Twenty-Six Seconds

by Alexandra Zapruder

  In the flood of mail that LIFE received about the memorial edition, I did not see any letters explicitly protesting the use of the images in color. But LIFE was prepared just in case, crafting a careful response in defense of both the purchase of the film and the publication of its images:

  We are concerned by your reaction to LIFE’s purchase and publication of the pictures of President Kennedy’s assassination and by your distress… The tragic death of President Kennedy will bring painful memories to all of us who have lived through it. But we feel the event—in its totality—is inescapably a part of our history. As editors of LIFE, our assignment and duty is to report this history as it is and as it happens, however painful and terrible it may be. And for this reason, we gave the most complete coverage we could to the events of November 22nd and the sorrow-filled days that followed.

  The letter goes on to mention Abe’s donation to Mrs. Tippit and informs the reader that Mrs. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and other members of the family “warmly admired and appreciated” the issue.

  It’s worth noting that the internal memos from the LIFE archives clearly show that the staff viewed the publication of the memorial edition as a public service and the fulfillment of their responsibility not only to their subscribers and readers who could not get the previous two issues but also to the nation. As George Hunt put it, “It fell to LIFE to do what LIFE has always done best; to bring memorable events into sharp focus; to show with force and clarity the faces and hearts of people caught up in the news; to paint with swift, broad strokes the look and feel of the events that will stand for many years as a permanent record of the day, to make all who shared in it agree, this week or a decade from now, ‘yes, that’s how it was.’” To this end, LIFE did not seek to make a profit from the memorial edition. They sold it nearly at cost, for fifty cents, and when it nevertheless made a profit, they donated all proceeds to the Kennedy Library. A beautiful, hand-signed letter from Mrs. Kennedy remains in the archives. “Your memorial issue was an appropriate tribute to President Kennedy and the desire of so many people to have a copy was another touching tribute to him,” she wrote. “I am most grateful that you gave the proceeds to the cause that is closest to my heart—his Library.”

  At the same time that the editors of LIFE were looking at the film to decide how and what to publish for the edification of the public, the federal government was organizing itself to begin an inquiry into the assassination of the president, which would necessitate scrutiny of the film as evidence in the murder. The life of the Zapruder film was, from the beginning, splintered in this way—viewed and used by different segments of society for their own purposes, sometimes alongside and sometimes in direct conflict with each other.

  President Lyndon Johnson established the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy on November 29, appointing seven members with Chief Justice Earl Warren as chairman. The Secret Service and the FBI had already put forward the theory that Lee Harvey Oswald had fired all three shots from the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository and had been the sole assassin. In the lengthy reports they compiled from the early days of the investigation, these agencies postulated that the first shot had hit President Kennedy in the back of the neck; the second hit Governor Connally; and the third caused the fatal wound to the president’s head. Governor John Connally agreed with these findings based on his recollections of what happened inside the motorcade. So when the editors at LIFE crafted their written description of the events shown on the film images for the November 29 issue and later in the memorial issue, they held to that basic narrative.

  In spite of the official explanation, many in the public wondered if the murder had been the work of a conspiracy, a possibility that seemed even more likely after Jack Ruby shot and killed Oswald just two days after the assassination. The following week, associate editor Paul Mandel wrote an article in LIFE, optimistically titled END TO NAGGING RUMORS: THE SIX CRITICAL SECONDS, in which he attributes the rumors to the fact that “the best evidence which could dissolve them, the contents of Oswald’s mind, was now irretrievable.” He went on to challenge the main arguments against the single shooter, though some of his facts are mistaken, and restated the description from the previous issue that two bullets hit the president and one hit Governor Connally. He also made the case for the use of the 8mm film of the assassination to establish a time clock of the events in question, arguing that the whole sequence took place in 6.8 seconds, enough time for Oswald to have fired three times—a mathematical contention that would be calculated and recalculated countless times in the decades to come.

  Meanwhile, it appears that at some point in early December, the Secret Service in Washington enlisted the help of the CIA in analyzing the film. This part of the story turns out to be maddeningly confusing: There is scant official documentation and conflicting, sometimes unreliable testimonies from those involved, often given decades after the fact. As a result, there are wildly divergent conclusions about what happened and the implications. Trying to isolate the hard evidence and write an account based upon it is hampered by conspiracy theorists who have commingled facts and speculation to form narratives that proliferate in print and on the Internet. After getting lost in this labyrinth more times than I could count, I eventually found a guide in Richard Trask, author of National Nightmare on Six Feet of Film: Mr. Zapruder’s Home Movie and the Murder of President Kennedy, and a measured and reliable historian of these events.

