writer. I am drawn to the study of history and I am especially curious about how simple narratives conceal much deeper, more complicated and interesting truths. It was hard to see how inviting this subject into my life wasn’t going to end in my wanting to write a book about it. I had no idea what kind of book it would be or what I would find if I dug into this history; I just knew that there would be questions and that I would want to find answers. At the same time, the thought of publishing a book—that most public of actions—flew in the face of at least one central life principle about the Zapruder film, which was that we did not invite conversation about it. I could see the conflict looming from a hundred miles away.

  As if that weren’t enough of a deterrent, along the way I was going to have to study the history of the Kennedy assassination—a subject I had avoided my entire life—and confront the immense, unspoken complexities of the Zapruder film. People spend their lives on this topic. I hardly knew a thing. Not only that, but my father and my memory of him were imprinted on every part of this story; in order to learn and tell it, I would also have to invite him back in, only to endure his loss again, to face my unanswered questions, and to risk the grief that still sometimes brought me to my knees. And so it would go. I would run through all the reasons that this was a terrible idea. I would parse out all the ways that I didn’t want to do this. I would push the thought aside and leave it all for another day. And it would always come back.

  My brothers—both of them gifted artists—have been the staunchest supporters of my writing. They encouraged me in my earliest thinking about this book, though they understood better than anyone the inherent problems that it raised. In 2010, my twin brother, Michael, sent me a quote from José Saramago’s novel The Cave.

  Begin at the beginning, as if beginning were the clearly visible point of a loosely wound thread and all we had to do was to keep pulling until we reached the other end, and as if, between the former and the latter, we had held in our hands a smooth, continuous thread with no knots to untie, no snarls to untangle, a complete impossibility in the life of a skein, or indeed, if we may be permitted one more stock phrase, in the skein of life… These are the delusions of the pure and the unprepared, the beginning is never the clear, precise end of a thread, the beginning is a long, painfully slow process that requires time and patience in order to find out in which direction it is heading, a process that feels its way along the path ahead like a blind man, the beginning is just the beginning.

  I taped this quote up above my desk where I could see it every day. And somewhere along the way, I found myself pulling the end of the thread, telling myself not to worry about the knots and tangles but just to follow it along for as long as I could. I began gathering the material records of the film—requesting copies of documents from our attorneys and going through my father’s old files in our attic, bringing home papers, letters, and photos from my aunt’s home in Dallas. I went to the National Archives and began wading through the government papers about the film. I also began reading the seminal books about the Kennedy assassination to get some purchase on the events of November 22, 1963, and its aftermath and poring over the handful of books and hundreds of articles about the Zapruder film. I started to interview close family friends, my father’s colleagues, and others from our inner circle who could offer insight into the life of the film. I had lunch with my father’s friends and asked them my questions. I see now that I was practicing the act of talking about the film—such an unfamiliar and uncomfortable experience—with the people I trusted, trying to locate and follow the strands that I knew ran through its history.

  Immersing myself in this material was anything but simple. It was an exercise in learning, calibrating, and interpreting at the same time. As I read, I was amazed at how much I didn’t know—the sheer breadth of the life the film had had without my realizing it. It was not just my grandfather’s story, or even that of our family, but the centrality of the film’s place in the Kennedy assassination debates, how it had challenged norms around the public representation of violence, how it triggered new debates about the media’s role in protecting personal privacy or providing access to information, not to mention who should own and control the public dissemination of personal but historically relevant information. Added to this were all the ways the film had touched American culture, influencing some of the century’s greatest and most provocative filmmakers, artists, and writers.

  And then there was our name. Zapruder. The Zapruder film. Abraham Zapruder. Mr. Zee. The Z-Film. Henry Zapruder. The Zapruder family. Zaprudered. The Zapruder Quotient. The Zapruder Curve. I could not get over my astonishment at seeing it in print so often. The experience was distinctly different than it would have been if our name had been comfortably ambiguous, like “Smith” or “Cohen,” shared with hundreds of thousands of others. But no. It was actually, literally our name, worn only by those who are descended from the man who shot the film. When people used the name Zapruder, there was no mistake about it. They were talking about us.

  I often became overwhelmed by the implications of this research. I would find myself staring off into space, spinning out various strands of thought, trying out alternative narratives and struggling to wrap my mind around the immense significance of this object that bore my name but that I knew so little about. Sometimes, I could tolerate only a few pages of reading at a time. Sometimes, I had to abandon the books altogether and try again later. I frequently stumbled over information that I found upsetting. Sometimes, my reading illuminated aspects of the film’s history I had felt but not known, or sensed but not understood. Sometimes, I found myself forced to think differently about parts of the past I thought I knew. And many times, more often than I liked, I faced characterizations of our family and interpretations of our actions that didn’t tally at all with my knowledge and understanding of who we are.

