Twenty-Six Seconds

by Alexandra Zapruder

  As winter turned to spring 1970, there was one further round of communication between Abe and Dick Pollard. Dick Hitt of the Dallas Times Herald published a small item on April 9, 1970, suggesting that LIFE magazine was considering selling the Zapruder film, possibly for as much as $250,000. Abe must have called Dick Pollard again. He passed along the article via mail, with a short note: “It was nice talking to you and I was glad to hear that things are well with you. I am enclosing the article of the Dallas Times Herald and, as you see, they don’t know everything but it fills part of the column.” There is no answer to his letter in the file. It was the last letter Abe Zapruder would write to LIFE magazine.

  CHAPTER 8

  LIFE’S DILEMMA

  In the summer of 1970, Abe’s cancer recurred. This time, there was nothing to be done. He was admitted to Presbyterian Hospital—known as Presby—and Lil went there every day, cooking food for him in the tiny kitchen on the hot plate, trying to find anything that he could tolerate or that would tempt him.

  My twin brother and I had been born in the fall of 1969. Both sets of grandparents, along with the rest of the family, came to Washington, DC, for my brother’s bris, but I was too small to go home from the hospital. My parents hadn’t known my mother was carrying twins until we were born, and I was in an incubator and missed the whole thing. Sometime late in the summer of 1970, we all traveled to Dallas. My aunt remembers that my parents brought us to the hospital to see our grandfather. Michael and I, nine months old, were in our double stroller and Matthew, nearly three, stuck close by. Papa Abe was wheeled down to see us. The moment was surely too short, and no doubt agonizing to all the adults who were present. Still, there is something reassuring to me about the fact that we were even briefly in the same place at the same time. I am glad that he laid eyes on the three of us together, that he looked at our faces and saw for himself the children who would carry his name. He died on August 31, 1970, at the age of sixty-five.

  To the world, Abraham Zapruder was the bystander who filmed the assassination of President Kennedy, the ultimate amateur photographer, famous the world over for being in the right place at the right time. Major papers carried obituaries that collapsed his entire life into a few lines about the twenty-six seconds of film that bore his name and came to define him in the public’s mind. But none of that had anything to do with who he really was or the real loss that our family felt when he died. Very much like my own father, he was a person who had endless interests, projects, plans, and ideas. He was incapable of being bored. He was happy puttering with the sprinklers in his garden or playing music on his electric organ or tinkering with the wiring in the house. These projects often led to mishaps and hilarity, like the time Abe piped the electric organ to play through the stereo speakers in the den and was happily banging away one morning when Henry—home from college and sleeping off a hangover in the den—was jolted awake and tried in panicked confusion to make the show tunes stop by frantically adjusting the dials on the television and radio.

  The funeral was held at Temple Emanu-El in Dallas, the congregation that had welcomed my grandparents in Dallas thirty years before. Rabbi Levi Olan, the revered leader of the community, delivered the eulogy. Afterward, my parents, Aunt Myrna and Uncle Myron, and my grandmother rode in a limousine behind the hearse that carried my grandfather’s body in a slow funeral cortege from Temple Emanu-El in Highland Park, through the suburban streets of north Dallas, to the cemetery, which was located about six miles away, toward the downtown area of the city.

  As they rode, my family began telling stories about Abe. One after the other, they traded memories of his funniest moments, retold his favorite jokes, and repeated one-liners that always broke up everyone in the room. A favorite one came from the time he and Lil were at a friend’s house for brunch and the guests had been waiting a very long time to sit down to eat. As everyone milled around, talking and hoping soon to be invited to eat, the host came over to make an introduction, saying, “Abe, I’d like you to meet a friend of mine.” Without missing a beat, and with a wry smile and a mischievous twinkle in his eye, Abe said, “What I’d really like to meet is a bagel and lox.” Best of all was his warning against using too many “ta-ta-tas,” an expression we often repeat in our family to this day. He would say that every automated or mechanical object—cars, refrigerators, toaster ovens—had only so many ta-ta-tas, you know, because while they are running, they make noises, going “ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta.” When Lil would put chicken bones in the waste disposal unit, he would scold her in bemused exasperation, “Lil, don’t put the bones in the disposal! You’re going to use up the ta-ta-tas!”

