Twenty-Six Seconds

by Alexandra Zapruder

  Kirkwood did not fail to notice my grandparents amid all of this chaos. “Mr. and Mrs. Zapruder sat quietly and virtually alone in the far right section of the courtroom, completely out of viewing range, staring not at the film but gazing rather sadly at the anxious, ill-tempered and, if not bloodthirsty, most definitely morbid craning mob of voyeurs who were glued to the screen.” This was exactly what Abe Zapruder had dreaded. But it was under way and there was nothing to be done about it.

  During an afternoon recess, Kirkwood found my grandparents and introduced himself. He described them as “a pleasant couple, she more talkative than her husband.” During their brief conversation, Kirkwood asked my grandfather how many shots he recalled hearing (two, as he had maintained from the beginning), and my grandfather told him again of the “intense horror” that the film caused in him. According to Kirkwood, my grandmother said she had seen the film only once before the showings in the courtroom. That must have been on the night of the assassination, when my grandfather came home and showed it at the house on Marquette. “It was gruesome, wasn’t it?” she said to him, shuddering.

  When the session resumed, the judge had to reprimand the press again. “I have been informed,” he said, clearly exasperated, “and I believe it, because I noticed it myself, that certain reporters and spectators have seen fit to leave early this afternoon trying to scoop the evidence… This morning, when it was announced Mr. Zapruder was going to be permitted to introduce his film, when we get to it, someone rushed out of the courtroom. If that happens in the future, that person’s credentials will be taken away. You have cooperated with me for twenty-three days and I have enough problems of my own without worrying about the reporters and spectators, so I would appreciate cooperation in this matter.”

  When one of the jurors requested another showing of the film, Kirkwood reported again on the clamor in the courtroom to find the best position; but this time, the eagerness of the crowd began to wear on him. “I focused on those spectators around me and the ladies and nuns hunched in the back and over the far wall. Some of them were all smiles and giggles, nudging one another now that they had managed to get a bird’s-eye view. A hungry look of salivating eagerness seemed to draw their faces to a point… I saw one lady arch her neck forward, grasp her companion’s arm and, eyes shining, whisper, ‘Now, now—here it comes!’ This followed shortly by the sucked-in vacuum of a gang gasp. I wanted out of there.”

  It was evening by the time Abe was able to leave the courtroom. The film continued to play a role in the trial; it was shown several more times the following day and referred to repeatedly during the rest of the proceedings. When the prosecuting attorneys delivered their closing arguments, they again dwelled at length on the details of the assassination to make the case that there had been a conspiracy, even though they still could make no direct connection between those events and Clay Shaw. In his final appeal to the jury, Garrison invoked the Zapruder film again, accusing the government, and implicitly LIFE magazine, of perpetrating a fraud on the American people.

  You heard in this courtroom in recent weeks, eyewitness after eyewitness after eyewitness and, above all, you saw one eyewitness which was indifferent to power—the Zapruder film. The lens of the camera is totally indifferent to power and it tells what happened as it saw it happen—and that is one of the reasons 200 million Americans have not seen the Zapruder film. They should have seen it many times. They should know exactly what happened. They all should know what you know now. Why hasn’t all of this come into being if there hasn’t been government fraud? Of course there has been fraud by the government.

  In his closing statement, Irvin Dymond tried to mend the damage. He reminded the jury that no matter how horrifying it was, the Zapruder film did not have any bearing on Clay Shaw’s innocence or guilt.

  The State is going to come back before you and wave the Dallas flag again, gentlemen. They are going to talk about the Zapruder film. That is a horrifying film. That is the reason I squawked about your seeing it ten times. I had never seen it before, and I was shocked and horrified by it. But don’t let that prejudice you, gentlemen, don’t let it cause you to lose sight of the basic issues in this case.

