All of this was unpleasant and frustrating. But it was something Kermit Hall said that really stayed with me. When Richard Trask proposed that our family donate the film to the government, Kermit Hall said rhetorically, “This is America. Why don’t they have a right to make something off their good fortune?” And herein lies the real crux of the matter. Throughout the entire hearing, when the experts or members of the board imagined the film from our point of view, they could see it only as a financial asset. But this is not what the Zapruder film was to the Zapruder family. From our point of view, the film represented a trauma for our grandfather. It was a source of pain for the Kennedys. It was a reminder of crushing disappointment and abandoned plans for my parents’ generation. It was a burden. It was an intrusion. It was a serious and complicated responsibility. It was a moral dilemma. It brought public censure and personal attacks on our family. It appropriated our name and changed the course of our lives. In the end, it was a legacy we never asked for. No one in our family ever talked or thought about the film in the terms that members of the board or the so-called experts used in this hearing. Not once. Never about using it for power or to withhold information or to influence public debate or to benefit financially at the expense of others. That anyone could refer to the Zapruder film as our family’s “good fortune” shows a profound misunderstanding not only of what the film represented to us, but of who we are.
There was one expert who was different from all the others. This was Art Simon, then an assistant professor in the English Department at Montclair State University. In 1996, he published a book titled Dangerous Knowledge: The JFK Assassination in Art and Film. In his book, he looked for the deeper meanings about American culture that might lie in our reading of the Zapruder film and the ways in which its controversies mirrored a crisis of faith in the visual record and perhaps in the idea of truth itself. His comments were, to me, the most provocative and interesting of anyone’s—not because he didn’t criticize our family but because he moved beyond the literal analysis of the film that limited the contributions of all the others. In his prepared statement, he said:
I understand that one of the arguments for preserving the original print holds on to the possibility that some future optical technology might be employed that allows the original to yield new information… I think this may well be an enabling fiction, a fantasy, a fantasy that motivates further study and fuels a faith that someday historical ambiguities will ultimately be made clear.
The film has become a fetishized object, invested with the potential to cover up our lack of reliable answers to many questions. In fact, this faith in future enhancements of the film has been a recurring trope over the last thirty years. And of course, a variety of such processes have been applied to the film. The Zapruder footage has repeatedly been cast in the role of ultimate witness, and investigators on both sides of the debate have insisted that with the proper scrutiny its images can render a legible view of the event.
Now, while three decades of analysis has produced a significant challenge to initial readings of the film offered by both the government and the mainstream press, it has also produced a multiplicity of interpretations, a crisis of knowledge, a serious critique of film’s capacity to offer a unified vision and discernible truth. In other words, the application of new technologies has not and probably would not guarantee a unanimity of interpretation.
In Simon’s view, the government did not need the original film because it still held the secret to the Kennedy assassination; to the contrary, it had yielded what it could and, more than thirty years after the fact, it was time to understand its value and meaning in totally different ways. He went on to speak eloquently about that meaning. It is, he said, “a secular relic,” and as a culture that values origins and “first things,” such original objects matter to us, maybe for reasons we don’t fully understand. “Perhaps preserving such objects functions symbolically as the government’s way of saying historical consciousness is important,” he said, “and that although the past cannot be preserved, some index of it can be located in tangible artifacts which have been kept or rediscovered.”
Although the board members engaged Simon on his ideas, one member in particular seemed thrown by the way the terms of the discussion had changed. William Joyce remarked, “You have quite a turn of phrase, ‘enabling fiction’ and ‘fetishized objects’ and ‘secularized relic’ among them, all of which speak to a certain kind of, in my view, marginalization of the film in the sense of the film as a record.” Simon responded, in what well might be my favorite moment of the hearing, “I am not sure that fetishes are marginal.” He went on to clarify that, of course, he believed the film had tremendous value in that regard but that it probably didn’t have much new value left, since it seemed unlikely that any technology could come along that would allow a universal interpretation of the film and, finally, a consensus on what happened to Kennedy.
Art Simon was the only one who looked past the literal, practical reasons the government needed to have the original Zapruder film to the emotional and symbolic reasons that lay beneath. He didn’t dismiss those reasons; to the contrary, he articulated and even validated them. It is a keeper of memory—the film that caught a moment in time of profound loss, a national disgrace, a dream destroyed from which America would never fully recover. It is a maddening puzzle—we see what happened but we don’t know what happened—that raised new questions about our faith in visual representation itself. And it is contested evidence—the object around which there developed such deep mistrust toward government.
I would go even further. I agree that the original film didn’t need to belong to the government because it contains hidden information that will change the way we think of the assassination; there is almost certainly no mystery contained within, waiting to be decoded by future technology. But maybe it needed to be preserved in the National Archives because it represents the hope of such a thing, the eternal optimism that everything is solvable and that, in time, our most vexing questions will be answered. Likewise, the original film did not need to be owned by the government because our family could not be trusted with it—as if every minute it remained in our possession it was at risk of being cut up, sold to the highest bidder, or scattered across the four corners of the earth. But maybe it needed to be owned by the government because there was fear of such a thing. Debra Conway said it herself in the hearing: “We should be very fearful of what a collector would offer the Zapruder family for this film.” For her, and others, fear of our greed was a shill for a deeper anxiety about the corrupting power of money or the uncertainty of how the American propensity to value wealth might end up affecting the fate of one of its most important historical artifacts.
