Twenty-Six Seconds

by Alexandra Zapruder

  It is one of the very few interviews that exist of my grandfather. I remember the first time I saw it. I was watching TV and I happened to pass by it as I was changing channels. I never knew the interview existed, and I remember the moment of shock and confusion as I realized I was seeing my own grandfather on TV, and I tried to absorb the fact, searching for a trace of familiarity that would connect me to him. I noticed his slight accent—not a pronounced Russian one but a kind of thickness or weight in his voice and a clipped way of speaking—as well as his breathlessness and agitation.

  The full interview is longer than the bit I first saw. There’s a second part where Abe speaks very little, referring first to the “sickening scene” and trying to make sense of his position relative to the shooting. I can see the wheels turning in his head. Then Watson interrupts him to start talking about himself and carry on with the business of broadcasting. There is a minute or two when Abe is not “on”; he is just sitting at the desk next to Jay Watson, biting his lips, shifting around, twitching his shoulder slightly. The first part of the interview has been dissected and examined ad infinitum for clues about what Abe Zapruder, the quintessential eyewitness, recalled seeing. But I am mining the second part, too. I’m looking for gestures, facial expressions, his voice and accent, the emotions and thoughts going on inside his head and heart. I’m looking for my father, my brothers and cousins, looking for the bloodline that links us to this missing member of our family.

  I remember excitedly calling my father to tell him that Papa Abe was on TV and asking him if he knew about this interview. I wish I could remember the entire exchange, but I only recall realizing that this information was not a revelation to my father. I might have been momentarily surprised that he didn’t seem particularly impressed, but thinking of it now, I understand that this little clip would never have the importance for him that it did for me. After all, he had a lifetime of experiences with his father to recall. I had only snippets and fragments. More than that, for me there was no clean way to untangle the memories that came from our family from those that came from his public identity. This was one of those times—like digging around in The Death of a President when I was eleven—when it occurred to me that there was an access route to my grandfather through the Zapruder film and the assassination. I understood, if vaguely, that his experience held not only information about the assassination but also clues about Abe Zapruder, clues that no one else would notice or look for but that were substance for the mental picture I wanted to create of him.

  My periodic ache for my grandfather is hard to explain. I don’t know if it’s because of the film—because I felt somehow that he was public property and it didn’t seem fair, in that most basic and elemental childhood way, to have to share him with strangers. Or if it was because my three living grandparents were such a big part of my life and his absence made the picture feel especially incomplete. Or because his death so clearly pained my father, which in turn pained me enough that I wanted to try to undo it. Or maybe it wasn’t about him at all, but the way I first grappled with the finality of death, railed against it as all children must, and wanted to cheat it by cobbling together a picture that would bring him back to life.

  While Abe shifted under the hot studio lights and breathed in Jay Watson’s secondhand smoke, business was being conducted offscreen. McCormick and Sorrels were consulting with Bert Shipp, the assistant news director at WFAA-TV, about what could be done with the film. They told him they might have something showing the assassination of the president taken by “some clothing manufacturer over here.” When Shipp asked them what kind of film it was, they told him, “Just film.” But it wasn’t just film. It was double 8mm color film, which was complicated and laborious to process. WFAA could process black-and-white film, and they could process 16mm, but this was way out of their league. Bert told them in no uncertain terms, “Let me tell you something. If you think you have in here what I think you have, don’t you be running around to any Bert Shipps or anybody else trying to get them to develop this film. You call Kodak. You get them to open that lab. Don’t you let anybody but an expert process this 8mm film.”

  Sorrels was convinced. Shipp called the Eastman Kodak lab near Love Field to see if they might be able to process the film that afternoon, but he couldn’t get anyone on the line. As was the case everywhere, the staff at Kodak were in a state of shock over the president’s murder. Phil Chamberlain, who was the production supervisor at Kodak, recalled: “When the news came that the president indeed had died, I cried, and had the receptionist announce it over the PA system. And then we planned to shut down the operations the rest of the afternoon. So we shut down the processing machines and people just… people just stood around in little groups crying and talking and commiserating.” When Shipp couldn’t get through via the regular channels, he called the emergency number instead and reached Jack Harrison, the staff supervisor on duty that day. Shipp put Agent Sorrels on the phone, who conveyed the urgency of the situation, saying, “We want to have you to process our film. We want you to shut your machines down and process the film we have here. How long will it take you to do it?” When he learned it would be about an hour and fifteen minutes, he told Harrison that they would be right over. “There’ll be a lot of us so just leave it open for us, and no other film to be run.”

  The group piled into a police car to ride the five miles to the Eastman Kodak processing lab at 3131 Manor Way. It was just blocks from Love Field. At around the same time, Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as the thirty-sixth president of the United States. At the very moment the police car approached the Kodak plant, Air Force One could be seen taking off from Love Field, ascending steeply into the blue for the terrible trip home to Washington with the casketed body of President Kennedy and his widow on board.