  The closing arguments ended late in the evening, and although the judge offered to allow the jurors to return to their hotel rooms and deliberate in the morning, they wanted to continue. It was after midnight on March 1, 1969, when they left the courtroom to deliberate. They were back within an hour. They found Clay Shaw not guilty and acquitted him of all charges. The trial was over and Clay Shaw was a free man.

  The Garrison trial went down in history as a gross abuse of power, a two-year attack on an innocent man, and a waste of government time and resources. And while many came away from the trial believing that there might well have been more than one shooter in Dealey Plaza, Garrison’s actions deeply discredited the conspiracy movement and drove it back underground for many years.

  If the editors at LIFE hoped that the resolution of the Garrison trial would bring an end to their immediate problems related to the film, they were very much mistaken. On Wednesday, November 26, 1969, just about nine months after the end of the trial, an article titled “Texan Pushes Cause: Bootleg Film of JFK Slaying Offered” appeared in the Washington, DC, Evening Star newspaper. The reporter explained that Greg Olds, editor of the Texas Observer, a liberal Austin newspaper, had an “eighth or tenth generation copy” of the film and was offering to get more copies of it to sell to the public for $2.50 or $5.00 at no profit to himself. If his source for obtaining copies dried up, he went on, he would have duplicates made from his own copy. When the reporter shared this information with Dick Pollard at LIFE, Pollard responded unequivocally, “That would be a major lawsuit. I can assure you it is illegal. You can argue public interest, but not the copyright law.” The Bernard Geis case had proved it. Then the reporter called Abe, who is quoted simply as saying, “This is the first I’ve heard of it.”

  That same day, Greg Olds sent a polite letter with best wishes to Dick Pollard, enclosing two copies of his editorial. The full text of his piece offers a clear explanation of why this ordinary citizen appeared determined to pick a fight with the media colossus. After running through the familiar tropes of conspiracy arguments that came from viewing the film, most notably how it clearly and unequivocally shows the president reacting to a shot from the front, the tone shifts. Suddenly, Olds is writing about something more than just solving the mystery of the assassination; he is expressing an urgency to confront these unanswered questions because something fundamental in the American character depends on it. Whether you consider this idealistic or misguided, Olds’s impassioned explanation sheds light on those who made this their cause, even at the risk of legal action or worse. He writes:

  I know you are sick of this subject… But I do not raise it again here out of morbid curiosity or any maudlin longings. I simply believe we as a nation never faced seriously the alternate possibilities that the first Kennedy assassination posed… It conformed more with our sense of what our country is—or is supposed to be—to believe that a single madman, acting alone—had shot the president…

  But if we as a nation are to prevail we must face hard questions. Consider all that has happened to our country since that November six years ago. Perhaps it is only a sickness of spirit that has caused the unhappiness this nation has endured since then; a sickness of spirit arising out of our sense of shame and loss, and, more to the point, out of a deep-seated sense, often repressed, that we failed Kennedy, our nation, and ourselves in not looking diligently, intensively, and hard into the assassination—unafraid to face whatever the truth might have been.

  … Whatever you believe, you owe it to your country to see the Zapruder film. If you do see it, you won’t believe the Warren Report.

  Pollard responded with a polite letter of his own, reiterating that the film was protected by copyright and that it would be defended as such. But, he wrote, “From your article, I gather that you
r purpose is not to use the film for publication or financial gain but rather for investigatory reasons. Assuming that is true, why don’t you come to New York and we’ll show you a perfect dupe of the original with no frames missing.” Greg Olds declined. But he did take LIFE’s threats seriously, writing a follow-up to his original editorial. In it he addressed those who had ordered copies of the film directly, asking them for patience as he consulted with a lawyer and weighed the implications of violating the copyright, and alluded to a possible legal justification if the public need were sufficient. In thinking through the issues, he suggested that the best option would probably be a showing of the film on national television. In this, he duly considered questions of “taste and purpose,” but concluded that these were outweighed by “the importance of this document whose implications must be faced by the nation.”

