Twenty-Six Seconds

by Alexandra Zapruder

  The morning had begun for Myrna when she and her best friend Ruth Andres went to Love Field to join the packed and frenzied supporters of the president and first lady, hoping to catch a glimpse of them as they stepped off the plane. Her husband, Myron, a stockbroker, was watching for the motorcade from his office window at the Praetorian Building on Main Street. Myrna had been euphoric after seeing them. (“She was gorgeous but he, oh God, he was so handsome. And that smile. He was just a knockout.”) Afterward, she had gone with Ruth to a nearby luncheonette but no sooner did they enter than they heard screaming and commotion, people yelling that shots had been fired at the president. Myrna immediately found a pay phone in the back of the restaurant to call Myron. “Oh my God, is it true?” she asked him. “Yes, it’s true,” he answered her. “I just saw him and turned around and a few minutes later on the ticker tape… ‘President Kennedy was shot.’” Myron, in disbelief, had called his headquarters in New York, saying, “It’s not possible, I just saw him.”

  Myrna told me this story in February 2013 when I traveled to Dallas to spend a few days with her and to interview her about the assassination and its aftermath. As soon as I arrived, we went to lunch at North Park, where I’m sure my grandmother’s spirit still roams the racks at Neiman’s, and then settled down at her home for the first session in what would turn out to be a marathon interview.

  Like her mother, Myrna is tall and has always been beautiful, with short, lightened hair, large, wide-set eyes, and high cheekbones. She dresses with style and has cultivated, elegant taste—her home is filled with artwork, glassware, pottery, and trinkets collected from travels to Israel, Africa, and Europe. She is passionate about politics and ideas, reads widely, and does not shrink from sharing her opinions. I think of her as a combination of her parents: strong-minded and strong-willed like her mother and cautious, reserved, skeptical, and analytical like her father. Like most of the family, she is quick to laugh, though she has had more than her share of sorrows.

  I asked her to tell me what else she remembered from that day. She said that she and Ruth were nearly hysterical as they headed toward home, not knowing the president’s condition or what had happened. Like many in Dallas, Myrna first assumed that the shooting had to be the work of the conservative anti-Kennedy forces in Dallas. She was at her house, having been dropped off by Ruth, when the president’s death was announced, and she flew into a rage, kicking the tires of her car, then marching next door to yell at her conservative neighbor, and calling the Dallas Morning News to scream at them for the hateful anti-Kennedy ad they had run that morning. “Oh, I chewed them out! That they were responsible. Oh, I gave them hell!” In a parting shot, she canceled her subscription. When she tells the story now, she laughs a little at herself but she remembers that then, she was completely wrapped up in the most intense grief she had ever known. When I ask her for details, she says, “I don’t remember. I was so emotional. I was just totally—I was just nuts. I was just nuts. I was angry. I was furious. I was crying. I just couldn’t deal with the fact that our president, who I loved so much, was killed in Dallas. It was horrible. It was horrible.”

  Abe finally got home around ten or eleven at night. “And he had the film,” Myrna says. “He had a copy of the film and he showed it on his projector in the den. I remember I sat in the living room. I could not watch it. But Mother and Myron and Dad watched that film.”

  As it turned out, the day wasn’t quite over. Before Abe could fall into bed, the phone rang. On the other end was a young Richard Stolley, who had been trying to reach Abe all evening from a suite in the Adolphus Hotel, which was humming with newsmen, photographers, and writers scrambling to cover the rapidly unfolding events in Dallas. The conversation that followed eventually rescued Abe from his terrible internal dilemma about what to do with the film and, at the same time, put events in motion that would later raise deeply contentious questions about the film’s disposition and fate.

  Dick Stolley is a seventy-year veteran of the news industry, handsome, with a beaming smile, an easy, warm manner, and a great sense of humor. He is eighty-seven years old now, a bit stooped, but he still has the mischievous glint and sharp energy of a gumshoe reporter. Although I had known about him all my life, we never spoke or met until 2013, when he asked me, on behalf of LIFE Books, to write a piece about my grandfather for a book about the assassination. When we finally met in person in New York, I felt an immediate sense of familiarity and affection for him.