  CHAPTER 2

  EXPOSURE

  The Eastman Kodak lab was located in an unadorned salmon-brick building with a double-height tinted-glass entryway. The group hustled up the steps into the nondescript lobby, where they were met by production supervisor Phil Chamberlain and Richard “Dick” Blair of the Customer Service Department. Harrison recalled later, “You could hear them like a bunch of cattle coming. All these people coming up there, talking among themselves… well-dressed men and a couple of policemen and just two or three ‘civilians.’ And one of them was Zapruder.”

  They wasted no time getting to work. Blair went with Abe into the darkroom, where they ran the unexposed portion of the film through to the end of the reel and took out the spool. The film was handed off to Kathryn Kirby, who was in the Special Handling Department. She stamped it with a processing identification code that would forever identify the film as the in-camera original. The perforated number, located on the edge print of the film, is 0183. The original was then given to Bobby Davis at machine #2 for processing. The machine had been cleared and certified by John Kenny Anderson, the production foreman, shortly after the call came in from Forrest Sorrels to make a machine ready. Bobby Davis had loaded the machine with new leader, a strong tape that is affixed to the unexposed film and literally “leads” it through the processing. According to Blair, Forrest Sorrels remained in the darkroom while processing took place, and Abe watched through a small window. He periodically called home to check in, and apparently spoke with an attorney who advised him about having affidavits made to certify the safe handling and processing of the film and the duplicates. Meanwhile, Harry McCormick of the Dallas Morning News never let up trying to get the film. “I spent over four hours with this man, trying to get prints for the paper. We made large cash offers, which he refused… When I could not get them for the paper, I tried to get them for myself, thinking I could then get something for the paper. I told him he did not know the markets and how to handle this and that if he would turn it over to me, I would give him all but twenty-five percent. I later went down to ten percent but still had no luck.”

  Meanwhile, the hunt for the president’s killer was closing in on Lee Harvey O
swald. Just forty-five minutes after the assassination, thirty-nine-year-old Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit, a World War II veteran and member of the force for eleven years, spotted a man who fit the physical description of the suspect in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. Tippit stopped to question him through the window of his police cruiser, and when he got out of his car to approach him, Oswald shot him three times at point-blank range before delivering a fatal gunshot to the head. Oswald fled to a nearby movie theater, where he was arrested and brought into custody. Forrest Sorrels got the call while he was at Kodak. He urgently needed to return to the Dallas Police Department, where Oswald was being questioned, but before he did, Erwin recalled that he said to Abe, “If [the pictures] come out all right, get me a copy. Would you do that for me?” “Sure,” Abe replied.

  Here I have to take a break for a brief technical explanation about the Bell and Howell movie camera and the development and duplication of double 8mm film. It’s the kind of section that I, as a reader, would normally skip. But it turns out that this matters a lot to the story later.

  Abe bought his Bell and Howell 414 PD Director Series camera the year before, in 1962, from Peacock Jewelry on Elm Street in downtown Dallas. The camera had gotten excellent reviews in Modern Photography, where it was described as “undoubtedly one of the finest 8mm motion picture cameras we have ever seen. The Zoomatic is an 8mm camera that has been beautifully thought out and designed along clean, functional lines.” That sounds like the kind of review that would have gotten Abe’s attention. Not only that, but it came with a sleek, elegant carrying case of hard black leather with a shiny silver buckle and trim. Everything about the design of the camera and the case suited him and his sense of style.

  Now for the particulars: The body of the camera is black with silver fittings and buttons. It has a flush-mounted crank on the right side of the camera’s body that the filmmaker pops out by pushing a button. You have to be careful doing this because the crank snaps out hard, and if it hits your hand, it will smart. I know this because I’ve done it. It takes thirty-five revolutions of the crank to fully wind the camera for filming. It seems obvious enough to go without saying, but there are no batteries or other power sources. The power comes only from the mechanism inside the camera that the operator winds to make it ready to film. When set at “full wind” (shown in a small “reserve power indicator” window), the camera runs uninterrupted for seventy-three seconds, exposing about fifteen feet of film.

  The camera has both a wide-angle and a zoom or telephoto setting, which can be set using a button on top of the camera or manually by adjusting a metal zoom lever on the lens. Most importantly, on the right side of the camera, there is another small window with the buttons to run the camera: ANIMATION, STOP, RUN, and SLOW MOTION. The button rests at the STOP position. ANIMATION is a single-stop setting, essentially to take still photos, which is accomplished by pushing the button up and then releasing it each time the filmmaker wants to capture an image. To film at normal speed, the filmmaker presses the button down to the RUN setting. And for slow motion, he pushes down to the very bottom setting. At normal speed, the camera should run at sixteen frames per second, though later tests, which were of critical importance to establishing the time clock of the assassination, showed that Abe’s camera was actually running at 18.3 frames per second.