  This latter part was certainly the most difficult. I had an impending sense of dread each time I began reading about our family—a feeling that criticism was waiting in the wings. It usually was. As I turned the pages, I noticed how my body tensed and my jaw clenched. And when I realized that the topic had shifted to something else, I would find myself relaxing and breathing again. It took work to overcome my natural defensiveness about my family. Most frustrating of all, I didn’t know our own story well enough to counter points of view that seemed wrong or unfair. It was very hard to stay present i
n the face of it all.

  Over the course of this work, I began to see how our family’s insistence on dignity and restraint when it came to talking publicly about the film had left a vacuum in the public story. Everyone but us seemed to own this narrative; each writer told the story and interpreted its meaning with his own facts, information, and perspective. But there was so much they didn’t know. They did not know who my grandfather was and how his life experiences and personality shaped how he handled the film. They did not understand the deeply personal relationship between our grandfather and Richard Stolley, the LIFE reporter who bought the film from him the morning after the assassination, and how that relationship shaped LIFE’s handling of it over the next twelve years. They did not understand why LIFE returned the film to our family in 1975 and the internal family dynamic that brought that about. They did not understand how our father thought about the film, and how he struggled to balance the public interest with his own private feelings about it, and how much our grandfather’s wishes and imperatives shaped everything that followed. They did not know what took place behind the scenes during the 1990s when our family was negotiating with the government about the film. They could not fathom what it was like to be in my father’s place, a Zapruder trying to strike the right balance between personal legacy and public responsibility for the Zapruder film. I might not know very much about the Zapruder film, but I knew a lot about the Zapruders. And I knew that no history of the film was complete without these threads woven into the story.

  Gradually, and with some degree of shock and even dismay, I began to realize that it wasn’t true that the Zapruder film had nothing to do with us. My family might have wished that was the case, but the gaps, distortions, and simplifications in the public story revealed just how much was missing and just how much it mattered. This was the substance of the book whose content I had not been able to imagine years before.

  Now what kept me up at night was not the worry that the materials would be scattered but what would happen when I brought them together and shaped them for myself, imposed my own narrative and interpretation on them. Through contentious times, high-stakes negotiations with plenty of money at stake, not to mention our name and reputation, our family had stuck together. What if, in spite of my best efforts, this book caused conflicts among us? What if it brought about outcomes that I would regret? There were other worries. I could not write a paean to my father or grandfather, but I did not relish the thought of judging their actions, either. Most of all, I knew that our grandfather and father had not welcomed attention about the film; it was difficult not to wonder if the mere act of writing this book would go against their unspoken wishes. As I worked, I struggled to reconcile the personal and historical imperative I felt to write this book with the worry that it would bring unintended and unwelcome consequences.

  These were real fears and they made the early years of this work difficult. But time helped. I mostly focused on tracing the life of the Zapruder film, endeavoring to understand how its public and private strands intersected and influenced each other. I sought to grapple with the complex problems that the film raised for so many people—not just our family but also the media, the federal government, assassination researchers, artists, filmmakers, and the public—and to untangle the vastly different and often conflicting points of view. I wanted to do more than tell “our side” of the story; I wanted to see it from as many sides as I could and to capture the truly maddening contradictions that the film embodies. In time, I began to see that although our relationship to the film was integral to an understanding of it, it was only a part of it. There was a story that was bigger than ours, and there were intrinsic questions that superseded my doubts and worries.

  Along the way, I inevitably had to revisit my own history with the Zapruder film, as well. Although in my growing-up years I did not experience our family’s silence around the film as particularly unusual, I grew to wonder what it was all about. Why didn’t we ever talk about it? Why didn’t I know more about this when I was growing up? Was there something that I needed to understand in order to make sense of the film’s place in our family’s life? Was there a personal legacy of the Zapruder film and, if so, what was it?

  These questions—individual and collective, public and private—are the ones I’ve tried to answer in this book. As in all creative work, it required faith: in the legitimacy of my questions, in the idea that the public story of the film was more complex and meaningful than it seemed, and in the belief that there were new contributions to make even to a topic as well traveled as the Zapruder film. It also demanded faith in my family—in the conviction that no matter how morally complex the situations of the past or how risky it might be to ask questions in the present, we were capable of coming to terms with this part of our legacy. I had to believe that challenging the prevailing culture of silence around the film was a reflection of our values, not a contradiction of them, and that we would be better for incorporating this part of our past into our understanding of our family legacy.