  In November 1963, Dick was the Los Angeles bureau chief for LIFE magazine. He had learned about the shooting from a correspondent in the office, Tommy Thompson, who saw it coming over the AP wire at just about the same time that my uncle Myron saw it on the Dow Jones ticker tape. Dick immediately called New York headquarters, where he reached assistant magazine editor Roy Rowan. Henry Luce and the other managing editors from his magazine empire had just heard the news during their weekly lunch at the Time & Life Building. Everyone sprang into action: At LIFE, managing editor George Hunt headed downstairs to face the inevitable. Production of the current issue of the magazine, due out on November 29, was already under way in Chicago. In fact, 200,000 copies had been printed, dried, bound, and sent to various distribution points. There was no way around it; they would have to stop the presses and completely remake the magazine in a matter of hours. A crack editorial team, including Rowan, associate art director David Stech, and a writer, layout man, and researcher flew to Chicago to the R.R. Donnelley plant where LIFE was printed. Teams in New York, Dallas, and Washington would report, gather photos, and prepare the content, which they would send to Chicago for assembly on the spot. Time was of the essence, not only to capture the breaking news in Dallas but also to close the issue and print the magazine’s enormous run in time for the November 29 publication date.

  Meanwhile, Rowan asked Stolley, “How fast can you get to Dallas?” Stolley and Tommy Thompson nabbed two photographers who happened to be in the office with their equipment and dashed to the Los Angeles airport. Stolley remembered, “No bags, no nothing, I mean, not even a notebook. And just outside the airport the announcer came on the radio and said that Kennedy was dead. Tommy, a Texan, let out a groan that I will never forget.” On the plane, they found themselves cheek by jowl with packs of other newsmen, many of them carrying camera equipment on their laps. “Television cameramen were getting on with those huge cameras… There wasn’t time to put them down in the baggage carrier, so they were carrying them into the plane and putting them in the aisle… I mean, everyone had a seat but equipment was everywhere and the pilot said, ‘Let’s go, let’s go.’”

  As soon as they landed in Dallas, Stolley went downtown to the Adolphus Hotel, where he got a suite and began setting up a headquarters for the LIFE staff who would be covering the story. Tommy Thompson left with one of the photographers for the Dallas jail to see what they could get on Oswald’s family, since Oswald himself was by then in custody. Soon, Stolley got a call from Patsy Swank, a stringer (part-time local correspondent) for LIFE, who had a juicy tidbit to share. “She said, ‘I just got a call from a reporter friend of mine who… tells me that a cop told him that a businessman with an 8mm home movie camera was in Dealey Plaza and photographed the assassination.’ I said, ‘Well, who is he? What’s his name?’… She sounded out three syllables—‘Zah-pruh-der’—and no first name, and I said, ‘OK. Patsy, that’s not a hell of a lot to go on.’… I’d never been in Dallas before, so I thought the best place to start would be the phone book… and I flipped over to the Zs and literally ran my finger down the Zs… and, by God, there was the name, exactly, phonetically, as it had been pronounced to me. I mean, spelled out: Zapruder, Abraham.”

  Stolley immediately started calling the house, but it was hours before he finally got Abe on the phone. When I asked him if he felt any apprehension about calling Abe at home, he said, “Oh, not the least. I mean, that’s what reporters do. You intrude on perfect strangers.” When at last Abe answered, Stolley introduced h
imself as a reporter with LIFE magazine and got straight to the point.

  “Mr. Zapruder, is it true that you photographed the assassination?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you get the entire sequence from beginning to end?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you seen the film?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Zapruder, can I come out now and see it?”

  (Pause)

  “No.”

