Twenty-Six Seconds

by Alexandra Zapruder

  Either way, I suspect that the call from Stolley came as an enormous relief to my grandfather. He—like millions of others—knew and trusted LIFE magazine. It offered the best way to get the film out of his hands and into those of an organization he felt would not sensationalize the president’s murder. Although he went through the motions of showing the film to all the reporters who showed up, it doesn’t appear that he seriously entertained the possibility of selling the print rights to any of them. At the same time, it’s impossible to overstate the role that Stolley himself played in the final decision. As the morning wore on, and as the gulf widened between Stolley on the one hand and the pack of rude, pushy, aggressive reporters on the other—and the character of the publications they represented—there can have been little doubt in Abe’s mind that he wanted to deal with Dick Stolley and LIFE magazine and no one else.

  Stolley remembers the reaction in the room when Abe finished speaking. “Well, the others went berserk at that and began screaming at him,” he said. “‘Promise me you’ll sign nothing, Mr. Zapruder!’ ‘Don’t sign anything!’ ‘Talk to us!’ ‘You’ve got to promise us!’… And poor Abe was just… he was stunned. That day, with all these reporters screaming at him, he just looked shell-shocked.” Nothing in his life could have prepared him for this. It wasn’t just the connection of the film to the money that was painful to him. It was the reporters’ lack of sensitivity about what the film actually showed. These weren’t agents from the Secret Service or FBI, who obviously needed access to the information on the film. This was the media up close, hungry to pay any price and disseminate at any cost images that he felt no decent person would want to see. They were treating the purchase of these images exactly as they would any other “scoop,” not as if they showed the gruesome murder of a man, the making of a widow, the felling of a young leader who had promised so much to a nation hungry for change. Or—even worse—it was exactly because they showed all those things that they were desperate to get the images.

  He had known almost immediately that this would be the dilemma of the film. The very night after the assassination he was visited by nightmares, some of which would haunt him for the rest of his life. But the one that pressed in on his dreams the most that night was not about the murder of the president but about the film. He dreamed he was walking in Times Square in New York, surrounded by the theaters and the flashing marquee lights. There, on the street corner, in front of a sleazy theater, stood a man in “a sharp double-breasted suit” hawking tickets to his home movie, shouting to all those who passed by, “Come inside to see the president murdered on the big screen!” From deep inside his subconscious, it was his anxiety about what to do with the film that rose most prominently to the surface. The worst-case scenario was not failing to sell the film, or not selling it for enough money, but successfully selling it and somehow unleashing consequences that he could never take back or control. It was not only being witness to the murder itself, but the hideous possibility of unscrupulous people exploiting that murder over and over again. It was that he would collude with the media to feed a voyeuristic fascination with the president’s murder. The crux of the dream’s horror, in my mind, is that he would become the hawker on the street himself.

  Richard Stolley and LIFE magazine offered him a safe harbor in a sea of sharks. No one was going to come out of this a saint, but maybe there was a way to come out whole, moral fiber intact, liberated from the film, and maybe a little better off financially than he had been before. But he would have to get through the negotiations first. Once settled in his office, Stolley began by testing the waters. He remembered that he wanted to see if Abe knew what he had, and to get a sense of how this was going to go. “That’s a very unusual piece of film,” he said carefully, in what was perhaps the understatement of the century. He went on to explain that when LIFE magazine encountered such unusual images, they occasionally paid more than their usual “space rates.” They would certainly consider paying as much as $5,000. In his recollection, Stolley said, “He looked at me and gave me this half smile, which indicated to me that he knew what he had and he knew that I knew what he had, so, kind of, let’s get on with it.”