  But when it came to writing about my grandfather and father, whose stories are, after all, at the heart of this book, I found myself facing an entirely new challenge. Before learning the history of the film, without fully knowing the details of my grandfather’s and father’s handling of it, I knew there was a risk that I would run into facts, details, or decisions that might run counter to what I expected or undermine my fierce tendency to defend them against criticism. For this, I had to draw upon convictions that ran deeper than knowledge—never a comfortable position for a writer of history. Still, I felt sure that each of them had wrestled in their own time with the private and public problems that the Zapruder film raised, that they had confronted the hard decisions, weighed their conflicting desires, tested their values, and faced the consequences of their mistakes. This is who they were in every other part of their lives; how could it be different when it came to the film? Whatever else the story might reveal, I believed that it was their humanity, above all, that shaped how they bore the burdens of the Zapruder film. This is why there is a story to tell, one that offers us all a deeper understanding of the film’s dilemmas and its place in American life. That faith was entirely borne out in the writing of this book.

  PROLOGUE

  HOME MOVIE

  It was past ten p.m. when Abe Zapruder pulled up in the driveway of his house on Marquette Street in the Highland Park suburb of Dallas. Exhausted and agitated, he turned the key in the ignition and pulled it out, sat for a moment in the darkened car, images of the day passing before his eyes. He dropped his head, disbelief washing over him yet again. His eyes felt dry and raw, his throat sore from screaming, his head aching. He had to go in. They had been waiting for him for hours. He reached over to the passenger side of the car and pulled the camera case by its long shoulder strap, the weight of it bumping across the seat, the silver buckle clattering. He reached for the bright yellow Kodak boxes in which the 8mm film reel and one duplicate had been hastily stashed. He suddenly remembered the technician handing them to him. “There’ll be no charge, Mr. Zapruder.” Had he even thanked him? He couldn’t remember. He grabbed his hat and put it on as he slid from the car, then slung the camera over his shoulder, cradled the films in his arm, and slammed the car door.

  His wife, Lillian, met him at the door. “Oh, Abe,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. He looked at her face for a moment and shook his head. There were no words. Passing through the family room, he crossed the hallway, with his wife following behind. In the dining room, the table wasn’t set for dinner. Normally, his daughter, Myrna, and her husband, Myron, would have brought their three children for Friday night dinner. Lil would say the blessings over the candles and he would recite the words of thanksgiving over the wine and bread. He wasn’t a religious man, but tradition mattered. They would eat Lil’s broiled chicken, or a brisket, or maybe both, and they would discuss politics, arguing and laughing, talking over each other. But not tonight. Tonight—as in home
s all across the darkened landscape of America—this was a house of mourning.

  Now Abe moved about the house quickly. Where was the projector? Turning right, he darted into the den, where Myrna and Myron were sitting, still in shock. He saw confusion, grief, and a trace of rage on his daughter’s face as she stood up and came toward him. He didn’t stop to talk; all he could think about was the film. He dug around in the closet until he found the projector and the screen. He yanked them out and began setting them up. Lillian stood nearby, uncharacteristically silent, reading her husband of thirty years, the man she had loved since she was a teenager in Brooklyn. Now was not the time to push him. After a pause, Myrna said, “What are you doing?” He still did not answer. He began threading the film through the projector and onto the take-up reel. Myrna’s face registered comprehension. “I can’t watch that,” she said. “I don’t want to see it.” He didn’t blame her. But he had to do it. He didn’t know when the thought had come to him. He just knew that all during the long, incomprehensible day, he had been thinking that he needed to get home, to see his family. He needed to show them his film.

  A few minutes later, they were ready: Abe at the projector, Lil and Myron seated nervously on the couch. Myrna retreated to the living room, weeping, her head buried in the couch pillows. The den had been his son Henry’s room, and it was here that Abe always showed the home movies, projected against the stand-up screen. He had been taking home movies for nearly thirty years—Myrna as a baby in Brooklyn, his wife and family at the beach in Far Rockaway, Henry toddling on a city sidewalk, then, later, the children riding bikes in Dallas, a visit to Fair Park. Hours of unexceptional films spanning the thirties, forties, and fifties. Home movies that caught the past—their parents now dead, the streets of Jewish Brooklyn changed, his young children grown and married—saving at least a bit of it for his own memory and for the grandchildren who would come after him. Only this time, he and his family weren’t telling stories and talking and remembering. The room was completely silent but for the clicking of the film running through the projector.