  Stolley remembered Abe saying that he adored the president, that he was devastated by having witnessed his murder, and that he couldn’t deal with anything more that day. It was too much. Stolley added, “I felt genuinely sorry for the man. He was truly grieving. You could hear it in his voice.” As much as he felt compassion for Abe, he was also a reporter through and through. He had enough experience to know that sometimes you need to push to get what you want, and sometimes you need to back off. Not because it’s the kind thing to do—though in this case it was—but because pushing too far can sometimes backfire. His instincts told him to let it lie. But just for one night. Before he hung up, Abe told the reporter that he could meet him at Jennifer Juniors at nine o’clock the following morning.

  LIFE was undoubtedly in a league of its own as a pictorial magazine in those days. My grandparents had a subscription to the magazine, as did everyone else in the family. LIFE had a reputation for bringing images of the most important events of the day to the public—political events, natural disasters, profiles of world leaders, cultural affairs, and a sizable number of frivolous or entertaining stories, too. Moreover, the magazine had a special relationship with the Kennedy family, publishing color photographs of the gorgeous first family that fed the public’s fascination and cemented the Kennedy mystique. When there was breaking news, LIFE could not always compete with other news media for speed and breadth of coverage, so the editorial staff focused on special angles, striving to uncover a part of the story that would otherwise go undiscovered. In many cases, the key to their uniqueness lay in the photography; it was the powerful image—poignant or revelatory, emotional or insightful—that moved the story past the facts and the words to make readers feel that they were there. Sometimes, these photos came from their own staff photographers, but just as often, LIFE reporters went in search of photos taken by amateurs. Loudon Wainwright described it clearly in his book, The Great American Magazine: An Inside History of LIFE: “The questions LIFE reporters always asked themselves as they arrived at the scene were: ‘Who might have taken photographs that no one knows about?’ ‘How can we go about finding them?’”

  When Patsy Swank called Stolley with a tip about an amateur film, it was exactly what he was there to find. Before eight o’clock the next morning, Stolley left the Adolphus and took the short taxi ride through the deserted streets of downtown Dallas to Jennifer Juniors. Though he had been instructed to arrive at 9:00 a.m., LIFE reporters didn’t get the scoop by showing up on time. They came early. Not only that, but he was properly dressed in a suit and tie, and he carried himself with the authority of a representative of one of the leading magazines in the world. It may seem trivial now, but in this and other important ways, Dick Stolley separated himself from the outset from the roughneck, clamoring pack of reporters who would soon throng the offices of Jennifer Juniors. I asked him what was on his mind as he made his way to this meeting with Abe Zapruder. “You have to remember, you know, I had done this before. After one of the hurricanes that hit New England, I was a young reporter… and I was sent up to Cape Cod to get people who had taken pictures of the hurricane to give us pictures. So, in some ways, this was just like that.”

  As he prepared himself for the meeting, he was thinking only of seeing the film and, if it turned out to be good, procuring the print rights for his magazine. The previous night, after he got off the phone with Abe, he had called Dick Pollard, director of photography, in New York. “I said, ‘What are the parameters? I mean, I hope I am going to see that film first thing in the morning, and I have no idea who else is going to show up, but I need to know what I can offer.’ And the answer was, ‘You can go up to fifty thousand dollars, but then call us.’” When I interviewed Stolley in 2013, I asked him if that seemed like a lot of money to him then. “Yeah,” he said. “That was a fair amount of money for still photos.” It never occurred to him in that moment to consider the moving picture rights. For one thing, LIFE had no television outlet and no way to use moving images even if they wanted them. That wasn’t how they delivered the news. Not only that, but print still dominated the news in those days. TV news was relatively new, and evening broadcasts had only recently expanded from fifteen to thirty minutes a night. In fact, it was the round-the-clock coverage of the assassination that marked a turning point in the history of television news. But Dick Stolley was a print journalist. He was focused entirely on finding the still images he needed to bring the shocking news of the assassination to the American public in the pages of LIFE magazine.