  According to Trask, the likely scenario is as follows: As we know, the Secret Service had flown Copy 3 of the film from Dallas to Washington on Friday night, November 22. The agency then urgently enlisted the help of the CIA to make copies of certain frames of the film. Late on Saturday (or possibly Sunday) night, Ben Hunter and Homer McMahon, two employees of the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC), were called in to the lab. The NPIC was a little-known office charged with solving national intelligence problems by using photo interpretation and imagery analysis. Since the lab had the necessary state-of-the-art enlarging equipment, Hunter and McMahon were put to work making enlargements of the film, a task that was described as “above top secret.” Trask, who gleaned this information from careful scrutiny of interviews conducted in the 1990s with Hunter and McMahon, described the technical process: “The work done on the film was accomplished using the special ‘10-20-40 processing enlarger’ with a full-immersion ‘wet-gate’ used to create internegative prints forty times the original size. These internegatives were then utilized to produce multiple color prints of selected frames.”

  It’s not clear what, if anything, the Secret Service did with these reproductions of the film until early December, when they—again in conjunction with the CIA and NPIC—seem to have analyzed the film more thoroughly. Nearly nothing was known about the NPIC handling of the Zapruder film until the midseventies, when first-generation assassination researcher Paul Hoch came across CIA Document 450 among other materials he had received in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. This record confirms that the NPIC analysis took place and establishes that two sets of four large briefing boards with enlargements of the film were created, though the document does not state when or by whom. Much later, NPIC photo analyst Dino Brugioni would state that he made two of these briefing boards, although it appears that his memory of the timing and other details was not accurate.

  In Document 450, there is a prominent reference to LIFE’s report that Abe’s camera was running at 18 frames per second—an important fact for establishing a time clock of the assassination. This information had first appeared in Paul Mandel’s December 6 LIFE magazine article, which makes it even more likely that the in-depth analysis of the film at NPIC happened several weeks after the assassination. As Trask suggests, it seems that Hunter and McMahon’s efforts to create enlargements of the film took place urgently, over the weekend of the assassination, so that the Secret Service and CIA could clearly see the images on the film. Then, wee
ks later, amid rising questions about whether the early FBI and Secret Service accounts of the assassination were correct, the CIA and NPIC undertook a more comprehensive analysis of the enlargements from the film in order to try to establish the timing and impact of the shots fired at the motorcade.

  Who cares when it happened? After all, a report of two security agencies working together to glean as much information as they could about the president’s assassination seems innocuous enough. But don’t be fooled. Decades later, this link between the film and the CIA would become fodder for elaborate conspiracy theories whose proof, in many cases, rested on very different readings of the testimonies provided by these aging former NPIC personnel.

  At approximately the same time, in early December, the Warren Commission requested access to a copy of the Zapruder film from LIFE magazine. In the simplest of terms, their main focus in examining the film was to try to determine, in the words of assistant counsel Howard Willens, “which of the bullets hit whom and when.” To this end, general manager Art Keylor at LIFE had a copy of the film couriered to Washington, DC, on December 10 for their use. That same day, Keylor sent the original film to his colleague, senior editor John Jenkisson, with a cover memo: “Here is the original of the Zapruder assassination film for salting away in a vault. Because of the hazard of damaging the film, this one should not be used for projection.”

  Within a month, Keylor wrote another memo expressing the first concerns about the film prints and how they were being circulated. It was just the beginning of an issue that would preoccupy LIFE magazine for the full term of its ownership of the film. “I think we are all agreed we ought to be careful about the prints that are in existence on the Kennedy assassination film,” he wrote, going on to document the status and location of the various copies of the film. He proposed a plan to keep track of them, and, as for the copies in the possession of the federal government, he suggested that he “write a letter to the Secret Service in both Dallas and Washington and the Warren Commission officially requesting the return of the material when no further use is required by these organizations.” In early February, Secret Service chief James Rowley wrote to LIFE’s Washington bureau chief, Henry Suydam, with his response. It was an unequivocal no. He explained that Abraham Zapruder had duplicates of the film made expressly for the “official use” of the Secret Service before he sold the original to LIFE and that since that deal was made after the fact, it was of no concern to the Secret Service. “Please be assured,” he concluded, “that it will not be shown by us to anyone outside the Government unless for official investigative purposes. However, we consider it part of the official Secret Service file of the investigation of the assassination of President Kennedy.”

  Members of the commission staff, the FBI, and a photographic expert from the FBI laboratory named Lyndal Shaneyfelt examined the film seven times between January and April. At first, they worked from a second-generation copy of the film, but Shaneyfelt believed it was necessary to review the original because it would show much more detail. On February 11, Jenkisson drafted another memo, which began “Assassination film again.” He had just learned that the Warren Commission planned to request access to the original film because “the FBI [was] having trouble determining the trajectories of the shots” and they thought that “a look at the original film might help.” It is clear from the memo that LIFE was perfectly willing to help the Warren Commission; at the same time, executives were very concerned for the film’s safety. It is not stated explicitly in any of the memos, but I can’t help remembering those six frames of the original film that had been damaged in Chicago. The senior executives and editors at LIFE were among the few who understood not only how valuable and precious this film was turning out to be, but also how fragile.

