Twenty-Six Seconds

by Alexandra Zapruder

  His account of his early dealings with the film (as reported in his 1977 book and later repeated in his 2003 interview with the JFK Presidential Library, among others) does not, unfortunately, tally with the historical record. He begins by describing how Eddie Barker and his people began calling around Dallas to see if there was any film of the shooting. There was nothing unusual in this; everyone else was doing the same. He writes, “Slowly we picked up a trail. Someone had seen a man standing at a certain spot… We ran our leads through the FBI and the Dallas police. Finally we had a name: Abraham Zapruder. This heavyset man, in his fifties, kind face with skin the color of oatmeal, was to become one of history’s great accidents.”

  My grandfather, kind face or not, did not have skin the color of oatmeal, nor was he particularly heavyset, but fine. Let’s let that go. And while I’m desperately trying to keep my eye on the ball here, I have to admit I’m not crazy about Abe Zapruder being described as “one of history’s great accidents.” Aside from the obvious observation that we are all historical accidents, few of us would choose to have the immense complexity of our lives summed up that way. He goes on, “When we reached him Zapruder did not know what he had. We didn’t either, but we helped arrange for Eastman Kodak to process the film. This job had to be done by the best equipment. It had to be done fast. And it had to be kept confidential.” In a number of later interviews, including his interview with the JFK Library in 2003, this story had become calcified in his memory. “Finding the Zapruder tape [sic] and getting it, you say, well, you got lucky,” he said. “Also we got it processed. That, by the way, is a good story.”

  I’ll say it is.

  While it is difficult to account for this assertion, the other mistakes in this part of his book—mixing up days and collapsing the timeline of events—are entirely understandable given the chaos of the moment and the years that had passed. He remembered it as Saturday when Zapruder “put himself in the hands of a lawyer,” but here he must mean Monday, because we know that Dan Rather wasn’t at Jennifer Juniors on Saturday when Stolley acquired the print rights, and there was no lawyer present. At some point over the weekend, Rather, like Stolley, got in touch with his New York office and pressed the necessity of getting the film, a goal that the executives at CBS apparently shared.

  In fact, much later, Don Hewitt of CBS News recounted in his book Tell Me a Story the fever that gripped him when he learned about the film. “In my desire to get a hold of what was probably the most dramatic piece of news footage ever shot I told [Dan] Rather to go to Zapruder’s house, sock him in the jaw, take his film to our affiliate in Dallas, copy it onto videotape [sic], and let the CBS lawyers decide whether it could be sold or whether it was in the public domain. And then take the film back to Zapruder’s house and give it back to him. That way, the only thing they could get [Rather] for was assault because he would have returned Zapruder’s property.” According to Hewitt, Rather enthusiastically agreed to this plan. Then Hewitt came to his senses a few minutes later and called him back, saying, “For Christ’s sake, don’t do what I just told you to. I think this day has gotten to me and thank God I caught you before you left.”

  Rather, in his 2003 interview with the JFK Library, questions the veracity of this account, saying, “It makes a nice story,” though in his own memory of the events, the same basic elements are there. Recalling his walk to Passman & Jones on Monday morning, he wrote: “All sorts of crude ideas rushed through my mind. What if he gave it to NBC? What if he sold it to someone else?… For a moment I thought, if I have to, I’ll just knock him down and grab the film, run back to the station, show it one time and then let him sue us.” Darwin Payne had had a similar thought a few days before, minus the part about knocking Abe down. Hewitt and Rather were in a league all their own. However, the fact that Rather was beside himself to acquire the film, and that he recounted that feeling with all the drama of a news reporter in later years, is not surprising. It speaks to the way that media attention had crystallized around the film over the weekend. Even the fact that, despite all evidence to the contrary, he aggrandized his own role in finding the film and getting it developed can be explained by tricks of memory combined with an all-too-human ego. In time, Dan Rather would come to believe this story so fully that he would use it to justify a proprietary right to own the film. In his own words, “Our office—that mixture of CBS and KRLD crews—had done the legwork that turned up Zapruder. We had helped get the film processed. I felt we had at least a claim to it.”