  Before Abe could deal with the media, he had the painful duty of screening the film for two Secret Service agents who had come to the office for that purpose. Stolley thought Abe seemed slightly annoyed when he showed up early, but Abe just looked at him for a moment and then said, “Well, you might as well come and see this.” Stolley recalled that Abe had brought his projector from home and that he set it up on top of a rickety table in a small, windowless room on the fourth floor, preparing to project the images against the white wall. He ran the projector while Stolley and the Secret Service agents stood against the far wall. With no sound but the rhythmic clicking of the old movie projector, they watched the film in silence, until the moment of impact when the president’s head exploded in a shower of red. “And at that point… the three of us just went ugh, as if we had all been gut-punched, literally,” Stolley recalled. “I mean, we knew what had happened, but we had no idea what it looked like, and… it was the most dramatic moment of my career in journalism, seeing that unbelievable thing for the first time.”

  It was suddenly crystal clear to Dick Stolley that this was not, in fact, like getting photos taken by an amateur on the scene during a hurricane in Cape Cod. There would be nothing routine about this one. As he put it in his interview with me, “I thought, at that instant, there is no fucking way I am going to walk out of this building without that film.”

  Abe screened the film once or twice more for the Secret Service, who asked him a few questions about where he was standing and what he heard at the time the shots were fired. Stolley stayed quietly in the background, his mind racing, thinking that no one else in the media had yet seen the film and trying to calculate how he could use this to his advantage to convince Abe Zapruder to sell him the film. Meanwhile, it was almost 9:00 a.m., and reporters were beginning to gather in the outer vestibule at Jennifer. Eventually, nearly two dozen reporters turned up, representatives from the Associated Press, the Saturday Evening Post, Movietone News, and United Press International, but no one, at that time, from the national TV networks. Many of them had likely been up all night, and they were under enormous pressure to get whatever they could in the way of a scoop. Still, Erwin and Lillian, who were there at the time, remembered them as unkempt, brash, and rude, as far in temperament and style from Abe as people could be.

  Stolley took pains to separate himself from the other reporters, asking politely if he might use an office while the other news media screened the film. Abe showed him to a desk in what Stolley described as a “bull-pen” area of the office, where the staff usually worked. That’s probably how he started talking with Lillian, winning her over with his politeness and charm, which was just about the smartest thing he could have done. It turned out that they were both from Illinois and they shared the state’s passion for high school basketball. Stolley had been the sports editor of his hometown newspaper, and he knew all about her favorite team, the Taylorville Tornadoes, who had won hearts for their 1943–44 season, in which they made Illinois history by becoming the first
high-school basketball team to win the state championship with an undefeated record. While they traded notes about sports, Abe showed the film over and over to the assembled reporters and responded to requests to show it each time a new journalist turned up.

  Stolley says that the strain of showing the film over and over again got to Abe. He had started the morning in a subdued but calm frame of mind, very courteous but also businesslike. But after repeatedly screening the film, he had become more emotional and upset. After about an hour, he came out to where Stolley was sitting, not failing to notice that he was chatting sociably with Lillian. “I’ve shown the film to everybody who has come,” Abe said, “and I’m ready to talk.” Stolley followed him to the hall, where the reporters were assembled, and Abe addressed the group. He politely thanked everyone for coming and acknowledged that they all wanted to speak with him, but firmly said that since Mr. Stolley had been the first to contact him the previous night, he was obligated to speak with him first.

  Of course, Dick Stolley wasn’t the first reporter to have reached him at all. There had been Harry McCormick the day before, and Darwin Payne, and various others at the Jamieson Film Company and at Erwin’s house. They had all made offers for the film, hoping that by being the first, or the most persistent, they would convince him. But Abe had one thing on his mind on Friday, November 22, and that was to get the film processed, duplicated, and safely deposited with the Secret Service. That had taken all day. Still, if Stolley was not the first reporter to reach Abe, he was the first one to reach him after he had discharged his civic responsibility to get the film into the hands of the federal authorities. Depending on how you look at it, when Stolley reached Abe at the end of the day, he was either finally free to sell the film or still burdened with the problem of what to do with it.