  Herbert Orth, assistant chief of LIFE’s photographic laboratory, personally brought the camera-original film from New York to Washington for the commission to review on February 25. They watched it through several times, though they did not stop to examine it for fear of damaging it. At this time, Orth offered to make 35mm transparencies of key frames of the film (frames 171–434) so that the commission could study them more thoroughly. Shaneyfelt explained how they used their duplicate copy of the film in his testimony before the commission:

  In each case we would take the film and run it through regular speed, slow motion, we would stop it on individual frames and study it frame by frame, trying to see in the photographs anything that would give any indication of a shot hitting its mark, a reaction of the president, a reaction of Mr. Connally or Mrs. Connally, reaction of the Secret Service agents, reaction of people in the crowd, relating it to all the facts that we felt were important. When we obtained the slides from LIFE magazine, we went through those very thoroughly, because they gave so much more detail and were so much clearer.

  For the Warren Commission, the film’s main value was in establishing a time clock of the assassination. By determining the precise speed of the camera (how many frames elapsed per second) and correlating the timing with the visual evidence of the bullets’ impacts on the president and Governor Connally, they sought to establish a reliable sequence of events, including how many bullets were fired into the car, which ones hit the president and Governor Connally, and, among other things, whether Oswald could have worked the bolt action on his Mannlicher-Carcano rifle fast enough to fire all the shots.

  In addition to looking at the film, the commission needed to conduct some tests on the Bell and Howell camera, as well. It had, in fact, already been tested by the time the Warren Commission began its work. In National Nightmare, Trask wrote that on December 4, a local agent of the FBI got the camera from Abe to send on to Washington for testing. Sure enough, I later found the receipt for that loan amid some unsorted papers that were turned over to me by my mother and my aunt. Handwritten on yellowing lined paper, the note reads: “Received this date, from Mr. Abraham Zapruder, one Bell and Howell 8 mm movie camera (and case) which will be returned upon completion of its use to FBI.” It was signed by Special Agent Robert Barrett of the FBI, the same Dallas field agent who had been assigned (and failed) to get the Secret Service copy of the film duplicated the day after the assassination.

  When they were finished using it, the camera was returned to Abe (he had received a request to donate it to the Bell and Howell archives), but then the Warren Commission requested it. They wanted to check the speed of the camera when it was fully spring-loaded and as it ran down during the course of filming, to ensure that the frames-per-second rate was accurate. The testing showed that 18.3 fps was still an accurate calculation. As the commission reviewed the evidence, they saw significant problems with the initial scenario described by the FBI and the Secret Service. In Max Holland’s 2014 Newsweek article, he neatly explains the problem:

  [The commission] came to realize that the president and the governor had been wounded in such a brief time span that Oswald could not have worked the bolt action on his Mannlicher-Carcano rifle to fire two shots so quickly and accurately. Consequently, the staff theorized that there were either two shooters, or one of the bullets hit both men. The latter seemed more plausible, in part because Oswald had used military ammunition designed to pass through people. Besides, there was another insurmountable problem with the Life-FBI scenario: If a bullet, traveling at an entrance velocity of 1,900 feet per second, penetrated the president’s upper back, where did it go after exiting his throat at a velocity of 1,800 feet per second? Only one other person or object in the limousine was struck by a bullet, and that was Connally.

  Where, indeed, did that bullet land? If it didn’t hit Connally, they argued, it would have damaged the interior of the limousine, and there was no evidence of that. Sometime in March, Arlen Specter is credited with articulating a new theory for the first time: The first bullet hit the president, passed through the back of his neck and exited his throat, and then hit Governor Connally in the back, exited his chest, shattered his wrist, and lodged itself in his thigh
. The second bullet missed. The third bullet caused the fatal head wound to the president. Thus was born the “single bullet” or “magic bullet” theory, which would cause no end of controversy—and even ridicule—for decades to come.

  The members of the staff were well aware that it sounded implausible at first blush. Not only that, but it directly contradicted Connally’s own beliefs about what had happened; he believed that he had been struck by a second bullet and that it was not the same bullet that had hit the president. Mrs. Connally and another Secret Service agent corroborated the governor’s opinion. To test the single-bullet hypothesis, the commission staff decided to reenact the assassination in situ in Dallas. In spite of resistance from the Secret Service and the FBI—who, along with other concerns, did not want their initial conclusions to be proven incorrect—the commission staff carried out this complicated and elaborate plan on a Sunday morning, May 24, 1964. Using the film as a time clock of the assassination, they proceeded with certain assumptions, namely: that a shot, which they believed was the first one, hit the president sometime between frames 210 and 225; that the governor was wounded by the same bullet; and that the final shot came at frame 313. They positioned agents in crucial locations: standing in for Oswald in his “sniper’s nest,” sitting in for each of the occupants of the limousine, and standing where three key photographers had stood along the motorcade route—Abe Zapruder, Orville Nix, and Marie Muchmore. They marked the spots along Elm Street that represented where the car was when the shots were fired and took into account the various landmarks that they believed would have been a factor (a large tree obstructing Oswald’s view and a large freeway sign obstructing Abe’s view). By the end of the day, they were satisfied that the scenario they had proposed was indeed plausible.