Twenty-Six Seconds

by Alexandra Zapruder

  The first frames appear: two of his grandchildren playing in a backyard suburban scene—green grass and a small white patio with a lounge chair in the background. There is the baby, David, in blue gingham overall shorts, toddling toward the camera with his mischievous smile and eyes that crinkle into half crescents when he laughs. The film is silent but his mouth forms the word “Papa.” Then there is Jeff, the eldest, long and lean, digging in the grass. He does not look up or wave, so absorbed is he in his task. The scene changes. Abe is inside Jennifer Juniors, his dress manufacturing company. Lillian Rogers, his longtime assistant and trusted friend, is fooling around, talking on the phone and pretending to make him wait. I’ll be with you in a minute, Mr. Zee. Everyone at work calls him that. Seconds later, he zooms slowly in on her face and catches her in an unguarded moment, smiling girlishly at him. Then the image fades out.

  He stands, agitated.

  The screen flickers again and they are in bright sunshine, outside on Dealey Plaza. He remembers making some test shots and adjusting the settings. How he loved that camera. He loved the mechanism and the beautiful, clean way it operated, and the elegant design of the case. He loved anything that ran efficiently and well. In another life, he would have been an engineer instead of a dressmaker. Maybe if he had been born here instead of in Czarist Russia. Maybe if he had gotten a proper education instead of going to night school in America to learn English and getting by on his brains and wits. But such was life and chance.

  There are his employees, Charles and Beatrice Hester, seated at the pergola at Dealey Plaza, and his receptionist, Marilyn Sitzman. He had tried a number of spots before she turned up and noticed a four-foot wall that he could stand on. It would be perfect, offering him just the vantage point he wanted, looking down on Elm Street, able to follow the motorcade perfectly from left to right as it sailed past him.

  Here are the first frames, the lead motorcycles rounding the corner of Houston onto Elm. He remembers again that his heart had skipped a beat when they came into view but that he had stopped filming when he realized that it wasn’t the motorcade yet. He wanted to save the film, to make sure he got it all. He would capture the president’s beaming smile and a glimpse of his glamorous wife, whose style the women in his own family tried to emulate. One day, he would show it to his grandchildren. “That’s Jack Kennedy,” he would say. “There’s Jackie. Look at them smiling and waving. Aren’t they beautiful? We loved them. We thought of them like our own family.”

  Finally, the long dark cars came into view. He remembers the moment, lifting the camera to his eye and pressing the button. No more fiddling. He gripped his forearm, steadying the hand holding the camera, and trained his eye on the open limousine. There they were. He was going to get the whole thing from his perch above Elm Street. They were going to pass right in front of him. The light was excellent—the green grass behind the black car, the first lady in a pink hat. They came closer, and he could see them perfectly.

  It had all happened so fast; now he couldn’t fully match up the sounds he had heard with what he saw. The president was smiling and waving; then Abe lost sight of him for a second or two behind a street sign. When he came out the other side, something seemed wrong. His wrists were up around his throat, and then he slumped over to the side, toward the first lady. Abe didn’t understand what he was seeing—he was paralyzed, watching through the lens. Had he heard a firecracker? Was the president joking—“Oh, he got me”? No, he wouldn’t. But then, what—? As he struggled to focus, there was another sharp crack and, inside the car, an explosion. It couldn’t be. But it was. It was the president—his blood, his brains, everywhere inside the car, on his wife. It was the most horrific thing he had ever seen, more so than anything he could ever have imagined. He was utterly frozen, his mind trying to register what had happened. There was a pink streak on the back of the car—the first lady in her suit—what was she doing? She was shoved back inside, back into that bloody horror. And then they were gone.

  This was how he had known before anyone else; he had seen it magnified through the zoom lens. There was no way the president could have survived. He was as sure of his death as he had ever been of anything in his life. And yet it seemed like hours before everyone else knew. It was like being in a nightmare, trying to scream but finding that you couldn’t make a sound. He would try to tell someone that the president was dead, and they would reassure him—they thought he was hysterical. No, he’s been shot, they said. He’s been taken to Parkland. We don’t know anything yet. But he knew. He was alone with his certainty, shaken to his core, shocked and horrified that such a thing could happen in America. In Russia, where he had come from, yes. There, anyone could be pulled off a train and beaten to death or shot on the street. That was why his family had come here, to escape that barbaric violence and find a place in a democratic country, a society of progress. How could this have happened here? In America in the twentieth century? This event flew in the face of everything he believed about his beloved adopted country.

  His stunned wife and son-in-law sat numbly on the couch, unable to speak.

  The silence was interrupted by the ringing of the phone. Who could it be at this hour? He had already talked to his son, Henry, moments after the shooting, and the rest of the family was here. Reporters again? He had been given several hasty offers to buy the film but had refused, saying that he needed to make sure it reached the federal authorities. He had seen to that—it had taken all day, but the Secret Service had a copy and another one was on a plane heading to Washington. No one had asked for the original—or the camera, for that matter—so he had brought them home with him. But now what? The press was not going to give up, not when they realized that he was in possession of his pictures and at liberty to sell them. It was only going to get worse.

