Twenty-Six Seconds

by Alexandra Zapruder

  So why bother with the alterationists? After all, tangling with this kind of assassination conspiracy usually means getting lured into a sticky web of largely irrelevant but distracting assertions that never seem to end and from which it is nearly impossible to escape. Eventually, despair sets in, usually followed by resignation and the desire to take a nap. On the other hand, the alterationists’ ideas have been defended in conferences and symposia, in articles and, amazingly, in entire books. Now their ideas proliferate all over the Internet. Unfortunately, when writing about the Zapruder film, they cannot be ignored. Not only that, but when the alterationists begin theorizing, they nearly always attack my grandfather’s integrity in the process. For twenty years, they have done so with impunity.

  Douglas Horne’s theory, while far from the only one, provides a case in point. Horne posits that the original film and the three first-day copies were developed in Dallas on November 22, exactly as the record has always shown. But, for reasons that are not entirely clear, he says that Abe lied about having the affidavits signed by the lab technicians on that day. In an interview with Dick Russell, author of On the Trail of the JFK Assassins, he says: “I think the affidavits recording these events were probably really executed on Monday, November 25, and backdated to the twenty-second. (No one I am aware of saw Abraham Zapruder running around Dallas on November 22 with a manual typewriter under his arm.)” When LIFE returned to purchase the film rights a few days later, Horne says, “I believe he then had to prove the provenance of the film so he created the appropriate paper trail in the form of the backdated affidavits.”

  There is not a single shred of proof for these statements, but there is the formulation of a narrative that suits the theory and the adjustment of facts to prop up the narrative. For my part, I believe it is more likely that there was a typewriter at Kodak and at Jamieson that Abe could have used to type up the documents on Friday than that he would have needed to carry one around with him in Dallas on the day of the assassination in order to have the affidavits signed. I also don’t believe that he concocted a plan to traipse around town tracking down all the technicians from the two labs and a notary public and convinced them to collude in a deception by signing the backdated affidavits on Monday. In other words, I don’t believe that my grandfather was a liar.

  The next part of Horne’s theory is so elaborate and based on such incredibly thin “evidence” that it is painful to bother with it. I will not give it excessive airtime, and if readers are curious, they can have the experience of trying to sift through the mass of unsubstantiated facts for themselves. Just by way of reminder, the non-conspiracy version of this story holds that the Secret Service worked with the CIA and NPIC analysts to produce enlargements from their copy of the film (Copy 3) over the weekend of the assassination. This information did not come to light until decades after the fact, when the ARRB interviewed Ben Hunter and Homer McMahon, who had been employees of NPIC and had carried out the top-secret work. Their accounts reflect varying degrees of reliability due to age, the passage of time, and other factors. It is thought, based on CIA Document 450, which surfaced in the 1970s, that these enlargements were used to create briefing boards in December 1963 in order to better understand the timing and effects of the shots fired at the president and Governor Connally.

  Horne does not accept this simple version of the story. Instead, he argues that the original film—purchased by LIFE magazine on Saturday, November 23—was not sent by LIFE to Chicago that day. Instead, he says it was sent to Washington, where it was delivered to the NPIC. In this theory, it was photo analyst Dino Brugioni (whom Horne interviewed at length long after the work of the ARRB was concluded) who worked on the original at the NPIC and prepared briefing boards with enlargements of the film. Horne’s entire theory rests on Brugioni’s memory and interpretation of these events. For example, in an interview, Horne asked Brugioni why he believes the film he was working with was the original and not a copy. “Because two reasons,” he replied. “One, the fact that the Secret Service was bringing it in, and the second thing is when I looked at it, it was not processed in a typical commercial fashion, in a little box or anything like that. It was very well controlled all the time; that film was controlled by the Secret Service all the time it was there.” The Secret Service was bringing it in? It wasn’t in a little box? If he had a visual record from that day of the original edge markings from the film, or he had made prints that included the inter-sprocket material (which existed only on the original), it might be harder to discount this interview. But with all due respect to Mr. Brugioni, these details do not prove anything.

  If Horne acknowledged that the original film went to LIFE (which it did), then the government had already lost control of the images and no alteration would have been possible. But instead, the theory gets still more convoluted. He says that it was the next night, Sunday, November 24, when McMahon and Hunter were called in to the NPIC to work on what they were told was the original film. As in the case of Brugioni, Horne’s case hinges on a particular detail that McMahon provided in his interview with the ARRB. He stated that he had received the film from a Secret Service agent named Bill Smith (of whom there is no record) who brought it not directly from Dallas but from Dallas to Washington via Rochester, where it had been developed at the Kodak plant. Ben Hunter does not recall it this way, and there is no physical evidence on the copy of the film in question to support this assertion. Horne seizes on this detail to claim that McMahon and Hunter were deceived into thinking that they were working from the original film, when it was instead a doctored version that had been produced in Rochester in a secret lab with the code name Hawkeye Works. And—wait for it—this is the one passing itself off as the original in NARA today.