  For the next half hour or more, the two men sat together. I asked Stolley what they discussed. He said they talked a lot about the assassination and everything that was happening in Dallas, and in between they made small talk. Periodically, Stolley would raise his bid and Abe would let the figure hang out in the air, without saying no but not really saying anything, and they would start talking again. At one point in the conversation, Abe confessed that he was embarrassed that he, a middle-aged garment manufacturer, an amateur, had taken these pictures and not one of the world-famous photographers whose job it was to travel and capture every minute of the president’s life. Stolley also remembered that Abe told him about the vivid nightmare he had had the night before, and he repeatedly asked for assurances that LIFE would not “exploit” the film, that they would treat the images tastefully and respectfully. Stolley repeatedly reassured him that they would.

  Meanwhile, the frenzy outside the office was reaching a fever pitch. Every few minutes, one of the reporters would slip a note under the door or bang on the door and shout, “Don’t sign anything!” or “You promised!” Some went down to the street and used a pay phone to call the office, trying to interrupt the meeting in order to avert what looked like its inexorable outcome. Other reporters were verbally abusive and rude to Lillian, accusing her of keeping them from her boss. Erwin said that a reporter from the AP yelled at him, “I’m offering your boss a hundred thousand dollars!” Erwin shot back, “He’s not my boss!”

  The tension inside the office rose with the chaos outside. Stolley recalled that each bang on the door made Abe flinch and surely increased his desire to get the negotiations over with. “And I kept going up, and I finally got to fifty thousand, and I didn’t even wait for a reaction,” Stolley says. “I just said, ‘Mr. Zapruder, this is as high as I was authorized to go.’… And I think at that point we trusted each other—or he trusted me, which is the most important thing.” There is no question that Dick Stolley wanted the film every bit as much as any of the other reporters there. But he also clearly saw Abe Zapruder, understood his distress and shock, and regarded him as more than a human body standing between himself and the scoop of the century. “I mean, you have to keep remembering,” he wrote decades later: “We had all seen the film. But Abe Zapruder saw the actual murder.” Stolley rose to call his editor, but at just that moment, another reporter pounded loudly on the office door, demanding to be let in and have his chance at the negotiation. “And he just kind of winced,” Stolley wrote. “At that point, he just said, ‘Let’s do it,’ very quietly, very simply. ‘Let’s do it.’”

  They typed up a short contract and Stolley took possession of the original film. Abe kept the duplicate that had been made at Jamieson the night before. Thinking of the mob of reporters outside, Stolley asked him, “Mr. Zapruder, is there a back door to this place?” There was. Richard Stolley quietly made his way out of the building’s rear exit, while Abe was left to face the furious, howling crowd of reporters alone.

  As early as Saturday morning, November 23, there was no single life of “the Zapruder film.” There were four versions—the original and three duplicates—each of which traveled its own path, creating its own reverberations and consequences for our family, the media, the federal authorities, and the public.

  While the media was clamoring around Abe at Jennifer Juniors on Saturday morning, a group of FBI agents from the Dallas field office arrived at Kodak to examine the images on one of the duplicate copies. For this purpose, they had borrowed Copy 1 (number 0185) from the Dallas Secret Service. It’s important to keep the FBI and the Secret Service separate—even though people routinely use the names of the agencies interchangeably in their recollections—because they each carried on their own investigations and undertook entirely separate analyses of the film during that first week
end.

  The Dallas FBI agents remained at Kodak for an hour or two, watching the film over and over again, using an 8mm projector that allowed freeze-frame stopping to analyze it, trying to determine what it showed and how the information fit with the developing investigation. When they left, it would seem that they returned the film to the Secret Service and did not immediately report their findings to FBI headquarters in Washington. Instead, senior officials at the FBI learned about the existence of the film on Saturday afternoon from disgruntled media who could not get access to it from Abe Zapruder.

