Twenty-Six Seconds

by Alexandra Zapruder

  Things had changed in America when it came to the Kennedy assassination. Conversations about conspiracy and the legitimacy of the Warren Commission were no longer the purview of outliers or fringe elements; to the contrary, they were increasingly being taken up among mainstream news media and respected voices across a number of disciplines. LIFE magazine was well aware of the change in the air. Given the magazine’s centrality both as America’s beloved print magazine and as the holder of a vital piece of visual evidence, the editors of LIFE decided in 1966 that it was time to urge the reopening of the investigation into the Kennedy assassination. On October 7, Loudon Wainwright wrote an editorial for LIFE that precisely captures the mainstream perspective on the question. He described his own feelings at the publication of the Warren Report in the fall of 1964, his inclination to accept its conclusions based on its exhaustive scope and the prestige of its members, and his sense of relief that there might be an end to the “monstrous” grief shadow of the previous year. He acknowledges that there were always those who saw conspiracy and admits that he felt that much of this seemed “shady” and repellent to him. But now, books and articles had begun to appear that he could not ignore, indeed that had “shaken badly” his comfortable confidence in the Warren Report. “If they haven’t entirely swung me over to their view,” he wrote, “I, like many others, am beginning to wish very much for further clarification.” Wainwright made the case for a new investigation, arguing that this matter was far too important to be left to “individuals acting on their own initiative” or “historians of future generations.” Serious doubts had been legitimately raised, he says, and it would not do to ignore them. He concluded the editorial with this:

  Recently I saw again the amateur movie film which is the best record of the moment of the assassination. I had not seen it since the weeks immediately following President Kennedy’s death, and that mounting sense of horror came right back as soon as the leading motorcycles came into view on the little screen. The old incredulity persisted as the gleaming caravan approached down Elm Street. The open car went behind the road sign, it reappeared, and the President’s hands were at his throat, Governor Connally turned and then fell backward, and then—as the projector whirred in time and space so far removed from Dallas on November 22, 1963—there was the ghastly impact of the killing shot against the President’s head. It is too much, too much. Yet we must look at it, reverse it and run it again, slow it and stop it and find out everything about it, because it happened.

  Sometime in October, Bernard Geis arranged a meeting between Josiah Thompson, Loudon Wainwright, and members of the editorial staff of LIFE who were working on an issue revisiting the Warren Commission and the question of conspiracy. The way Thompson explained it in a later interview is that LIFE wanted and needed to be ahead of the curve on their investigation and reporting, and that it would take too long for any single person to familiarize himself with the vast amount of material that had already been accumulated on the assassination. But here was Josiah Thompson, a respectable scholar with a book contract, who could codirect the project as a consultant. Everyone’s interests and abilities seemed to align perfectly: Thompson desperately wanted access to the copies of the Zapruder film at LIFE (which were far better than either the second-generation copies at the National Archives or the reproductions in the Warren Report), and the magazine’s editors would get an expert to write an article, or several articles, that would appear sometime in the first half of 1967. They would begin with an issue for November 1966 about reopening the investigation and go from there. “And within an hour,” Thompson said in an interview, smiling, “I was looking at the Zapruder film. Which was brilliant. I mean, the colors were there, the clarity was there. It was really something, really, really something.”

  Even so, from the very beginning of this arrangement, there was a conflict looming down the road. Thompson knew that he would want to publish frames from the Zapruder film in his book, and LIFE editors knew that they would not give him that permission. There is considerable disagreement about who said what and when, but it seems likely that Thompson hoped that after he got into LIFE—developed a relationship with the editors, worked on the project, and made his contributions—he would prevail upon them to change their minds. Certainly, he would have a better chance inside LIFE than he would under any other circumstances. He worked from home except when he needed to be in the office; a copy of the film and the transparencies were apparently kept in associate editor Edward Kern’s office, and Thompson worked there on those occasions when he needed to use the film.

  All seemed to be going well until early November 1966, when Thompson grew suspicious that something was not right at LIFE when it came to the film. His doubts began when he was on a research trip to Dallas. According to his own account, he showed a full set of the film transparencies to a doctor who had treated Connally, then went to dinner, leaving the transparencies with Miami bureau chief Henry Suydam, who, in his former position as Washington bureau chief, had dealt with the film when it was being used by the Warren Commission. When he returned and asked to see them again, Thompson found several transparencies missing. According to Thompson, Kern and associate editor Richard Billings carried out some kind of distract-and-search maneuver in Suydam’s hotel room to see if they could locate the missing transparencies, to no avail. Thompson feared that someone inside LIFE might be trying to hide or suppress some frames of the film. As he later explained it, “I suspected there was some power struggle at LIFE in motion, but I had not a clue what it was about and who was on what side. I decided that it would be an extremely good idea for a good copy of the relevant frames to exist outside the Time-Life Building.” That was when Thompson decided to undertake what would be the first—though far from the last—cloak-and-dagger operation to secretly copy the film.