Seen in this light, it is true that there were many ways in which the government’s needs could not be satisfied by a record copy of the film, no matter how excellent that copy might be. This was what rendered all of our family’s offers inadequate, no matter how neatly they matched up with the language of the JFK Act. Ultimately, our family’s private attachment to the film had to give way under the weight of a competing reality, which was that as the twentieth century drew to a close, the American public had become attached to it, too.
At the end of March 2016, very late in the writing of this book, I called David Marwell. The undercurrent of hostility toward our family that had run through the ARRB hearing bothered and puzzled me. I could understand that our offers of compromise did not satisfy the board. But how did that turn us into enemies of the common good? Why did they see us as oppositional forces, when our father had tried so hard to compromise? In his own words, “We entered into discussions with the Review Board on a completely cooperative and open basis, appreciating the difficulty facing the Board. We did not challenge the Archives’ refusal to honor its agreement to return the film but instead permitted the Board to extend its deliberations over five years.” In terms of the family’s offers to the government, my father wrote, “We [proposed op
tions] with the express understanding that we were not advocating any course of action for the Board but were simply providing it with alternatives to consider in its deliberation.” There was a disconnect somewhere.
For answers to these and other questions, I had a date to interview Judge John Tunheim, chief judge of the United States District Court for the District of Minnesota and former chairman of the ARRB. But before I raised these issues with him, I wanted to float my questions by David. He was circumspect, as usual. He said that there was, indeed, some negativity toward our family on the part of some of the board members and the staff. He said that some felt we should have donated the film, and that it was difficult to resolve the board’s fundamental, elemental conviction that the government should have the film with our resistance to the taking. In other words, I wasn’t wrong. He also said that Jack Tunheim was thoughtful, reasonable, and a very decent guy. “Just ask him,” he said.
So I did. We met for breakfast at the Mayflower Hotel in downtown DC early in the morning on March 31. Judge Tunheim has a boyish face that belies his twenty-one years on the federal bench. He was cordial and easygoing, making small talk as we navigated our way to a table and got some coffee. Then he handed me a thick file of papers. “This is my entire file, by the way,” he said. “It’s not censored.” I was, of course, immediately disarmed.
Judge Tunheim was unequivocal and clear about his point of view regarding the inclusion of the original film in the JFK Collection. He had, from the outset, wanted our family to donate the camera-original film to the government. His focus was entirely on fulfilling his obligation to create a comprehensive public record of the assassination that would be preserved for future generations. When it came to the Zapruder film, the preeminent assassination record, the board wanted to end any ambiguity about its ownership and legal status. That is why all of our offers utterly failed to impress them. He explained that when a researcher approached the board to raise a question about a possible conspiracy theory, even if it were far-fetched, they would move to declassify records related to that subject so that they would become publicly available. The point was to hold nothing back. If the board was committed to this level of transparency about marginal records, how could it ignore the original Zapruder film sitting in NARA? Time and again, he emphasized the fact that he was taking the long view, looking ahead a hundred years or more, and that he felt a deep sense of responsibility to ensure that the film would be permanently secured. Given the goals of the JFK Act, he and the board wanted the reassurance that the film would always be safely lodged inside the government.
As we talked, another thread began to surface. Judge Tunheim recalled that from the time he became head of the board in the spring of 1994 (two years after the passage of the JFK Act), there was a nearly constant stream of letters from LMH, many of them threatening legal action regarding the film. It was a “tense legal relationship,” Tunheim said. I had been through the letters and, although I hadn’t read them that way, I could certainly see how he would. It was clear to me that Judge Tunheim didn’t come to our meeting with this as a focused point he wanted to make. As I pressed to understand, I could see him scrolling back in his memory, trying to describe his experience of dealing with LMH in those years.
Toward the end of our meeting, he showed me some of the papers in the file. He explained that the first letter from Jamie on behalf of LMH demanding the return of the film arrived on his desk before the board had a budget, office space, or a staff. David hadn’t been hired as chief of staff, and they didn’t have a legal counsel yet. This was, he explained, the context in which the board was operating. “Before we had a staff, we had [LMH] breathing down our necks for what was probably the first issue we had to deal with. The frame of reference was: threaten litigation, threaten to go to Congress to get an act to take power away from us to make any decisions about the film, the National Archives saying ‘What should we do?’ the Justice Department saying ‘We don’t know, let this board decide.’ It was caught up in legal mechanics right from the start.”
