On Sunday morning, Curry’s police officers took steps to secure the basement of the building and got into position for Oswald’s transfer to the county jail. He exited the jail office handcuffed to Detective J. R. Leavelle, and witnesses recalled a surge of media with microphones and cameras with flashbulbs pushing forward as he appeared. About ten feet from the exit, at just about 11:20 a.m., Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby slipped between a news reporter and a detective standing on the ramp leading from the basement of the building up to Main Street. His right arm was already extended by the time anyone noticed him. He fired one fatal shot with his .38 revolver into Oswald’s abdomen.
There are many reasons why Oswald’s murder is important to this story, not the least of which is that it must have seemed to those witnessing it on television at the time, or hearing about it in the immediate aftermath, as if the United States was coming completely unglued. It certainly had major ramifications for the subsequent investigations into the president’s assassination, since the accused assassin’s murderer was a shady Dallas nightclub owner with cozy relationships to law enforcement and rumored ties to the Mafia, details that made many wonder if Ruby’s act had been less an act of vigilante justice than a calculated silencing. Oswald’s killing had unintended consequences for the Zapruder film, too. Journalist Max Holland articulated this idea in his 2014 Newsweek article “The Truth Behind JFK’s Assassination,” writing, “In the absence of a cathartic, public trial in Dallas, the Zapruder film displaced Oswald’s view from the sixth-floor window; a partial but mesmerizing visual record had to stand in for seeing the assassination through Oswald’s eyes and hearing it described in his words.” Who knows what role the Zapruder film might have played in history had Jack Ruby not murdered Lee Harvey Oswald, leaving a massive vacuum of information and perspective in his wake?
When LIFE’s weary editorial staff learned of Oswald’s shooting, they managed to pull themselves together for long enough to update the issue with the new information—changing a headline, adding a few lines of text, and inserting a photo of Oswald just before Ruby fired—before collapsing in total exhaustion. Also on Sunday afternoon, senior staff at LIFE, including Dick Pollard and publisher C. D. Jackson, had gathered in New York to screen a copy of the film that had been made in Chicago and sent to their office. Like everyone who saw the film that weekend, the editorial staff were stunned and appalled. C. D. Jackson in particular was personally upset by the film, and he expressed his strong feelings that the public should not see the images, at least until enough time had passed for the initial grief over the president’s death to subside. For this reason, he urged LIFE to acquire all rights to the film. Although Jackson was not on the editorial staff and, as such, did not make content decisions for the magazine, he seems to have convinced the editors that acquiring the film rights was the best thing to do. Pollard reached out to Stolley, who was still in Dallas. Stolley was to call Abe and inquire about purchasing all rights to the film.
C. D. Jackson’s effort to protect the public from images that he considered too violent made sense at the time, even if it reflects what many would consider a paternalistic attitude by today’s standards. To understand that moment and the actions of those who decided what to do with the film, we have to go beyond platitudes about the innocence of the sixties and actually imagine a time before people were routinely bombarded with moving footage of violence multiple times a day, at any time, without warning. We have to scroll back and erase the most shocking, watershed images from our collective consciousness: No black civilians being beaten and killed by the police. No beheadings of reporters by ISIS. No slow-motion implosion of the Twin Towers into the streets of Lower Manhattan, no people jumping out of the burning buildings, no planes crashing into the towers. No Challenger exploding in flames in the Florida sky. No scenes of the Vietnam War, no dead bodies of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. In many ways, it’s impossible to understand the history of the Zapruder film without traveling back in time to see it through the eyes of those who saw it when there had never been anything like it before.