  The 414 PD camera takes double 8mm film, which, confusingly, is sometimes just referred to as “8mm” (the forerunner to Super 8). Double 8mm film actually starts out as 16mm-wide unexposed film stock with perforations (or sprocket holes) on both edges of the film. When the filmmaker wants to make a movie, he opens the door on the left side of the camera, loads the unexposed film reel (in low light) onto the spool, and then closes the door and runs off a few feet of film to get to the start position. He has about twenty-five feet available for shooting, with a few feet of leader. He winds the mechanism (remember that “full wind” allows the camera to run about fifteen feet uninterrupted) and begins filming. When he is finished, he will have a strip of 8mm-wide images running along the left half of the 16mm reel of film. This is side A. To continue filming, he needs to take out the reel, flip it over to the other side, and reload it before rewinding the mechanism. Then he can shoot side B, whose images will occupy the right half of the film strip. So, when it comes out of the developing machine, still in its 16mm-wide form, the images on side A are on the left, running in one direction on half of the exposed film, and the images on side B are on the right, running in the opposite direction. At this point, there are perforated holes on each edge of the film strip. Then, in the normal course of processing, technicians slit the film strip down the middle, making two 8mm strands of film, which are then spliced together so that it can be watched as one continuous reel with all the images going in the same direction on the right, and the perforated holes along the left.

  We aren’t quite done. When the film spool is loaded into the camera, it’s held in place by a spindle in the middle and sprockets that fit into the perforations, or sprocket holes, along both edges of the camera roll. The original film captured the images all the way to the edge of the film, including in between those tiny holes. Duplicates of the film do not include what is sometimes called the “inter-sprocket” material. This became very important in later years when assassination researchers sought to mine every millimeter of the film for clues about the shooting.

  The reel of film that was loaded in the camera on November 22, 1963, was Kodachrome II safety film, a color film that was less grainy and produced a more saturated color image than other films on the market. The downside was that it was not easy to develop and had to be sent to a Kodak lab for processing. Decades later, I would find a box containing many small yellow boxes with my grandfather’s name and address hand-lettered on them from years of having films developed at Kodak and sent back to him. The assassination sequence that he caught on film is only twenty-six seconds long and is composed of 486 individual frames.

  All my life I heard people say that it was amazing that he kept shooting when the shots were fired and that he didn’t drop the camera, fall to the ground, or lose his balance or his composure during the whole sequence. Apart from a few infinitesimal flinches, his hand remained remarkably steady. I never paid much attention to this when I was a child; it seemed like the kind of boring thing that adults were always saying. But now I have the replica camera that Bell and Howell sent him after the original camera was taken for testing and eventually ended up in the National Archives. When I hold it in my hand, feel its weight and the pressure of holding down the button, try to focus through that tiny viewfinder while the camera is in motion, I think it is more amazing than I ever realized. Add to this the trauma of witnessing the murder of the president of the United States, and there’s really no accounting for it. I think my grandfather would say the same. He was asked over and over again but he could never explain how he did it.

  It took an hour to finish developing the film. The first step was to review it using the standard quality-control method. According to Phil Chamberlain, they watched the unslit 16mm film on a Kodak processing inspection projector, which ran at four times normal speed, just to check for scratches or other physical problems. The assassination sequence, on side B, ran along the right side of the film—right-side up, fortunately—while the family shots ran along the left side of the film strip and appeared upside down. Chamberlain remembered, “He started out… apologizing that he didn’t really know what was on the rest of the film, that he wasn’t much of a photographer… First thing we saw were pictures of his family, even as I recall, a couple of children… And then all of a sudden we’re seeing the motorcade coming down… You could tell that he definitely had pictures of what had happened. And we saw… the one frame where Kennedy’s head literally exploded.”

  “My God,” someone said after the film ended, breaking the long silence in the room. Jack Harrison, who was in the room, remembered it as “needle sharp,” and Erwin described the firs
t images as “the clearest, most beautiful picture you ever saw.” He went on, “That last shot, you see his head come off, and I mean, you could see it so clear… [It] was an absolute shock.”

  Abe asked Chamberlain if they could see it again, but he handed the reel back, saying that he didn’t want to risk it getting damaged. When Abe asked about making copies for the Secret Service, Chamberlain told him that the Kodak lab in Dallas couldn’t make duplicates; for that, they sent films to Kodak headquarters in Rochester, New York. Someone suggested that a local motion picture company called Jamieson Film Company might do it, provided that the original was kept in the unslit 16mm form so that they could run it on their 16mm duplicating printer. Pat Pattist, Kodak’s quality-control supervisor, got on the phone with Bruce Jamieson to discuss the situation. The first problem was that neither Kodak nor Jamieson had duplicating film stock for 8mm on hand. Kodak could provide three rolls of 8mm camera film but that wasn’t the same as duplicating film; the Jamieson technicians would have to guess what exposure to use to get the right color and light level in the duplicate. In a later interview, Jamieson described it this way: “We could use our best estimate of what the exposure should be and print all three of them that way. Or we could print the first one at the optimum calculated exposure and then print the next two, one somewhat overexposed, the other one somewhat underexposed. And this way we could be assured that we had one optimum copy.”