  Cartha DeLoach, assistant director in charge of the Crime Records Division, a high-ranking operative and close confidant of J. Edgar Hoover, wrote two memos on that day that help piece together the Bureau’s efforts to get the film. In the first one, he documented his initial awareness of the film and several calls to Dallas about it. He wrote, “We have received inquiries from ‘Time’ magazine, ‘Telenews,’ ‘The New York Times’ and a number of other communications outlets relative to several minutes of 8 millimeter color film which was reportedly taken at the scene of the assassination by one Abraham Zapruber [sic].” Apparently, other agents in the Bureau had received similar calls. DeLoach called Special Agent Gordon Shanklin in the Dallas FBI field office to find out more. DeLoach reported that Shanklin “knew that we had this film and [he] was having it processed at the present time at a commercial shop in Dallas. Shanklin stated he did not believe the film would be of any evidentiary value; however, he first had to take a look at the film to determine this factor.” Either Shanklin was confused or he was covering his rear, because the FBI agents had returned the film to the Secret Service earlier that morning.

  In the same memo, DeLoach notes that he further instructed Shanklin to ignore the media, to proceed with processing the film to determine what value it might have, and to get back in touch when he had seen it. He was clearly unaware that it had already been developed and viewed at length—by his own local Dallas agents, no less. He also believed Shanklin was in possession of the original film, writing at the very end that “despite the pressure that was being put on [sic] by the news outlets this matter would have to be treated strictly as evidence and later on a determination would be made as to whether the film would be given back to Zapruber [sic] or not.” This seems like an entirely reasonable thing to think, under the circumstances, and it raises the question of why the Secret Service hadn’t, in fact, taken the original film in the first place. Unfortunately for the federal agencies, that ship had sailed. Richard Stolley had carried the original out of Jennifer Juniors and had it sent via courier to Chicago so that the LIFE editors could include it in the special JFK assassination issue for November 29.

  Without the original, the Secret Service had only the two first-generation copies to use for analysis. If the FBI wanted copies to be made from these versions, they would be second generation. The visual clarity would deteriorate with each version. And none of the copies of the film included the visual information between the sprocket holes of the film. But with no other option, the Dallas FBI field office borrowed Copy 1 of the film from the Secret Service in Dallas for a second time that day. Inspector Thomas Kelley of the Secret Service lent it to Special Agent James Bookhout in the Dallas field office of the FBI, who handed it to Special Agent Robert Barrett, also in the FBI field office, to make a duplicate. Here they ran into a bit of a snag. Apparently, Barrett was totally unable to find a way to make a duplicate of the copy. Nowhere in the entire city of Dallas—not at any of the television stations, nor at Kodak, nor at Jamieson—could anyone be found who could duplicate the film. Within hours, Barrett gave up and returned it to Shanklin. Someone else would have to figure out what to do with it.

  In DeLoach’s second memo, written later that day, it is clear that Shanklin had called and given his boss the bad news. First of all, DeLoach knew by then that “Mr. Zapruber,” as he repeatedly referred to him, had sold the film to “Time and Life” (though the memo is not clear about the difference between the original and the copies) and that the FBI would be working with a duplicate. Also, Shanklin reported that local film companies had been unable to duplicate the film. Apparently, the Dallas field office didn’t even have a movie projector on which they could watch the borrowed copy, nor could they seem to find one in the whole of the city of Dallas. But, Shanklin added helpfully, when he held the thin strip up to the light, he could clearly see the color images, tiny as they were, showing the president and Governor Connally being hit by the sniper’s bullet. I don’t know what DeLoach’s response was to this report of hapless incompetence, but I can only imagine it was laced with expletives. Neither the Secret Service nor the FBI in Dallas had obtained the original film or the camera when they had the chance. Further, Shanklin had failed to grasp the film’s importance, even after his own agents reviewed it for hours. Finally, his agents could not even find a way to have it duplicated. Instead, the FBI would have to use a copy to make a second-generation copy in order to analyze what was turning out to be a critical piece of visual evidence of the president’s assassination.