  In the article, he casually mentioned that “additional copies of the film, in whatever quantity I need, are available… So, supply is not the problem.” It might not have been the problem for Greg Olds, but it most certainly was the problem for LIFE. How could this unknown person have unlimited copies of the Zapruder film? Who was supplying them to him? What would this mean for defending the copyright? If they couldn’t defend it, would they eventually lose it? What would happen to their investment?

  For now, the most pressing matter was figuring out the source of these bootleg copies. They had some suspicions, but to dig deeper they put their Austin stringer, Robin Lloyd, on the case and also hired an investigator (unnamed in the files) who spent a month or more conducting interviews and gathering information, uncovering traces of bootlegs not only in Austin but also in New Orleans, Washington, San Francisco, and Montreal, among other places. What they found was that there was no shortage of people and institutions that were perfectly willing to violate the law in their desire to get their own copies of the Zapruder film.

  One creator of bootlegs, according to Lloyd, turned out to be LIFE’s erstwhile nemesis, CBS. Lloyd reminded Dick Pollard in a telegram dated December 2, 1969, that LIFE had lent a copy of the film to CBS in mid-1966 for background research on their Kennedy assassination documentary series. There is no written account of that loan in the Zapruder film files at LIFE from that year, so this information came as something of a surprise to me. According to Lloyd’s telegram, the loan had been strictly for study purposes and not for reproduction or broadcast. In a surprise move, CBS made ten copies (though, according to a report by Hugh Aynesworth elsewhere in the file, it was reported to have been thirteen). It’s worth noting that CBS, having been entrusted briefly with the film, had not only secretly duplicated it in spite of explicit instructions to the contrary, but had then gone on the air and publicly shamed LIFE magazine for refusing to allow it to be broadcast. It occurred to me to wonder if this was Dan Rather’s revenge for LIFE’s having acquired the film back in 1963 in spite of his belief that he was both entitled to it and swindled out of it.

  While there is no indication that CBS shared its copies, one source for the pirated copies allegedly included Bill Turner, an ex–FBI agent who wrote for the antigovernment and antiestablishment magazine Ramparts, who was “with Garrison at all times,” and who is said to have been the source of the film that was supplied to Olds. But it was really Jim Garrison himself who appeared to be the primary culprit in the flagrant disregard for the copyright of the film and the protective orders issued by the courts against its reproduction and distribution.

  None of this was particularly surprising, though it was perhaps alarming and unsettling. But in mid-December, LIFE’s investigator reported a story that sounds more like bad genre fiction than the actions of a legitimate district attorney. Investigator William Gurvich, who had worked in Garrison’s office but had resigned over the Clay Shaw trial, met with Charles Ray Ward, who had been Garrison’s first assistant and had also resigned his post in mid-1969, denouncing Garrison as a fraud and criticizing him for the charges against Clay Shaw. In utmost confidentiality—and only with guarantees that he would be held harmless in the investigation—Charles Ray Ward confessed that he had brought LIFE magazine’s copy of the Zapruder film to a hotel room on the fourteenth floor of the Pontchartrain Hotel in New Orleans in mid-1968. He delivered the film to a French reporter, referred to by the code name “Inspector No. 3,” who wrote for Paris Match. As if the story didn’t have enough dodgy details, Ward added that one of Garrison’s girlfriends was in the hotel room when he arrived, apparently “shacking up” with the Frenchman, at least for the night. Shortly thereafter, the film was allegedly taken from New Orleans to Montreal, where it remained for several weeks while three copies were made. Upon the Frenchman’s return to New Orleans, he gave the copies to Garrison. In a report produced for Time Inc., Gurvich recounted the information he had gotten from Ward regarding pirated copies of the film. “One was kept in Garrison’s residence and another in the safe in his office,” he wrote. “The third was given to Ward to retain. According to Ward, Garrison believed he would be assassinated and wanted copies made ‘or else the world will never know the truth.’”

