Twenty-Six Seconds

by Alexandra Zapruder

  Abe returned to Jennifer around 11:30 a.m. with his camera. First he filmed a few minutes of Lillian to fill up side A of the reel of film already in the camera and then flipped it over so he could start with a fresh side for the motorcade. There was a big discussion among the staff about where they should stand to get the best view. Several decided to congregate on Dealey Plaza, along the stretch of Elm Street that would mark the last leg of the motorcade. Compared to Main Street, where spectators were five deep, cheering and waving, the crowds along Elm were fairly thin. There was a mass exodus from Jennifer shortly after noon, with nearly everybody “hitting the elevator,” in Lillian’s words, on the way down to the street, except for a handful of people who went out on the fire escape to watch from there. Nearly everybody: Marilyn, who wasn’t a supporter of the president, decided to go open her first bank account instead. Erwin, too, left the office to attend a meeting at North Park Inn just as the staff began to filter out around 11:45. As the office emptied out, Abe realized that someone had to stay back to keep an eye on the place. He gallantly offered to stay instead of Lillian. Years later, she remembered, “Mr. Zee was telling me to take the camera and I could go and he would stay, but he didn’t really mean it. But anyway, he said it. So he went on but I stayed there and I could see. I had the window open. It was a warm day, beautiful day, the sun was shining.”

  Camera in hand, Abe went down to Dealey Plaza to scout out a location. He tried a few places, walking all along the curb on Elm Street, but could not find solid footing there. Another spot was blocked by a tree. After a while, Marilyn Sitzman came walking up the hill. All the banks had been closed because of the president’s visit, so she gave up and walked back to the plaza, where she encountered Abe taking some test shots of his payroll clerk Beatrice Hester and her husband, Charles, sitting on the pergola at the back of the plaza. As Abe continued to look for a place to stand, Marilyn suggested a four-foot-high concrete abutment. It was a perfect location—high above the street, giving him a clear view of the length of Elm; the president and Mrs. Kennedy would ride right past him in the open-top limousine. There was a risk, however: He would need to set the telephoto lens on full zoom in order to get a clear view of them, and he worried that he would get dizzy standing up on the ledge while following them through the lens as they passed by. Since he suffered from vertigo, this was a real possibility. So, as Abe climbed up on the ledge and found his bearings, he asked Marilyn to stand behind him and steady him if he started to lose his balance.

  Abe Zapruder wasn’t the only photographer on the scene. In fact, there were no fewer than twenty-two photographers on Dealey Plaza, most of them amateurs, positioned along the last part of the motorcade route. Some were shooting black-and-white or color stills, Polaroids, or 35mm slides, while several others had movie cameras loaded with color film. It seemed everyone had the same idea. Mary Moorman and James Altgens, their cameras loaded with black-and-white film, were positioned near the curb across the street from where Abe was standing. Farther up the street, near the hairpin turn from Houston to Elm, Phillip Willis stood ready with color film in his camera. Marie Muchmore was standing on the opposite side of Elm from Abe, on a grassy area set back from the street, her movie camera loaded with color film. Over on Main, Orville Nix was waiting with a movie camera and color film, as well.

  Up on the concrete ledge, Abe looked out for the motorcade. When the lead motorcycles rounded Houston to Elm Street, he started filming, only to stop when he realized that it was not the president’s car yet. He re-cranked the mechanism of the camera to “full wind” so that it would run for the maximum amount of time. He didn’t start filming again until he could see the president and the first lady coming toward him in the car. Years later, in an interview she gave with my mother, Marilyn remembered, “When they started to make their first turn, turning into the street, he said, ‘OK, here we go.’”

  Those first few seconds of the film are perfect: The sun is shining and you can clearly see the unmistakable, handsome face of the president as he brushes his hair from his face, lowering his arm as he turns toward the crowds on his right, smiling, and raising his hand again to wave briefly. For an instant, the back of a freeway sign obscures the limousine, and then the Kennedys reappear. “As it came in line with my camera, I heard a shot,” Abe later recalled. The president’s elbows fly up, his face distorted in pain, and he suddenly hunches forward as his wife looks at Governor Connally, sitting in the jump seat across from them, before turning back to her husband with visible confusion on her face. “I saw the president lean over to Jacqueline. I didn’t realize what had happened,” Abe remembered.