While I could understand his point of view, I also knew that by the time the board assembled, there had already been two years of back-and-forth about the film. It was, in Tunheim’s words, “abundantly unclear” whether the government had taken the film, a fact that caused significant frustration for Jamie and our family. Jamie was, after all, trying his utmost to protect our interests, both because that’s what good lawyers do and because he cared about us. The more I thought about it later, the more I thought about the relationship between trust and strategy when it comes to resolving contentious issues. Our family had entrusted the film to NARA. We had an agreement. The government violated that trust when, after the passage of the JFK Act, they refused to return the film. For two years, Jamie, on behalf of our family, tried to get clarity on the status of the film and offer a compromise. For two years, nothing happened. Inevitably, by the time the board assembled, there was frustration and even anxiety about the possible outcome. Three more years went by, during which time the issue remained unresolved. I’m sure it’s true that the ARRB felt the threats from our family’s side; on the other hand, it’s threatening when the government seizes something that belongs to you and that you had entrusted to it for safekeeping in the first place. Meanwhile, the legal strategies designed to bring about a resolution just further alienated each side and caused them to dig their heels in deeper.
Ultimately, Judge Tunheim said that he did not like having to exercise the taking of the film. He hoped until the end that we would donate it, though he understood that it was a reasonable, rational decision on my father’s part not to do so. Still, the board was running out of time, and he and the other members felt there was no other good option left.
Two weeks after the hearing, on April 24, 1997, the ARRB announced its “Statement of Policy and Intent with Regard to the Zapruder Film.” It began with the recognition that the Zapruder film was an “assassination record” within the meaning of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. The statement went on to outline the implications of this decision, especially as it concerned ensuring public access to the film and establishing its authenticity. The statement ended with this: “Resolved, that the Review Board intends to exercise its authority, as formulated in its enabling legislation, to direct that the film be transferred, on August 1, 1998, to the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection at NARA and that the Review Board will work with Congress to resolve this issue.”
It had taken five years and countless hours of discussion, debate, analysis, study, strategy, meetings, letters, proposals, and efforts. The federal government and the American people were soon to be the proud owners of the original Zapruder film.
CHAPTER 13
A FINAL FIRESTORM
In the course of deciding whether to take the film, the ARRB launched a comprehensive examination of the original film and took inventory of various other materials related to the film in NARA’s possession. Specifically, they sought to authenticate the original and to understand how certain visual anomalies on the film might be explained. This was partly a response to a claim made in the early 1990s by a group of assassination researchers—namely, Harrison Livingstone, James Fetzer, and David Mantik—that the original Zapruder film, along with other evidence, had been altered over the weekend of the assassination. Inside the ARRB, Douglas Horne, who had been hired as a senior analyst and ultimately served as chief analyst for military records, pressed for an independent review of the film in an August 1996 memo to David Marwell.
Roland Zavada, a retired Kodak standards director for imaging technologies, was hired to carry out the analysis, which Kodak agreed to donate to the ARRB in pro bono services. Zavada’s analysis, which focused largely on the Zapruder film but also included other assassination films, provides a thorough technical study of the original film, the camera, the developing process, and the film’s provenance. He reviewed and clarified the edge markings on the film
, which indicate when and where it was processed, as well as the various dimensions and developing details of 8mm film, focusing especially on the inter-sprocket material. He also carried out studies to examine the irregularities that appeared on the film and that had caused alarm among certain researchers. In the words of the report, the objective of these film tests, using the identical type of camera that Abe had used, was to “determine whether the recognized anomalies in the Zapruder film theoretically attributed to claw flare, claw shadow, development turbidity, first frame inertial effect, and the design of the photo-electric cell are borne out by actual tests with film.” Zavada’s study provides not only a highly detailed report on every aspect of the Zapruder film and Abe’s camera but also proves the film’s authenticity beyond any doubt.
It should come as no surprise that this was not the end of the story as far as suspicions of alteration went. James Fetzer was the champion of the argument, joined by David Lifton, among others. Douglas Horne, too, remained skeptical about the validity of Zavada’s tests, continuing to speculate that the film had been altered and that the original film in the National Archives is not, in fact, the original Zapruder film—though his case was based largely on the impressions and memories of several former CIA agents who were interviewed nearly thirty years after the fact. There are so many different theories and variations on these theories, each of which slices and dices the evidence in a different way, that trying to address them is like playing a diabolical game of whack-a-mole. Not to be outdone, there is a still fringier lunatic element who believe that the film was fabricated by cutting and pasting frames, and that it is a hoax and a fraud.
There are many who have vociferously and thoroughly argued against these claims. The captain of the authenticity team is none other than Josiah Thompson, who used the film back in 1966 to make his case for a conspiracy. This is a perfect indicator of the way that the community of assassination researchers has splintered over the years into ever-narrower categories of belief and thought. Just because a researcher believes in conspiracy does not mean he believes in alteration, though certainly the alteration theories, by definition, involve a conspiracy. Thompson is joined in his defense of the film’s authenticity by both conspiracy theorists and advocates of the single-shooter theory, who may vehemently disagree on what happened to the president but who all grant that there is no evidence to suggest that the original film was altered.
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