  The phone kept ringing, insistent. “Abe?” Lillian asked. “Should I answer?” His heart sank again, for the hundredth time, thinking of Jackie Kennedy and imagining the footage crossing her path. Would he be the cause of further pain and suffering for her and her family? But how would he prevent it? It was too late. The film existed, and there was no way to undo it now. But one thing was for certain; he wouldn’t keep it. He never wanted to see it again, though see it he would, nearly every night for years to come, in his nightmares. Should he sell it? To whom? He could already imagine the images splashed all over the news, on the television. The thought was sickening. Choices upon choices, none of them good. He was exhausted; it didn’t seem like so much could have happened in a single day. And he was going to have to make more decisions tomorrow, and the day after that.

  He should let the phone ring. He should wait and deal with whatever it was tomorrow. But he didn’t. He walked into the kitchen, dazed, and picked up the receiver.

  CHAPTER 1

  ASSASSINATION

  When Abe woke on the morning of November 22, the weather was overcast and drizzly, a disappointing beginning to the day of the president’s visit to Dallas. A few days earlier, the papers had published the details of the motorcade route. After landing at Love Field, Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy, together with Texas governor John Connally and his wife, Nellie, would travel in an open-top limousine downtown to Main Street, greeting spectators and fans before turning right on Houston and then making a quick left on Elm heading for the Trade Mart, where the president would address a gathering of business leaders. Abe must have been delighted when he realized that the motorcade was going to pass directly in front of 501 Elm Street, where Jennifer Juniors was located. A short walk to Dealey Plaza and he would have a splendid view of the president and first lady as they passed by.

  In spite of the rain, Abe left home early, as usual, and by the time he arrived at Jennifer, the plant was up and running. He and his assistant, Lillian Rogers, began every day the same way, walking around to be sure everyone was at work and all was going smoothly. Abe was considered a tough but fair boss, one with meticulous taste and high standards for efficiency and excellence but who also cult
ivated a sense of warmth and informality in the plant. Everyone was family, from the office staff to the salesmen, cutters, pattern makers, designers, and seamstresses.

  After they finished their morning check, they would leave the fifth floor of the building and head down to Abe’s office for coffee. It was November, which meant that the company would be preparing its spring line. As Abe and Lillian sat drinking their coffee, they were surely going over one aspect of the business or another, maybe looking over some dresses or tweaking a design.

  To make their inexpensive knockoffs, they had to buy couture and other sample dresses, which they kept on racks in the factory while they were using them to create the patterns. They would often go to Neiman Marcus and consult with Helen Kessler, a thirty-year veteran of the Haute Couture Department, to choose dresses that they would put on his wife Lil’s Neiman’s charge and bring back to the shop. There they would take photos of them, mock them up, and then—in an impressive act of chutzpah—return the dresses for a refund before finishing the knockoffs to sell. Still, getting the dresses wasn’t the whole story. There was a lot more to it. Lillian, who gave an interview with my mother and aunt in the nineties, described what set Abe apart. “A lot of pattern makers are clumps, schlumps; they just don’t have any idea of fit,” Lillian said, but Abe “could see if something had a ridge across the back or didn’t fit quite right. There would be a little dress that was not just right and he’d lift it up here, and he’d say they’d have to adjust the pattern and take that little bit out to correct it.”

  Abe had learned the needle trades together with hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants who had arrived in New York from Eastern Europe, taking a job as a pattern maker in a factory on Seventh Avenue when he was still a teenager. He stayed in the New York garment industry until 1941, when he and Lil moved to Dallas for the opportunity to work for an up-and-coming sportswear line called Nardis. By 1963, he had been in the business for four decades.

  But his success in the business was not just a result of experience. From his earliest days in America, he had an innate sense of style, dressing like a gentleman in a crisp white shirt and well-pressed trousers, or a perfectly cut suit and hat. It was surely part of what caught the eye of his future bride, Lil, who also dressed with a flair that belied her family’s poverty. Street smart and savvy, she knew how to shop carefully, getting expensive clothing for a fraction of the cost by buying samples. In pictures of them from the late twenties and thirties, they are a glamorous couple, Abe grinning with his hat tilted rakishly on his head, and Lil, tall and slim in a tailored suit or a long skirt with a silk blouse. She, too, wore fashionable hats that framed her heart-shaped face and her radiant smile. They were a young, modern American couple and they dressed the part. In later years, Abe would joke that there was nothing to dressmaking: All you needed was “a front, a back, and two sleeves.” But the truth was that he knew from his own experience how the right clothing—and careful attention to style, fabric, cut, and fit—could transform a person.

  At some point over coffee that morning, Lillian asked Abe if he had brought his movie camera from home, as he had said he was planning to do a few days before. Well, no, actually, he hadn’t. He had given up on the idea at the last minute, thinking that with the crowds packing the motorcade route, he would never get near enough to see, let alone film the president. I can picture Lillian’s reaction—a sigh, a shake of the head. She knew as well as anyone how he operated. She had been working with him for seven years by then. He was practical almost to the point of being pessimistic. Not only that, but in spite of his many talents and sharp mind, he could be uncertain of himself. It wasn’t his style to put himself forward.