  As if this were not absurd enough on the face of it, McMahon cheerfully decimated his own reliability in an interview with Jeremy Gunn on July 14, 1997. Horne was present at the time. Asked by Gunn if he was sure he worked on the Zapruder film, McMahon replied: “I have senile dementia… I can’t remember really anything… I am a recovering drug addict and alcoholic. Do you know what a wet brain is? Well, you’re looking at one. I damn near died. And I’m not a competent witness because I don’t have accurate recall.” Gunn pressed on. “With regards to the other events that you talked about, what is your sense of how accurate your memory is of that?” McMahon answered, “I just told you, I don’t have a full deck… So whether you are talking to a reliable witness or not, that’s up to you to decide.”

  Apparently, Horne decided he was. There are countless additional threads to this story, facts and suppositions that could be presented, refuted, and argued. But then we’d be down the rabbit hole, and that’s far beyond either the scope or intention of this book. However, there is one matter that must be put to rest. In this version of the alteration theory, Abraham Zapruder remains a loose end that must be tied up. He had seen the original film repeatedly over the weekend and would—the alterationists suppose—have noticed the discrepancies between his film and the reworked one brought to the NPIC on Sunday night and passed off as the original. Never mind that several Secret Service agents, technicians at Kodak and Jamieson, a great many members of print and broadcast media, and Abe’s own family and office staff had also seen the film that weekend. Horne ignores them. But he does posit a handy solution for why Abe never protested this inconsistency:

  Perhaps a “film switch” is even why Zapruder was allowed to renegotiate his contract with LIFE magazine, perhaps that additional $150,000 [sic] (which was pro-rated over a six-year period) bought his silence and future cooperation. After all, he did see the true original in the Kodak lab the day of the assassination, and did screen it for others (such as Dan Rather) on Saturday, November 23 [sic]. (Perhaps this is why Dan Rather’s contemporaneous account of what he saw in the film that weekend, broadcast on the radio, differs from what we see in the film in the archives today!) It would have been imperative to reliably obtain Zapruder’s silence over the weekend.<
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  There are many reasons why I shouldn’t care about the alterationists and their preposterous school of thought. But at the heart of every alterationist theory there lies the implicit or outright declared belief that Abe Zapruder was complicit in the conspiracy. Douglas Horne adds to this the familiar trope of greed—to him, the obvious solution to the problems his own theory raises is that Abe allowed his silence to be purchased for $150,000. I do care about that. I have elsewhere in this book acknowledged the ways in which Abe handled the ethical dilemmas posed by the film. He was not perfect, nor did he need to be. But, unlike the alterationists—theorizing, interpreting, and speculating thirty years after the fact—Abe was the one who saw the president murdered in real time; he was the one who was responsible for the film; and he was the one who did his best to handle an unprecedented situation with dignity and moral balance. I am more than willing to leave it to Josiah Thompson and others more versed in the facts to take down the alterationists’ theories. But for our family, it is unforgivable to allow the casual defamation of my grandfather’s character with absolutely no proof or evidence of any kind. In this, the alterationists and their ideas are an affront to Abraham Zapruder’s reputation and to his memory.

  When it comes to the Zapruder film—and I am not the first to say this—the committed alterationists represent the final, inevitable outcome of decades of scrutiny and excessive faith in the power of the Zapruder film to tell us what happened to President Kennedy. They want every anomaly explained, every inconsistency resolved, every doubt tied up in a seamless narrative. But life isn’t like that. When the film failed to deliver a clear and consistent story, and when even the most advanced technological methods failed to provide consensus on the maddening question of what happened to our president, there was nothing left to do but question the evidence itself. Thus, alteration became the de facto solution. For this school of thought, there is no simple human error, or failure of memory, or unanticipated outcomes of decisions made in haste. Instead, the answers to their questions can only be found by following the traces of a bigger, darker history that they alone can see.

  In October 1997, acclaimed author Don DeLillo published Underworld. Across two short scenes in the novel, his characters Klara and Miles visit an art installation in 1974 in which bootleg copies of the Zapruder film are playing in continuous loops at different speeds on hundreds of TV screens in a New York City apartment. These pages remain as provocative and haunting as anything I’ve read about the film. Unlike the alterationists, who were busy bogging down an understanding of the Zapruder film (Fetzer’s Assassination Science came out in 1997), DeLillo conjured up a scene that suggests the film’s meaning not only in the context of 1974 but also in the enduring present.

  When I wrote to Don DeLillo’s publicist, Kate Lloyd, to find out if he would talk to me about the Zapruder film (he has said that it “could probably fuel college courses in a dozen subjects from history to physics”), the last thing I expected was to end up having lunch with him in a quiet French restaurant on a fall afternoon in Manhattan. He is famously reticent and had, according to Kate, granted only two interviews in the five years she had been working with him. At first, he seems shy, quiet, and reserved. It is hard to square his gentle presence with the dangerous, sometimes frightening worlds he has created in his fiction. Then again, he has a quick laugh and a distinct twinkle in his hazel-brown eyes. When we sat down, I asked if I could record our conversation and then pushed the small machine to the side, assuring him that we would forget about it once we started talking. Our lunch was less an interview than a conversation, as I found myself not only asking the questions but also answering them.