  In fact, Rather and CBS had no claim to it. If anyone did, it was LIFE, since it was Richard Stolley who had learned about the film in the early evening on Friday, reached Abe that night, and behaved with compassion in that moment, throughout the next morning, and in every interaction they had over the weekend. Nevertheless, Abe and Sam Passman apparently entertained bids from parties other than LIFE. Perhaps they were using the other reporters’ interest as leverage in the negotiations, or perhaps they felt they had to give everyone a fair chance to bid for it. Either way, once everyone was assembled, Sam laid out a few basic ground rules for the proceedings. Both Richard Stolley and Sam Passman recall this part vividly.

  The reporters were instructed that they were not to report on what they had seen on the film unless they were the ones to acquire it. In the closed system of media ethics, it wouldn’t be “fair” to the reporter or network that acquired the film for what would surely be a substantial amount of money if the competition left the office and blew their exclusive. In Sam Passman’s files, I found several copies of the confidentiality agreement that he must have drafted. They are marked up by hand and written in legalese but nevertheless totally clear. The key parts read as follows: “The undersigned will not reveal or disclose to anyone any information or the scenes therein depicted, except to members of the organization which he represents for the purposes of appraising the value thereof… Furthermore, no stories, news casts, commentary or otherwise shall reveal or disclose the scenes depicted therein.”

  The confidentiality agreements in the file are not signed or executed, perhaps because everyone felt that, under the circumstances, a gentleman’s agreement would be enough to guarantee a measure of discretion among the competing reporters. That turned out to be naive. Again, from Rather’s memoir:

  The lawyer laid out the ground rules for us: He had set up a projector in a private room. You went in, looked at the film one time, took no notes, came out and gave him your bid. I was already saying to myself, the bid comes second. The first thing I am going to do is look at the film, then knock the hinges off the door getting back to the station and describe what I had just seen. Then, and only then, would we get into the bidding.

  And that is precisely what Dan Rather did. On his way out the door, he told Sam that he needed to consult with executives at CBS before he could make an offer. And then, in an act of breathtaking chutzpah, he went a step further, extracting a promise from Sam that they would not settle on the sale of the film rights until he got back. Got back from where? From rushing to KRLD to deliver the first description of the assassination to the public, in direct violation of the confidentiality ground rules. “Within seconds after I walked into the studio,” he wrote, “I was on the air, describing what I had just observed.”

  Rather’s rush to get the exclusive on the film ended up having an unintended consequence—as rash and ill-considered actions often do—in the later conspiracy debates. Rather, who had seen the film only once, described the president’s head as jerking slightly forward at the moment of impact and didn’t mention the far more obvious backward motion that followed. This description later fed the interests of a number of different conspiracy theorists, especially the so-called alterationists, who relied on this detail to “prove” that Rather had seen the “real” version of the film as compared to the later ones in circulation that must have been altered because they didn’t conform to his spoken recollection. For his part, Rather defends his misrepresentation of what was o
n the film not by acknowledging that it was irresponsible to give an account after having seen it only once, but as follows: “At the risk of sounding too defensive, I challenge anyone to watch for the first time a twenty-two-second film [sic] of devastating impact, run several blocks, then describe what they had seen in its entirety, without notes. Perhaps someone can do so better than I did that day. I only know that I did it as well and as honestly as I could under the conditions.”

  Maybe that’s why it would have been a good idea not to do it in the first place. After all, while Rather surely was trying to be honest about what he saw, he was doing so under inherently dishonest conditions, having disregarded the ground rules established by the sellers of the film. It’s true that those restrictions were put in place not to protect the public from rushing to conclusions about the shooting but to prevent one reporter from scooping all the others. Still, his fault in that moment was not a humble failure of memory; it was self-interested professional ambition. And while this may not be new in the annals of media history, Rather’s single-minded focus on “the get” throws Stolley’s sensitivity into sharp relief and explains, to some extent, the climate that gave rise to Abe’s conflicting and complicated feelings about selling the film to begin with.

  After getting off the air, Rather consulted with his bosses in New York about what they could offer to acquire the film legitimately. They threw together a proposal ($10,000 for one broadcast) and sent Don Hamilton from the business office at CBS to the airport to fly to Dallas and help negotiate. Rather was told to stall for time—but it was much too late. While Rather was on the air, Abe and Stolley had settled on an agreement with LIFE. Sam Passman remembers that there was some back-and-forth with offers from AP until finally Stolley came out with it: “Look. We want to buy the darn thing. Let’s quit fooling around with it.” They certainly offered a significant sum of money, but there were additional factors: Abe already knew and trusted Stolley; he felt confident that LIFE was a responsible choice; and they already had the print rights, anyway. Everything about it made sense. They settled on $150,000 for all rights (a figure that included the $50,000 they had already paid for print rights), with an arrangement to pay in six annual installments of $25,000. Abe and Stolley shook hands, signed a second contract giving all rights to LIFE, and Abe turned over the remaining first-day duplicate of the film. He would never possess a copy of his home movie again.