  The November 25 issue of LIFE, titled A MATTER OF REASONABLE DOUBT, closed on November 18. As always after a big deadline, the editorial staff were beat, so the place emptied out. Earlier that day, Thompson had traveled from his home in Philadelphia up to New York with a copying stand, a 35mm camera, and fifteen rolls of film wrapped in Christmas paper and stuffed in his briefcase. When Kern left his office at the end of the day, Thompson got to work illegally copying the film. “I set up my copying stand over the light table in Kern’s office,” he wrote, “and started copying the 4" by 5" transparencies.” When Kern returned to the office rather late and found Thompson in flagrante, he demanded to know what he was doing. “I’m copying some frames from the goddamn film,” he snapped. He then explained that he couldn’t keep coming up to New York every time he wanted to look at the film and he wanted to have copies down in Philadelphia for his work. Oddly, Kern did not stop him. He simply left the office, whereupon Thompson continued copying the frames for another two hours. No one at LIFE said anything to him the following day, demanded the return of the images, or fired him for making an unauthorized copy of the film. Not only that, but executives at LIFE magazine signed a contract with Thompson after that date, even though the editors knew full well what he had done. At the same time, they gave him no permission to use the images in his book or anywhere else. Years later, in his interview with the Sixth Floor Museum, Thompson said, “So, basically, I stole the film. I stole it because of my concerns about its security.” This sort of confused logic would become something of a trend over the next nine years.

  In November 1966, Abe granted a rare television interview. I suspect that LIFE’s decision to revisit the assassination and the extensive use of frames of the film in the November 25 issue prompted the calls from reporters eager to get his unique viewpoint. Marvin Scott was a reporter working for the Mutual Broadcasting System who was producing a radio documentary about the assassination. As he described it in an article posted on the New York City TV station WPIX website in November 2013, Abraham Zapruder was the “hoped-for prized get” for his documentary, and it took some cajoling, pleading, and good old-fashioned charm to get him to agree. Ev
entually, he did, and they went down to Dealey Plaza to do the interview.

  Abe began speaking: “Well, as I’m standing right here, I believe, I can almost see it as a picture before my eyes… It’s almost three years. It’s left in my mind like a wound that heals up, and yet there’s some pain left as to what happened.” He recounted the basic outlines of the story, as he had already done for Jay Watson at WFAA-TV, the Warren Commission, and William Manchester. The story was entirely consistent, with a few additional reflections brought on by the time that had passed. He talked about his disbelief at having been able to capture the whole scene, saying, “I’m amazed with myself how I stood there and continued shooting the film after what I saw… Some tell me they call it [being] ‘froze up,’ or paralyzed. I don’t know what to call it, but I kept on shooting and yelling until he went out of my sight. I don’t know where I got the strength but I had it.”

  Marvin Scott spent a considerable time in the interview asking Abe for his thoughts on the controversies around the assassination, such as the debate about the number, timing, and direction of the shots fired. From the interview, it seems that Abe was well versed in these issues, and he did not hesitate to contradict Scott when he thought he miscalculated the time elapsed between shots or other elements related to the time clock. He had apparently thought about the issues more than anyone in our family realized. He even mentioned that he had gone back to the site and looked at the stockade fence to the right of the wall on which he had been standing, to measure its distance from his position that day and to determine if the shots he heard might have come from that direction. In the end, he felt sure that—even though he heard only two shots and not three—the shots sounded consistent, leading him to conclude that they both came from the same direction. At the time of the assassination, he and his receptionist, Marilyn Sitzman, who had been standing behind him at the time, both believed the gunfire had come from the left, the direction of the Texas School Book Depository.

  When questioned by Scott about the various controversies surrounding the film, he comes across as pragmatic and unflappable. Scott asked him first what he thought about the speculation that frames were missing. In response, he pointed out that “four frames would hardly be a third of a second, and I don’t think anything could happen in a third of a second that would amount to anything.” Next, Scott asked him about assassination researcher David Lifton’s contention that he could detect on the film evidence of shock waves or stress marks from what he thought was a bullet striking the Stemmons Freeway sign, and that this bullet could not have come from Oswald. “Strangely enough,” Scott continues, “after the assassination, the sign disappeared.” Abe had a practical answer for that, too. First, he pointed out that Dallas was a growing city and signs were constantly being moved to make way for new roads and the like. “As to the distress marks, when you take an eight millimeter and enlarge its size as showed in LIFE, a speck of dust will show all kinds of marks, and if you want to elaborate on ’em and pick on ’em you could pick, but I don’t believe there was [sic] any shots going through the sign.” In general, while he acknowledged that anyone could have doubts about anything, he felt that the conspiracy theorists were “looking at the hole instead of the doughnut.”

  Abe’s support for the Warren Commission is not at all surprising. Everything about his worldview and experience led him to have a basic faith in the American government. But it was more than that. I think the best reflection of his viewpoint is expressed in this interview, when Scott asked him what he was feeling as he stood in the spot where it all began:

  Well, my thoughts come back as they were almost three years ago. I think we’ve lost a great man. I loved that man; my family loved that man. There were millions, I’m sure, [who] loved that man. He was an inspiration to the youth of America. I believe he’s the first time that in this country we had a president as young as Kennedy was. The loss was great. He was an inspiration, as I said, to the youth, and I believe if our country wasn’t what it is—strong—that it could [not] withstand a shock like this. Would this be in another country, where they had a one-man government, [it could be] a terrible tragedy for the whole country, if [we] weren’t as strong as we are.