For Abe Zapruder first, and for LIFE magazine and the federal authorities next, there was no map to direct them on how to handle it or what to do with it. In this, it was like Lewis and Clark standing on the edge of a new American wilderness. Which way to go? How to get there? What would they find? What consequences might flow from the path they charted? In the earliest days, when Abe was trying to decide what to do with his film and journalists at LIFE were trying to figure out how to represent the assassination, there was no choice but to rely on past experiences and contemporary values to make those decisions. It is worth remembering that—ironically enough—those values were forged in a world before the Kennedy assassination and the Zapruder film. So Abe Zapruder sold the film to LIFE because he felt he could trust them, and C. D. Jackson wanted to take possession of it because he felt that, as publisher of LIFE, he was responsible to an extent for the images that reached the public. Certainly, their personal feelings carried a disproportionate weight in the decision-making process, but, more than that, their choices reflected an American climate and sensibility that were soon to be challenged by the consequences of the JFK assassination itself.
In retrospect, it can be hard to understand why Forrest Sorrels and the other Secret Service agents failed to seize the camera and the original film from Abe Zapruder after the assassination. There can be no question that if asked to turn them over, he would have done so. Being only human, he might have had a flicker of regret about the film’s financial value, but he surely would also have been grateful not to be the one to have to decide what to do with the footage. It’s pretty clear from Cartha DeLoach’s memo that he assumed the Secret Service had taken the obvious step of securing the original film. But the FBI memoranda from that day show a picture of disarray and chaos in the local field offices instead. This fumble, in combination with the technical problems that the agencies had in reviewing, duplicating, and analyzing the film, makes the government appear wildly unprepared for what had befallen them.
Meanwhile, in his affidavit written in January 1964, Forrest Sorrels had this to say on the subject: “Mr. Zapruder agreed to furnish me with a copy of this film with the understanding that it was strictly for official use of the Secret Service and that it would not be shown or given to any newspapers or magazines as he expected to sell the film for as high a price as he could get for it.” When I first encountered this statement, I will admit that I was instantly defensive. It seemed like an impossible thing for my grandfather to have said. For one thing, it doesn’t tally with the recollections of Harry McCormick, Darwin Payne, Erwin Schwartz, or Dick Stolley. Each of them independently said that Abe refused to even discuss the sale of the film that day and repeatedly turned down offers from media desperate to buy it. The following morning, at Jennifer Juniors, he had ample opportunities to create a bidding war to raise the sale price of the film, but he didn’t. Clearly, financial gain was not his only motivation; finding the news outlet that would treat the images with discretion and dignity was every bit as important. It occurred to me to wonder if Sorrels had his own reasons for reporting the story that way. By January 1964, when Sorrels wrote his report, he may have realized the grave error in judgment he had made by not taking the camera with the film in it at the time. Perhaps he was trying to cover himself after the fact by implying that it was Abe’s financial interest in the film that determined the course of events. It is also possible that my reaction to Sorrels’s statement has to do with our extreme sensitivity to criticism about our financial motives more than anything else. This is always the nerve that is touched in our family, on our grandfather’s behalf and on our own.
Cartha DeLoach and the FBI agents in Washington, needless to say, would not have let the film slip out of their hands. It could only have happened in small-town Dallas, which was totally unprepared for the disastrous events of November 22. In an interview with William Manchester, my grandfather later
said, “The Police Department here didn’t even have a projector. That shows you what kind of Police Department we have. They had to come to my office to see [it].” Here, there’s also a sharp contrast with how the media in general, and LIFE in particular, grasped the importance of the film and set about obtaining it. Their concerns and responsibilities were radically different: The media was focused strictly on reporting the story, while the Feds were trying to cope with the loss of the head of the government, the confusing and rapidly changing criminal investigation, and all the evidence pouring in, trying to distinguish what was most important in any given moment. All the more reason, of course, that the government should have seized the original film. Instead, while the Secret Service and FBI were fumbling to get second-generation copies made in Dallas and Washington, DC, LIFE had no trouble making prints in Chicago, and was sending a duplicate copy of the film to New York the very next day.
While it’s tempting to poke fun at the Feds, there is a common thread that runs through the very different responses of all the people who were dealing with the film, whether it was my grandfather’s actions, LIFE’s editorial decisions, or the government’s delays. The film in Abe Zapruder’s camera was not the famous, iconic “Zapruder film” on November 22, 1963. It only became so over time, as a consequence of all the things that happened to it. On the first day, and in the years that followed, the film would always be out of its time, always opening new questions and posing problems that individuals and organizations were unprepared to handle.