  The next part of the sequence always feels agonizingly long to me, even though it took place in seconds. The car dips into the lower part of the camera frame, and as the president’s body sinks down in the car toward his wife, the fatal shot strikes him. “And then I realized,” Abe said. “I saw his head open up and I started yelling, ‘They killed him! They killed him!’” Jackie recoils, her mouth open in horror, and suddenly she is climbing out of the open-top car, scrambling on the back hood of the limousine, met by Secret Service agent Clint Hill, who pushes her back down into the seat.

  For an instant, Abe and Marilyn stood stunned on the concrete stump, paralyzed by what had just happened. Then someone behind them dropped a soda bottle, which made a loud crack and shattered on the concrete. Marilyn recalled that the noise woke them out of their shocked trance. “Some people were screaming,” she said. “I mean, it was utter chaos by that time. But the first thing I remember is after that bottle hit and I looked down… everybody was laying flat on the ground almost. There might have been one or two people still standing but I would say that ninety-eight percent of the people were still laying flat on the side of the hill.”

  Abe never remembered getting down from the ledge or anything that happened in the immediate aftermath of the shooting except for his own anguished screams. A still photo taken by James Altgens of the Associated Press shows Marilyn and Abe in his hat and bow tie, holding the camera; they are faintly visible in the far background, having just gotten down from their perch. They moved toward the pergola where the Hesters had been standing during the motorcade, but in the panic and chaos, Abe soon got separated from the rest of them. He was by himself on the plaza, distraught and in a daze, with the camera still in his hand and the case slung over his shoulder, when he encountered Harry McCormick, a reporter from the Dallas Morning News. McCormick had been at the Trade Mart waiting for the president to arrive when he heard of the shooting. He rushed over to Dealey Plaza, where he spotted Abe holding his camera and immediately approached him to find out if he had caught the shooting on film. Abe answered that he would not speak about the film with anyone but the federal authorities. In Harry’s account, it was he who told Abe that the Secret Service would want to see the film, and he offered to get Dallas Secret Service chief Forrest Sorrels and bring him to Jennifer Juniors.

  Somehow Abe got back to the office. Lillian remembered that “Everybody was going nuts, turning on the television. There was nothing and you couldn’t get anything on television… So anyway, he walked in, and he handed me the camera. He says, ‘I’ve got it all on there.’” Abe later tried to piece together his memory of the traumatic first moments after the assassination. “Well, I was in a state of shock when I got back,” he said, “and I was kicking and banging the desk. I couldn’t understand how a thing like this could happen. I personally have never seen anybody killed in my life, and to see something like this, shooting a man down like a dog, I just couldn’t believe.”

  His first instinct was to call his son, Henry. In his confusion, he dialed the home phone number and reached his daughter-in-law, Margie, instead, who had been home waiting for a furniture delivery and listening to the radio when the news broke. She knew that the president had been shot, but like everyone else in the nation, she did not know yet that he was dead. This was one of the few stories I remember hearing from my childhoo
d, perhaps because the innate awfulness of it impressed me. When I asked her to tell me the story, my mother recalled, “Papa called the house and said, ‘Is Henry there?’ and I said, ‘He’s at his office.’… He said the president had been killed. And I said, ‘Well, he’s been shot. He’s been taken to Parkland Hospital.’” He was distracted and rushing, she said, very anxious to reach Henry, never stopping to explain what he knew or that he had a film of the shooting. Like many others during that long hour between the shooting and the announcement that the president was dead, she tried to reassure him that the president was being treated at Parkland and might yet survive. But Abe insisted that the president was dead. “He knew,” she said, and even fifty years later, I hear the sadness and resignation in her voice.

  Abe was able to reach Henry at his office at the Justice Department shortly before the phone lines got jammed. “He was crying,” Henry recalled in an account he wrote thirty-five years later. “He said that the president was dead. I protested that this was not true, that the radio had reported that he had been taken to Parkland, the emergency hospital in Dallas. There was no way, my father said, that the president could have survived. He told me that he had seen the president’s head ‘explode.’ He kept saying how horrible it was that Mrs. Kennedy had been there when this happened to her husband and expressing his own horror at having seen the president ‘shot down in the street.’ [He] told me that he had a film of the assassination and discussed with me what he should do with it… He kept saying that the president was dead, asking me how this could happen in America.”