  The Kennedy assassination has figured largely in DeLillo’s work, and the film has been an object of fascination for him for decades. He explored the idea of conspiracy and its unexpected, pervasive influences in his novel of the JFK assassination, Libra. He told me that it was while he was working on an article for Rolling Stone about the assassination that he was able to get a bootleg copy of the film from a dealer in Quebec. In fact, in the mideighties he probably could have gotten it from my father. The fact that he didn’t know he could and had to procure it from a dealer who was “beyond US law” speaks to the ongoing sense that the film was suppressed or difficult to obtain in America.

  In an interview in the Paris Review in 1993, Adam Begley asked DeLillo to speak about what the film meant to him. Among many other things, he said, “There’s something inevitable about the Zapruder film. It had to happen this way. The moment belongs to the twentieth century, which means it had to be captured on film.” I didn’t entirely understand what he meant until we talked. He described the twentieth century as the age of film, just as today is the age of the Internet—by the 1960s, cameras had become commonplace and everyone was filming everything. He is right; after all, there were twenty-one other photographers on Dealey Plaza that day alone. But I understand that he was talking about something more than just the odds that someone would record the murder. There is a kind of poetic logic, if such a phrase exists, in capturing such a defining moment of the twentieth century on film, which remains the technology most associated with that time. In this, film is distinctly different from videotape or, most relevant for today, digital media with its clarity, permanence, perfection, ability to be manipulated and replicated ad infinitum. In contrast, 8mm film is tangible and fragile, its images grainy and saturated, paradoxically preserving memory and degrading over time. Everything about it offers tantalizing, nostalgic glimpses of a time that has slipped away.

  In Underworld, Klara and Miles enter the apartment in which they will see the Zapruder film, finding it filled with every kind of TV set from “the smallest imported eyeball to the great proscenium face of the household god,” including a whole wall of TV sets from floor to ceiling. People are smoking pot, sitting on the floor, and waiting. I asked DeLillo to tell me how the idea came to him. “I’d seen something like that in a museum or gallery,” he said, where the artist had “stacked TV sets on top of each other, and I don’t remember whether he had a pattern that each screen related to each other screen [or] whether they were old television sets but it struck me as an interesting thing to do in the apartment of some sort of avant-garde individual. And so there we are.”

  As the scene begins, everyone is slightly edgy, anticipating what they will see.

  The footage started rolling in one room but not the others and it was filled with slurs and jostles, it was totally jostled footage, a home movie shot with a Super 8, and the limousine came down the street, muddied by sunglint, and the head dipped out of the frame and reappeared and then the force of the shot that killed him, unexpectedly, the headshot, and people in the room went ohh, and then the next ohh, and five seconds later, the room at the back went ohh, the same release of breath every time, like blurts of disbelief, and a woman seated on the floor spun away and covered her face because it was completely new, you see, suppressed all these years, this was the famous headshot and they had to contend with the impact—aside from the fact that this was the President being shot, past the outer limits of this fact they had to contend with the impact that any high-velocity bullet of a certain lethal engineering will make on any human head, and the sheering of tissue and braincase was a terrible revelation.

  In our conversation, DeLillo elaborated on how he thought about that scene when he was writing it. “Of course, the key to the whole thing is that I think the people went to look at it expecting to see some sort of art that they hadn’t seen before,” he said, “and then to see this terrible drama of violence was terrifically shocking, even for highly sophisticated people.” For me, there is also the prominence of the home movie, the “jostled footage,” the car dipping out of the frame. DeLillo captures so perfectly what others so often forget in discussing the film—the man standing and holding the camera, taking a home movie, the imperfections that lend the film its terrible sense of intimacy.

  There is a break in the narrati
ve, and then we are back in the studio with Klara and Miles, people are more stoned, a couple is making out in a closet, and the loop of the film continues to play. While it is still (always) 1974 for Klara and Miles—that last moment before the film exploded into the public realm on national television—it is not the case for us reading Underworld in 1997 and after. As DeLillo repeats in varying forms the description of the footage rolling on the television sets, I began to see a narrative in the piece itself—not a perfectly sequential one, of course, but the echoing ways in which the film jolted Americans into new and upsetting confrontations. There is the shock of seeing a head encountering a bullet for the first time (“the sheering of tissue and braincase was a terrible revelation”) and then the shock of realizing that it will always be a shock (“the head dipped out of the frame and reappeared and the shot was unexpected”). The footage rolls again, and each time, it seems, there is the possibility for a new revelation, like the idea that the murder could have been the product of a darker political reality than anyone had previously conceived. “Here comes the car, here comes the shot,” he writes, “and it was amazing that there were forces in the culture that could out-imagine them, make their druggiest terrors seem futile and cheap.”