In 2013, I interviewed my mother about our family’s history with the Zapruder film. When we sat down in the living room of the house I grew up in, she said, “Honestly, I was never interested in the film, so I’m not going to be much help. It’s so sad you can’t talk to Dad about all this, but I didn’t want to have anything to do with it.” When I asked her why not, she said, “Because it was just sad. It was a reminder of a terrible thing.” My mother is petite, with short, dark, wavy hair that she has worn in the same style for as long as I can remember, and big hazel eyes. She has a slightly crooked smile. Trained in art history as a medievalist and as a museum registrar, she blends her knowledge of the arts with a propensity to carefully document nearly everything. She has produced an astonishing photographic record of our family life and has also captured unforgettable images from her travels with my father that hang on the walls of her home. She tends to dismiss her own creative abilities, but she has illustrated her calendars with lovely tiny drawings and cutouts that represent important events in her life. She is very charming in public, but those who know her best know that there is a deeply sensitive and emotional current running under her polished surface. I know it wasn’t easy for her to talk about the film, and that it was still more painful to discuss my father, whose death was her loss more than anyone else’s.
I asked her to tell me what happened after my grandfather called and told her that the president was dead and she tried to tell him that he was at Parkland Hospital. “I was just in a state of shock,” she said, “and I was listening to the radio. I mean, I just kept listening and listening, and then Dad came home. And the two of us just sat there. You know, it kind of got dark, and we were—we were devastated. It was like someone in your life—someone you knew had been shot.” They probably would have sat there alone all night but for Blanche Barbrow, a relative and close friend of my mother’s parents, who called and asked them what they were doing. They had only been in the city for three weeks and didn’t know anyone yet. It was not a night to be alone. “You come right over here,” she said, “and have dinner with us.”
Two days later, on Sunday, the president’s flag-draped casket was borne from the White House to the Capitol Rotunda on a horse-drawn caisson. My parents were among the 300,000 people who lined the broad avenue that day as the cortege went by. My mother recalled how the news of Oswald’s murder reached them. “It was a sunny day, it was very cold, and someone had a transistor radio… and said, ‘Oh my God, Oswald’s been shot.’”
As the sun began to set on Sunday, hundreds of thousands of people formed a huge line, ten deep, miles long, walking to the Capitol Rotunda to pay their personal respects to the president, whose body was lying in state. My parents and my mother’s younger brother, Joe Seiger, who had driven down from Pittsburgh, returned to take their places in line. Although the Capitol was supposed to close at 9:00 p.m. on Sunday and reopen for a short time on Monday morning before the funeral at Arlington Cemetery, officials decided to allow the building to remain open all night so the mourners could file past.
My mother remembered it as a very cold November night, as they slowly made their way on foot along Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol. When I asked her what it was like, and were people talking to each other, she said, “We were devastated. We were there because the president we loved had been killed, and—I mean, this just wasn’t part of what I thought of as American history. A president assassinated? We felt like—and I think Dad felt similarly—like it was a personal loss.” I can almost see the set of my father’s face in that moment, the crushing disappointment he must have felt not only at the president’s death but also at the implications for his own life. All those plans, that hard work, that letter to the president pleading for a way to work in his administration—all of it dashed in a matter of seconds. It took them until past dawn the next morning to make their way out of the freezing weather into the brief warmth of the Capitol Building and to momentarily file by the closed casket to say goodbye to their president, and with him, all those hopes and dreams.
CHAPTER 4
ALL RIGHTS TO LIFE
Abe’s experience over the weekend was different in nearly every way from the rest of the public’s and his own family’s. He had the responsibility of the film hanging over his head, but it barely registered with his children, so wrapped up were they in their own grief about the assassination. My mother always emphasized this point, that the film had absolutely no significance to them at the time. Myrna agreed. “I absolutely shut the whole thing out. All I could think about was Kennedy and that he’d been shot. I didn’t understand the implications of my dad taking the pictures and the press… nothing… My focus was on the loss of Kennedy, not on the film.”