  By the time he got off the phone with his son, Abe was resolved to get the film into the hands of federal authorities. Meanwhile, Marilyn Sitzman and the Hesters were heading back toward the office through streets suddenly jammed with police: detectives and officers from the Dallas Police and the sheriff’s office, all trying to collect clues and eyewitness testimony. On their way, they ran into Darwin Payne, a young reporter for the Dallas Times Herald, at the corner of Houston and Elm. He had been working on a story about Jacqueline Kennedy when he got word of the shooting. He rushed to the Book Depository Building where, he later recalled, “There were some women who worked at the next building for Abraham Zapruder who said, ‘Our boss took pictures of it. He has a movie camera.’ And that, of course, was of great interest to me, so… they led me to him, in the building next door. We went up to the fifth or sixth floor, whichever floor he was on. There he was in an office. He was a dress manufacturer, and I saw him and talked to him.”

  Payne said that Abe was in tears and that he knew for certain that the president was dead, even though the TV was on in the office and the national news hadn’t reported it yet. Payne’s fragmentary notes, scrawled in a blue spiral-bound notebook, survive to this day. They read: “I got film. I saw it hit in head. They were going so fast. [Illegible] Slumped over with first shot. Second shot hit him in head. It opened up. Couldn’t be alive. She was beside him. After last shot, she crawled over back of car.”

  Payne wasted no time trying to acquire the film for his paper. “I was trying to get Zapruder to let us take the… to go with me to the Times Herald with his film and see about having it developed,” he remembered. “To see if he had anything. And I told him I felt certain that we’d pay him for the film. He said he didn’t want to do that. He said he wanted to give it to the Secret Service or the FBI.” When that approach failed, Payne enlisted the help of the paper’s publisher. “So I got [James] Chambers on the telephone,” he said, “and we had a three-way conversation… Chambers, myself, and Zapruder. And he told Zapruder that he was very interested in the film. He would pay him for it, you know, if it were good.” But still Abe refused. He insisted that he was going to get it to the Secret Service.

  In an oral-history interview nearly forty years later, Payne remembers a flash of an idea and relays it with a smile: “The camera was on top of a filing cabinet right there. And in a fleeting moment, I thought, ‘Well, I could grab it. Nobody would stop me. I could grab the camera and run.’ Of course, I didn’t.” It wouldn’t be the last time that members of the media lost their heads for a minute or two over what they thought might be the scoop of the century.

  Minutes later, the phone rang. It was Erwin, calling from a friend’s house where he had been following the news of the shooting. In an interview, he recalled: “I picked up the phone and I called the office and I hear screaming, turmoil, and I said to the girl, ‘What’s going on?’ She said, ‘Oh, Mr. Schwartz, the police are here with shotguns.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ And she said, ‘Oh, Mr. Zee has the films and they want the films and he told me to put it in the safe.’… And I said, ‘Where’s Mr. Zee?’ She said, ‘He’s in his office, crying.’ And she went and got him, and he picked up the phone and said, ‘Erwin, Erwin, it was terrible. I saw his head come off.’ I said, ‘I’ll be right there.’ I said, ‘Just stay there. I’ll be there as quick as I can.’”

  When Erwin arrived at Jennifer and got off the elevator on the fourth floor, he found two uniformed Dallas police officers with shotguns standing in the outer vestibule. When he asked them why they were there, he recalled that they said, “We came to get the film.” Abe had declined to give it to them as well; he was waiting for the federal authorities. Erwin brushed past them and went straight to Abe’s office, where he found him still in shock, still saying over and over that the president’s head had exploded and how horrific it had been. Erwin said, “Who… why do they want this film? Why are they after the film?” And Abe answered, “I told them I’d give it to them but only to someone in authority.”

  All this time, Harry McCormick had been looking for Dallas Secret Service chief Forrest Sorrels. Sorrels had been in the lead car of the motorcade and had ridden to Parkland in advance of the president’s limousine. At Parkland, he commandeered a police car and rode back to the area of the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD) Building to start trying to piece together what had happened. He brought two witnesses to the sheriff’s office just across the street to have their testimony taken. While there, he ran into McCormick. Sorrels described their meeting in an official affidavit: “At that time Mr. Harry McCormack [sic], who is a reporter for the Dallas Morning News, and whom I have known for many years, came to me and says, ‘Forrest, I have something over here you ought to know about.’ I said, ‘What have you got here?’ He said, ‘I have a man over here that got pictures of this whole thing.’ I said, ‘Let’s go see him.’ So we went on to a building at the corner of Elm and Houston, on the east side of Houston, and across the street from the court house building there, up to the office of a Mr. Zapruder.”