  In the written record, however, DeLoach simply ordered Shanklin to “immediately” put the film on a commercial flight to Washington. The matter would henceforth be handled in the capital. So Copy 1 was flown from Dallas to DC on American Airlines flight 20, which left at 5:20 that evening. DeLoach instructed that the film be picked up from the airport and brought into town to be “processed either by our own photographic lab or by a commercial lab with whom we do business here in Washington.” But here again, and in spite of DeLoach’s impatience to get the film, the momentum stalled. The FBI’s state-of-the-art photography lab didn’t have the capability to duplicate the film, and the company with whom they did business in Washington was apparently closed for the weekend. Somehow, the FBI could not find a way around these problems, so the agency waited until Monday, November 25, three full days after the assassination, for the commercial lab to open its doors and make the three duplicates they required. Finally, on Tuesday morning—after much consternation from the Secret Service in Dallas, who urgently wanted their copy back—the FBI returned Copy 1 and one of the duplicates to the Secret Service in Dallas. In a cover memo, the FBI director sternly reminded them that these copies were for official use only and that they were to be treated with the utmost confidence. Never mind that in just a few days, millions of copies of LIFE magazine with images from the film would be flooding into living rooms across America.

  During the day on Saturday, Richard Stolley had dispatched the in-camera original of the film to Chicago, where LIFE’s printing plant, R.R. Donnelley, was located. LIFE’s skeleton crew had all been there since the day before, working under the guidance of Roy Rowan to tear up the original issue of the magazine and remake it under enormous time and emotional pressure. The work was well under way when word reached Rowan that an amateur movie was on its way to Chicago for inclusion in the new issue. It arrived by courier and Rowan set up a hand-cranked Moviola projector to allow his team to study the film frame by frame and to decide which images they wanted to have enlarged and printed for further editorial review. There was absolutely no question of printing in color; there was simply not enough time, at least not in this first issue. Rowan later remembered how painful it was to watch the film over and over, seeing the “animated young president happily waving to the crowds just before his life was suddenly extinguished.”

  But there was no opportunity to dwell on these sorts of thoughts; the time crunch was too great. Rowan sent the film to their photo lab, which produced over one hundred 8 x 10-inch black-and-white prints that Rowan and associate art director David Stech laid out all over the floor of an office in the printing plant. Rowan recalled that they agonized over whether to publish frame 313, the gruesome image of the bullet’s impact on the president’s head. I don’t know if Rowan was aware of Abe’s plea for respect and dignity for the president, nor do I know if Stolley had the time or forethought to convey it to
him. I doubt it. But either way, Rowan decided against using the image in this issue. The debate would be taken up again by members of the editorial and art direction staff for the later memorial edition, published the following month. But for the moment, the public was spared this appalling visual. As it was, the thirty-one images printed in black and white clearly showed the basic sequence of events and were plenty horrifying. Most upsetting were the images of Mrs. Kennedy clambering on the back of the limousine after her husband was fatally wounded.

  During this frantic day, while the prints were being made, six frames of the original film were damaged. Four frames were removed, and large splices appear on the original. In later years, in the context of growing fears of a government cover-up of a conspiracy and suspicion that LIFE was in collusion with it, rumors of these missing frames took on enormous importance. It didn’t help that LIFE did not publicly disclose this information until much later. By that time, there was such mistrust of the government and resentment of LIFE that any inconsistency having to do with the film could get pulled in by the gravitational force of the various conspiracy theories. For the moment, however, no one outside LIFE knew that the original film had been damaged. By midmorning on Sunday, the LIFE magazine issue was wrapped up and ready to print.

  Back in Dallas, Police Chief Jesse Curry had decided to move Lee Harvey Oswald on Sunday morning from the city jail located in the Dallas Municipal Building on Main and Harwood Streets to the Dallas County Jail. There were considerable concerns for Oswald’s physical safety: The FBI and the sheriff’s office had received calls from a man claiming that “a committee” planned to kill the president’s murderer. Further, on Friday night and Saturday, the building had been mobbed with reporters and cameramen trying to ask questions and photograph or film Oswald as he went back and forth between the homicide office for questioning and the elevator leading to the jail.