  As the long, black car swung through the deep red wrought-iron gates of the cemetery, my grieving family found themselves laughing uproariously, remembering the inimitable, hilarious, utterly unique man that was Abe Zapruder. I can think of no better legacy for his life than that.

  On a fall day in November 2013, I drove east from my home in Chevy Chase to Pasadena, Maryland, to meet Robert Groden, who has—for better and for worse—played a critical role in the history of the Zapruder film. It was a sunny afternoon, the late-changing leaves along the Baltimore–Washington Parkway read as rust and copper with an occasional pop of red. Above me hung a low drape of storm clouds, but in the distance, there were plum-colored wisps in the brightly lit sky. It was the kind of autumn day that feels, even as you are witnessing it, like it is slipping away.

  Groden was due to speak that evening about his research on the JFK assassination. Before his talk, we met in the law offices of one of his friends. He is a big man, wearing suspenders that day, with broad features and thick white hair that falls over his ears. He has an amiable manner, a friendly smile, and from the moment we met, he was frank and open-handed with his answers to my questions. It was clear that while I considered him a stranger, he felt deeply connected to our family and our history through the Zapruder film. It was as if all the gratitude he felt for the existence of the film, which he had never been able to express to my grandfather—or my father, for that matter—was finding its way to me. It was endearing and a little uncomfortable; it was impossible not to like him but I wasn’t sure I was going to agree with all or even most of what he had to say about the assassination. Then again, I wasn’t there to debate the finer points of conspiracy theory with Robert Groden. I was there to hear about how he got hold of a copy of the Zapruder film, hid that fact for six years, labored to make the best possible visual copy he could, and eventually allowed it to be aired, illegally, for the first time to a national audience on Good Night America with Geraldo Rivera in 1975.

  Groden told me that he had been a big fan of the president and that he had been, like so many others, shocked and devastated when he was assassinated. It happened to be Groden’s eighteenth birthday, which made him feel a sort of intense personal connection to the event. “I felt safer as an American with him in the White House,” he told me. “And I think… when he was killed it was as if someone had cut an anchor chain and we were adrift in the ocean. It was just a horribly emotional strange thing, and I didn’t know what direction my life was taking.” He left high school shortly thereafter, while still in eleventh grade, and enlisted in the army, but he soon found that military service was not for him. He returned to his native New York, and after working in the record business for a while, he encountered Moses Weitzman, who was working at EFX Unlimited.

  Weitzman had previously made 16mm and 35mm copies of the Zapruder film for LIFE magazine when he was working at Manhattan Effects. He had since left that job, but when its parent company, Technical Animations, decided to sell the company, they called him back to help liquidate some of their assets. “And lo and behold,” he recalled years later, “in my office, there was my box with that piece of film, that technically imperfect copy… I kept it as a sample of my expertise… drawing a perfect circle, so to speak.” He brought that copy with him to his next job, at EFX Unlimited, where he eventually hired Robert Grod
en, which is how Groden found himself in close proximity to a very good 35mm copy of the Zapruder film.