  Payne remembered their arrival. “A group of people came in… ties, coats, and all that. And they were Secret Service… With them was Harry McCormick, the police reporter for the Dallas Morning News. They had come to get the film… They went into an office and shut the door. Harry McCormick went with them as they shut the door. I went in, decided I was going to go in, too… I mean, I was a reporter, as well. They said nope, no reporters admitted. And there I saw that Harry McCormick was already in the room. He was at the opposition paper… And so I said, ‘I’ve got to be in there. If McCormick’s in there, you’ve got to let me in there.’ So they kicked McCormick out.” But not before Harry could offer $1,000 for the film, which Abe again refused.

  While the two frustrated reporters waited outside, Abe, Erwin, and Sorrels discussed matters in the office. Sorrels described the meeting in his Warren Commission testimony the following May. “Mr. Zapruder was real shook up,” he recalled. “He said that he didn’t know how in the world he had taken these pictures… and he says, ‘My God, I saw the whole thing. I saw the man’s brains come out of his head.’ And so I asked Mr. Zapruder would it be possible for us to get a copy of those films. He said yes.” Erwin remembered it this way: “Forrest Sorrels identified himself and Zapruder said, ‘I’ll give you the film. I’d like to.’ [Sorrels] said, ‘Well, let’s see if we can’t get it
developed.’”

  Getting the film developed was not as easy as one might think. At some point, Harry McCormick had suggested that they might have luck at the Dallas Morning News. So the group decided to go over there to try. They retrieved the camera from the company safe and left with the two police officers who had been waiting in the vestibule. The officers escorted Abe, Erwin, Forrest Sorrels, and Harry McCormick in a squad car with its siren blaring, while Darwin Payne resumed his investigation by heading over to the Texas School Book Depository. They arrived at the Dallas Morning News and inquired about processing the film, but, as Forrest Sorrels later put it in his Warren Commission testimony, “There was no one there that would tackle the job.” Perhaps unwilling to let the film out of his sight, McCormick suggested they try the ABC affiliate WFAA-TV, which was located right next door.

  When they arrived, program director Jay Watson was already on the air, having interrupted the station’s regular programming to cover the shooting. He was interviewing eyewitnesses from the scene and trying to report the news as it came in. It wasn’t long before the producers nabbed Abe and put him on the air while Erwin stood off to the side, holding the camera inside its leather case. In retrospect, it’s another strange twist in a story of coincidences that the man who caught the moment on film was himself caught on film almost immediately afterward, preserving his first, fresh impressions of the event that changed his life.

  In the grainy black-and-white image, Abe is neatly dressed in a dark suit, with a white shirt, a small dark bow tie, and just the hint of a white pocket square. He is wearing glasses, the classic 1960s browline style framed in dark plastic along the top and rimless on the bottom. He is obviously agitated and upset, moving around uncomfortably in his chair and repeatedly clearing his throat as he speaks. Meanwhile, Watson is smoking and looks slightly bored, holding an on-set phone to his ear and distractedly adjusting the microphone as Abe describes finding a place to shoot the pictures and what happened until the motorcade came into view. “As the president was coming down… I heard a shot, and he slumped to the side like this,” he said, slumping over. Still no reaction from Watson, who has the phone to his ear, looking off camera. “Then I heard another shot or two, I couldn’t say whether it was one or two, and I saw his head practically open up”—Watson suddenly swivels around, leaning in and locking on as Abe raises his hand to his head, gesturing to show the explosion of the president’s skull—“all blood and everything, and I just kept on shooting.” Watson is staring at him now, completely motionless. “That’s about all,” he says, deflated, and then there is a momentary pause, just the slightest shake of the head and exhale of breath as he struggles for composure. He looks down, shaking his head again, and I can almost see the adrenaline coursing through him, his disbelief and revulsion. Still shaking his head, he pushes himself to speak. “I’m just sick, I can’t… terrible, terrible.”