  So when Lillian heard that he had left the camera at home, she wasn’t about to let it lie. “You ought to go home,” she told him firmly. He quibbled with her, telling her she should go get her camera, even though she preferred still photos and wasn’t nearly the avid photographer that he was. “You’re the one that makes the beautiful movies,” she protested. It was true. Abe loved photography. He had started with stills, taking many photographs of Lil in the early 1930s, developing them in a darkroom he set up for himself in the basement of the family’s apartment building on Park Place. Soon he became interested in home movies, catching on to the first wave of amateur filmmaking. By 1963, it had been a favorite hobby for three decades; he had bought himself a brand-new camera the year before. Those who knew him well, like Lillian, knew that he would regret it if he let this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to film President Kennedy and the first lady slip through his fingers.

  At some point in the back-and-forth, Abe’s receptionist Marilyn Sitzman and his young business partner Erwin Schwartz—the son of his original partner, Abe Schwartz—came in and joined the conversation. Marilyn tried to encourage him to get the camera, remembering that the only way to get Abe to do something was to cajole him into it. Erwin, on the other hand, scoffed, “You’re crazy… When he comes around that corner, makes that run onto Elm off of Houston, they’ll be going over a hundred miles an hour. You won’t get to see anything. I mean, the parade’s over.” But Lillian pleaded, “Oh, Mr. Zee, go home and get the camera. Don’t listen to him.”

  Eventually, however, Lillian gave up and went back to work. She knew he would have to make up his own mind. When she returned to the fourth floor later in the morning, she realized that Abe was nowhere to be found. “Where had he gone?” Lillian rhetorically asked my mother and aunt in her interview with them. “Home to get the camera, of course.”

  This story of a near miss with history—Abe Zapruder leaving his camera at home on the morning of JFK’s assassination—has been told many times before. It’s been said that he forgot it, or that it was overcast and that he feared rain, or that he was afraid he was too short to get a good enough view to take the pictures. Any of these explanations could be true, but they fail to take into account just how predictable it was that he would leave the camera at home and that Lillian would talk him into going back to get it. In a certain way, that’s the least unlikely bit of it; he had Lillian in his life exactly for this reason. Unlike Abe, she carried the innate confidence of a Midwestern American who had never known the traumas and instability that he had. She saw when he hesitated but never let him give in to his insecurities, encouraging him to trust his instincts and take risks. In return, he taught her everything he knew about business and about people, ideas, and the wider world.

  It is true that Abe Zapruder’s intersection with history is laced with coincidence and chance. Any number of things could have gone differently that day. But Lillian letting Abe get away with not filming the president when he was passing a hundred yards away from Jennifer Juniors was not one of them.

  While Abe was out, Lillian made an announcement over the company’s PA system giving the employees permission to take an extra-long lunch to watch the president’s motorcade. “This is your captain,” she said, “and we don’t care what your religion is or your politics. You could be Baptist or Republican… We don’t care, but today the president of the United States is coming down here and we have a chance to see him, and it doesn’t make any difference whether you agree with him or not. He’s still the president.”

  Her words hint at the political tensions that sharply divided the city of Dallas at the time and had raised serious concerns for the president’s safety. In fact, Dallas—more than any other American city—had become ground zero for a reactionary political movement that bitterly opposed President Kennedy. They were led by a small knot of ultraconservatives, including Ted Dealey of the Dallas Morning News; H. L. Hunt, the oil tycoon and the wealthiest man in the world; Rev. W. A. Criswell, pastor of the First Baptist Church in Dallas; and retired Army General Edwin Walker, together with the fiercely right-wing Texas representative to Congress, Bruce Alger. Gripped by an ironclad conviction that the United States faced the threat of an imminent Communist takeover, they believed that Kennedy’s international policies and his supp
ort of the United Nations amounted to a betrayal of the United States.

  There was simply no way to live in Dallas and avoid this climate. The Dallas Morning News (which Abe referred to as “that rag”) was filled, day after day, with editorials excoriating the president. In 1960, Myrna and Myron had been appalled to witness Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson being physically harassed at the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas by a group of high-society women led by Representative Bruce Alger and called the “Mink Coat Mob” by onlookers to the protest. Then, just a month before the president’s visit, protesters spat on Adlai Stevenson, American ambassador to the United Nations, when he spoke in Dallas. Myrna wrote him a personal letter of apology.

  Far from quieting down in advance of the president’s visit, conservative agitators papered the city days before his arrival with five thousand leaflets showing a mug shot of President Kennedy and the words “WANTED FOR TREASON” beneath it. They accused him of betraying the US Constitution and turning the sovereignty of the government over to the “Communist-controlled United Nations.” Then, the very morning of his arrival, the Dallas Morning News ran an inflammatory ad by the so-called American Fact-Finding Committee that read, in part: “Welcome Mr. Kennedy to Dallas… A City that rejected your philosophy and policies in 1960 and will do so again in 1964—even more emphatically than before.”