But Abe had no choice. “For him, it became the total point,” Myrna reflected, “because the phones never stopped ringing.” I think now how isolating, even alienating, that must have been for him. He was utterly besieged by the media, who were calling the house at all hours of the day and night, unrelenting in their pursuit of the moving picture rights to the film. It surely didn’t take him long to understand that they would not let up until the rights were no longer available for sale.
Against this backdrop, Abe reached out to attorney Sam Passman, who was a partner at Passman & Jones in Dallas. His regular attorney was out of town, but Sam was a family friend and relative through his son-in-law, Myron. I never met Sam but my parents interviewed him in 1994. During their conversation, Sam recalled that Myron called him first, and then he heard directly from Abe. At first, Abe wanted to know if Sam’s friend Bill Barnard from the Associated Press might be interested in acquiring the film. It must have been later in the day on Sunday that Stolley reached Abe at home, inquiring for the second time in as many days about purchasing rights to the film. Stolley remembers that Abe sounded “relieved” to hear from him. He told Stolley to meet him the next day, not at Jennifer Juniors this time but at the office of Passman & Jones.
Heartsick and conflicted, Abe arrived at Sam’s office on Monday to meet the reporters and media representatives who wanted to purchase the film rights. Although he was surely leaning strongly toward making a deal with Stolley for LIFE—for all the same reasons that he had sold the print rights to him two days before—Abe was prepared to meet with the other representatives who were there, including Bill Barnard from the AP, Felix McKnight from the Dallas Times Herald, Mike Shapiro from the Dallas Morning News, and a very young Dan Rather from CBS. Dan Rat
her has famously written in his memoir The Camera Never Blinks that his heart sank when he saw Richard Stolley walk into the lobby, knowing that LIFE had, in his words, “a reputation for paying big.” Stolley says he had more or less the same reaction when he saw Dan Rather, knowing that he was an aggressive young reporter and that he would do whatever he could to get the film for his network.
The camera might not blink but memory definitely falters, and there is no way to tell this part of the film’s history without revisiting Dan Rather’s role in these events, which reveals a great deal about the media climate that my grandfather faced. Rather, chief of the New Orleans bureau of CBS at the time, had been sent to Dallas prior to the president’s visit to organize coverage of the event. Given the hostility in Dallas, and the aggressive Kennedy-haters who had harassed and spit on Adlai Stevenson just weeks before, CBS planned to be prepared in the event of an ugly or embarrassing incident. Working with Eddie Barker, the news director at local Dallas TV station KRLD, Rather saw to it that CBS was ready for anything that might happen, setting up “film drops” all along the motorcade route through Dallas. With coverage of the visit in the capable hands of the local media, Rather traveled to Uvalde, Texas, on Friday morning to do a light piece on the ninety-fifth birthday of John Nance Garner, a former vice president to FDR who had famously compared that office to “a pitcher of warm spit.”
When Rather returned to Dallas before noon, he realized that they were missing a film drop at the very end of the presidential motorcade route just at the end of Elm Street past Dealey Plaza, where the motorcade was due to go under the triple underpass en route to the Dallas Trade Mart. That is how, just after 12:30 p.m., he found himself standing on the far side of the underpass, where instead of seeing the motorcade roll by on its way to the Trade Mart, he suddenly saw a police car speed past, followed by two limousines, and take an unexpected route up the Stemmons Freeway. It didn’t take him long to realize that something had happened, but what it was he wasn’t sure. In his book, Rather fully describes how he learned about the president’s death and his early reporting of it on CBS. While that part isn’t what interests me, it’s worth noting that his nearly single-minded focus on being first to get information, the exclusive holder of it, and the fastest to deliver it—consequences be damned—comes through vividly. It’s a set of imperatives that defined his actions when it came to the film, as well.
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