  By this time, Groden was an avid conspiracy theorist. He was convinced that the Warren Commission was nonsense and that the public was being deceived by a massive cover-up. He told me, and has told many others, the story of visiting President Kennedy’s grave at Arlington Cemetery in 1965. He thinks he remembers speaking aloud to it but he is not sure. Either way, he introduced himself to the dead president and swore to find out who killed him no matter how long it took and where it took him. In conversation, Groden seems earnest and sincere and, as such, very disarming. It’s hard not to believe him. Then again, it’s also hard to relate. Perhaps it is only my conventional thinking, but I cannot help but think that such a grandiose life commitment must be psychologically motivated, that it is about something deeper than simply wanting to find out who killed President Kennedy. Perhaps it is a desire to have some purpose, or to escape the confines of an ordinary life in the service of greatness. Or maybe it reflects an unwillingness to face the finality of the president’s death, or a reluctance to accept that knowing how he was murdered will do nothing to restore what was shattered. Maybe for some, it is better to dwell in the moments before, to remain in the how because there will never be a satisfying answer to the why.

  Or maybe not. Either way, Groden became determined to uncover the truth of the Kennedy assassination. The single most important moment for him occurred in 1969 when he came across that 35mm copy of the Zapruder film. Groden says that Weitzman knew of his interest in the case and showed him a copy of the film. In Groden’s words, “Absolutely everything that we had seen—the illicit copies that were made during the Garrison investigation—were visual mud. This was like looking at the original event.” Groden says that soon after he saw the film, Weitzman gave him the copy, saying, “You can do more with this than I can.” This is not how Weitzman remembers it. In fact, he says that he was not “into the whole underground culture of the Zapruder [film].” To hear Weitzman tell it, the film was not given to anyone. It was taken. “I didn’t keep it under lock and key,” he said. “Someone made surreptitious copies of it and used it.” Either way, when Weitzman was asked in his 1997 testimony before the Assassination Records Review Board how many copies he thought there might be of the Zapruder film, he answered, “Oh, God. Unfortunately, I probably am the grandfather of many of them… To the best of my knowledge, that [35 mm] copy is what a great many copies have been made from.”

  However it happened, Groden got hold of the 35mm print and had, in Weitzman’s lab, access to equipment that allowed him to work on it to produce an even better quality version. To this end, he did several things to the film. First, he “step-framed” it—meaning that he shot each frame twice so that the whole film runs slightly slower, allowing the mind a fraction more time to absorb what is happening. Then, by modifying a technique known as rotoscoping, he reshot the film frame by frame, zooming in to a particular focal point, such as the president’s head, and keeping that focal point in the center of the frame for each shot. In this way, the film was both closer up and stabilized, because the image remained in the center of the frame rather than moving up and down, as it does in the original. Groden repeated this process several dozen times, creating versions of the film focusing on the reactions of Mrs. Kennedy, the driver, Governor Connally, various Secret Service agents, and parts of the car. The overall result was multiple versions of the film that were much clearer, more detailed, and easier to see than previous copies had been.

  During the time he was doing this work, Groden describes himself as deathly afraid, looking through the rearview mirror of his car every few seconds when he drove anywhere. As he put it in his interview with the Sixth Floor Museum, “I was very, very paranoid about it. I had in my hands the Zapruder film, the enhanced Zapruder film—the proof that at least one shot came from the right front… And I was really too afraid to deal with this. I didn’t know where it would lead. I didn’t know who was involved. And all I knew was here I have this evidence, and I didn’t know what to do with it. So I put it away in a bank vault because I was too afraid to do anything with it.”

  While Robert Groden’s copies of the Zapruder film sat in a bank vault, waiting to see the light of day, the magazine editors at LIFE continued to struggle about what to do with the original and the bootlegs that seemed to pop up continually. In his last letter to Dick Pollard in April 1970, Abe had inquired about a snippet in the Dallas Morning News about a proposal to sell the original film. I suspect he thought it was a rumor. Apparently, it wasn’t. That same month, Hollywood cinematographer Haskell Wexler (whose credits at that time included Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, In the Heat of the Night, and The Thomas Crown Affair) wrote to Dick Pollard inquiring about the possibility of purchasing the original Zapruder film. He initially wanted LIFE to send the original via courier to its office in LA, but Pollard soon replied, “I’ve had second thoughts on sending the Zapruder original to the West Coast. It’s just too scary to think of losing it—so much so that no one on my staff wants to take the responsibility.” They agreed on a compromise and Pollard reported in early June, “If the price is right, we might just go ahead and make a few bucks.” The arrangements continued to move ahead for several duplicates of the film to be couriered out to the West Coast in June. Then, nothing.