  In the spring of 1969, my parents were in New York with friends for the weekend when they got a call. Abe wasn’t well. He had been diagnosed with stomach cancer and was going to have surgery. “We just kind of stayed in the hotel,” my mother recalled. “We didn’t feel like going anywhere.” When I ask her if she and my father knew right away how serious it was, she says no. In those days, she tells me, doctors operated and then routinely told patients that they had removed all the cancer, whether or not it was really true.

  In September 1969, there is a letter from Dick Pollard, polite as always, responding to what must have been a phone call from Abe, who had heard disturbing news about the film. According to the New York Times, a short motion picture called Mort d’un président had been scheduled to premiere in Paris at the Théâtre Balzac on the Champs Elysées. Director Hervé Lamarre confirmed to the Times that it included the Zapruder film and said that it was the first time that the film would be seen in full in public. It was, of course, an entirely unauthorized use of the film and a clear violation of LIFE’s copyright. United Artists, which had partly financed another film due to premiere at the same time, L’Américain, forced the producer to withdraw the short movie, but the underlying issue remained. Pollard wrote to Abe: “We, too, were shocked by the story in the N.Y. Times reporting that your film was to be used in a motion picture. Our lawyers in Paris were alerted and report that UA has withdrawn the movie. However, we still must find out if there is a bootleg dupe of your film circulating in Europe.”

  Just a few months later, on December 4, there is the first letter from my father to Dick Pollard. I can’t help but think that my grandfather’s illness had something to do with this. Maybe Abe needed his son to help him deal with the film at this point. It is cordial but businesslike, referring to a visit they made together to the LIFE offices during the summer of 1968 and following up on Abe’s inquiry about the Texas Observer editorial and the copyright violation of the film. In it, Henry asks for information on the steps that LIFE was taking to preserve the integrity of the copyright.

  A few days later, Pollard wrote back to Abe, copying Henry. “After your phone call, and the one from the Washington Star, we put our Austin stringer to work on the bootleg film. It was our feeling that the Texas Observer was not the real culprit… However, [Greg Olds] would not tell us the source of the stolen film. Confidentially, we have traced it to District Attorney Garrison’s office and to a Ramparts correspondent… As you know, Garrison subpoenaed the film. We can only assume he made a dupe. Your son can attest that this is highly irregular.”

  Pollard appears not to have known that Abe was ill, and it’s possible that Henry’s letter seemed like a rebuke, or as if the heavy-hitting DC lawyer was stepping in to handle something that his father could not. But I don’t know this for sure. What I do know from the records is that the ongoing problems with the bootlegs (especially those from Gre
g Olds) and copyright were making general manager Jack Watters a little nervous. He handwrote a note to chief editorial counsel Jack Dowd on one of the early December telegrams with information about the bootlegs: “Here’s more on the Zapruder mess. Should we be reacting more emphatically?” But in early January, a note to the file from Dowd reads, “We are in good shape as of now. Will move on them if they violate again.”

  They didn’t. Greg Olds wrote a letter on February 27, 1970, to all those who had requested copies of the film—nearly 150 requests from twenty states and several foreign countries—explaining his decision not to distribute the film after all. Olds graciously conceded defeat, recognizing that it would constitute copyright infringement and that they would likely lose the resulting lawsuit, thus failing to accomplish his goal of distribution of the film to a wide audience. “I appreciate having heard from each of you,” he wrote. “The orders for the film confirmed my notion that interest is great in President Kennedy’s death and doubt is widespread that we have as yet uncovered the truth as to who was responsible for that tragic loss to mankind.” He sent a copy to Pollard with a short cover letter. Pollard’s response captures all the exasperation and frustration of being the person who had to handle this unruly, complicated, endlessly controversial historical document. “Thank you very much for sending the letter on the Zapruder film. I suspect it may be the best solution at this time… I look forward to the day when I am no longer responsible for this historic film. I get it from all sides—Zapruder, Time Inc., the networks, etc.”