  Thinking back on the assassination from the vantage point of three years, he could grieve the murder of John Kennedy and at the same time reiterate his absolute faith in America. For him, the fact that America elected John Kennedy was the purest proof that its people possessed the values, courage, and strength to endure his assassination and prevail. I have to wonder if, somewhere in the back of his mind, he was thinking of the overthrow of Czar Nicholas II and how the Bolshevik Revolution had plunged Russia into chaos and violence. He was just twelve when he lived through those events. But America was not Russia. Even if he saw the fissures that Kennedy’s assassination had caused, in his mind they could not threaten the basic foundation of American democracy. For him, and for many of his generation and background, the Warren Commission and its conclusions were part and parcel of that faith.

  In December 1966, the editors at LIFE clashed with CBS over access to the film. It was not the first time. CBS had asked to use it in June 1964, when they were preparing a program about the Warren Report, but had been firmly turned down. There is nothing in the internal documents about this, perhaps because the reasons were so entirely obvious. As a print magazine, LIFE could only run the images as still frames in their magazine. That had been all well and good in 1963, when C. D. Jackson bought the film to get it off the market and when the editors felt it should not be seen anywhere, but as time went on and the public began to want to see it, LIFE faced a very serious practical problem. They simply had no mechanism to show the film as a film, even if they decided that it was appropriate or commercially wise to do so. Meanwhile, television—in the form of CBS, among other networks—was on the rise, competing for advertising dollars and cutting into print profits. The medium, of course, was perfectly suited to the Zapruder film. But in what world would it make sense for LIFE to simply hand over the Zapruder film to CBS so that they could be the ones to broadcast it for the first time to a national audience? Not only would they be giving away their exclusive; they would be implicitly acknowledging the supremacy of television in news coverage. No indeed, that would not do. But if it had been only briefly unpleasant to turn down CBS’s request to air the film in 1964, it would prove to be far more difficult in 1966, as the cultural context changed and pressure began to build on LIFE to make the film accessible both to researchers and to the public at large.

  Edward Kern wrote to Dick Stolley and George Hunt to brief them on the latest. “CBS has been putting a lot of pressure on us to either allow them to run the Zapruder film, which I refused, or to let them send over a couple of experts to see a run-through of it for purposes of reporting on a two-hour telecast sometime over the year end.” He denied their request to even view the film, and when CBS asked where else they could go to see it, he directed them to the FBI and the Warren Commission. It seems that he hoped this would be the end of the matter. Upon further inquiry, CBS learned that the Warren Commission had given their copies of the film to the National Archives. It was not welcome news at LIFE. “We hold journalistic copyright to this film,” Kern wrote his colleagues, “and I assured CBS that we would sue the hell out of them if they got it either through the FBI or the Warren Commission, but there is the possibility that their experts could get a run-through.” Kern believed that LIFE should try to intervene to prevent this possibility, but he left the matter to the Washington bureau to sort out. The following day, Stolley reported that it was too late—CBS had already contacted the National Archives and seen the film, and they were “probably there again this morning viewing the Zapruder film.” From this, LIFE learned that the National Archives not only had the film, they had a policy to “run it in its entirety for bona-fide researchers but not for the simply curious.”

  In his memo of response, Stolley raises the thorny problem of what ownership of the
film actually meant. While it was clear that LIFE had the right to grant permission for reproduction of the film, did it also hold the right to decide who saw it and when? If there were copies in the National Archives that had come there through government channels (from Abe to the Secret Service to the FBI and from LIFE to the Warren Commission), what right would LIFE have to control them? Did LIFE control only the dissemination of the images or access to the images as well? It seemed unclear. The dustup ended that afternoon with the realization that there was nothing LIFE could do about CBS seeing the film at the National Archives. LIFE’s editor, Ed Thompson, wrote back to Stolley, “It’s a very tricky public domain question and I suppose whatever comments go on the air [in the CBS program] could have come out of LIFE’s publication of the frames and the Warren Commission report. But if there’s a chance, let’s try to stop the viewing.”

  While it seems understandable from a business point of view that the LIFE editors did not want to hand over the film to their television competition, it’s also understandable that researchers and others resented the magazine’s exceptionally tight control over it, especially in the light of Loudon Wainwright’s October editorial. After all, who should be able to scrutinize the film—only the executives and editors at LIFE and the federal authorities? The assassination researchers also wanted to add their contribution to the public discourse in light of the reopening of the investigation that Loudon Wainwright was advocating. Then again, was it LIFE’s duty to share its copies of the film if other copies were available elsewhere? Did LIFE have an obligation to let researchers publish those images for the greater good? The underlying question—whether an individual’s interest in historically significant images should supersede a corporation’s right to control the content that it owned—would plague the film for much of its existence.