  The matter was taken up again in late January 1971 when Pollard wrote a memo to Time Inc. vice president Rhett Austell explaining that the magazine had decided to sell the film. After updating him on revenue generated by the film and the ongoing problem of bootlegs, Pollard wrote: “I bring this to your attention in case one of your Divisions might have future use for this historic film.” In another memo to Dick Clurman, former chief of the Time-Life News Service, he explained that the film had generated little revenue in the past two years and that there were “sizable legal fees” to maintain the copyright.

  Around the same time, he showed the film to Austell and Edward “Pat” Lenahan, who was general manager of LIFE at the time. Austell and Lenahan had similarly emotional responses to the film, and neither favored selling it. But they had entirely different approaches to dealing with it. “Austell thought the footage too rough to ever use in motion. He advised us to give it to the Library of Congress and take a tax deduction. Lenahan said, ‘I don’t care if it costs $100,000 a year for the next ten years to protect the copyright, we should not sell or give this film away.’ So, the Zapruder film is off the market for one-time use or outright sale.” In passing, Pollard mentioned that they had never had a serious offer, so perhaps the Haskell Wexler deal had fizzled over the price. Managing editor Ralph Graves apparently agreed with this decision, though in a handwritten note, he added, “At some point, the Film Division should figure out a way to use it to own credit and profit.”

  It is clear that, over the years, the fate of the film was largely dependent on the values and tastes of each individual editor who ended up in charge of it. While one editor might be ready to sell it or give it away, another editor was committed to keeping it; while one person thought it should never be seen, another wanted to reserve the right to exploit it for film or TV. Likewise, some editors were attached to the idea of discretion and good taste, while others talked in terms of profit and recouping lost investments. As with most things, the reality was far more complex than the idea of LIFE as a monolithic organization in lockstep over using the film for the greatest possible profit and orchestrating a calculated effort to keep the film from the public.

  In the summer of 1973, shortly before the tenth anniversary of the president’s death, Bernard Fensterwald, representing an organization called the Committee to Investigate Assassinations (confusingly, the CIA), wrote to LIFE to inquire about licensing the Zapruder film for use in a documentary film to be “distributed by the Committee for exhibit on college campuses, before community organizations, and possibly theaters in this country and overseas.” The committee claimed no specific
agenda regarding the assassination, describing its mission to “seek the truth and inform people of the facts.” The board of directors included a significant number of well-known authors of books about the assassination, though none of them endorsed the findings of the Warren Commission. Fensterwald explained that the committee was consulting with Robert Richter, who had previously worked for CBS on the four-part Warren Report series (in which the Zapruder film had not appeared) and who was representing the committee in the negotiations. Jack Beck in LIFE’s film division wrote back promptly to say that LIFE was investigating the possibility of using the film for the tenth anniversary and was disinclined to discuss the matter until they had reached a decision. They punted it for further review in September.

  Sure enough, on September 20, Richter wrote again with an offer: $10,000 for a nonexclusive license for the committee to use the Zapruder film in a documentary he would produce. LIFE once again seemed ready to consider a deal. Jack Beck wrote to editorial services director Paul Welch to suggest that they try to work out a deal in which the TV rights would be held back in the hope of eventually profiting from them. “I say this because I share the Committee’s view… that some day there is destined to be a break in this story which will tell us more than the Warren Commission was able to find out. When that happens, the Zapruder film will again have heightened historical significance, I imagine. It certainly should remain a house asset.” For the moment, the film was apparently back on the market. In the following months, the negotiations continued the way such things do, the complexities of legal jargon obscuring possible hesitations or tensions, and with seemingly endless questions, answers, tweaks, and corrections.