  When Dan Rather returned to the office, he was shocked and furious to discover that he had missed his chance to bid on the film. He wrote that Sam Passman told him LIFE had made a “preemptive” bid (a detail not corroborated either by Sam or Stolley). In response, Rather shouted at Passman that CBS hadn’t put in their bid yet. Apparently, Passman was supposed to wait for Rather to finish breaking the confidentiality ground rules before he closed any deal, just in case Rather—who had not discovered or developed the film but somehow believed that he had and therefore felt a proprietary right to the film—wanted to bid on it. Rather concludes with this: “I tried in an act of desperation to talk tough, which meant I raised my voice and paced back and forth and kept saying things to imply no deal existed since our bid wasn’t heard. I remember, clearly, crying out there was an ethical problem here. Both Zapruder and his lawyer ignored me. LIFE had the film.”

  Dan Rather was right about one thing: There definitely was an ethical problem. But it had nothing to do with Abe, Sam Passman, or Dick Stolley. In later years, LIFE and CBS would fight it out over the Zapruder film again, and sometimes it was LIFE that would get the black eye. But this time, amid all the chaos and the ugliness and the frenzied desire for the film, Abe continued to find a safe harbor in Dick Stolley, and Dan Rather was just another shark he had to fend off as best he could.

  Abe’s internal conflict over the film did not let up over the course of the weekend; to the contrary, it seems to have become an increasingly agonizing problem for him as they neared closing the deal with LIFE. “Abe was really concerned about whether he should sell it or not, whether he should take the money and so on,” Sam told my parents in 1994. “[He] was concerned that the Kennedy family might be harmed in some way… or that certain portions of the pictures would be terribly distasteful. He just didn’t want to do anything that might harm them. He was really crazy about the Kennedys, he really was… Right up until the end, I wasn’t sure he was going to do it.”

  It was essentially a repeat of the dilemma from two days before, only for more money and more exposure. He had something that the media wanted, and it was clearly worth a lot of money. There was a certain temptation inherent in the prospect of a sudden and unexpected financial windfall that would bring with it security for him and his family. On the other hand, what an awful way to make money. It carried with it not only the ugliness of profiting from a national tragedy but also the equally ugly possibility that the images would bring further pain to the grieving Kennedy family and would bring out public censure or judgment.

  Against the backdrop of all his other worries, his Jewish background made him especially self-conscious about the financial aspect of the film’s sale. His childhood experiences of anti-Semitism had taught him that those who hated Jews could turn anything into a reason to attack, humiliate, and shame. What was easier for an anti-Semite than accusing a Jew of profiteering? He never liked calling attention to himself, even in benign circumstances; this was, after all, part of why he had hesitated to bring his camera along to film the president to begin with. And now he was going to get rich off the president’s murder, and everyone would know it. He sensed that the public would not concern itself with the complexities and pressures of the moment; instead, it would simply see him as a crass and unscrupulous “money grabber.” His fears on this score were not solely a reflection of his upbringing and background. This was Dallas, after all, which had come to be called the City of Hate. It would be bad enough if he or his family were judged for his actions, but what if they caused a backlash against the Jewish community that had welcomed him here, that he loved, that had been his home for more than twenty years?

  Abe Zapruder was, in this moment, like many people who face a moral dilemma. The choice is not a binary one—to be a saint who doesn’t care about the money or to be an opportunist who only cares about the money. Instead, he was a human being with conflicting feelings, opposing desires, and moral imperatives that clashed with practical realities. He had gotten where he was in life by working hard, conducting himself ethically, and traveling the most American path to success. But, in an irony that no one could have predicted, he would gain financial security not in this uncomplicated way but in a situation fraught with moral compromise.

  In the end, as most people do when they are faced with complicated circumstances, he walked the line. He made a deal that contributed to his financial security ($150,000 was a lot of money, especially in those days), but he made it with LIFE magazine, because at least that way he could feel that his choice was a responsible one. It was not just the financial terms of the deal that speak to his concerns: He insisted on a clause in the contract guaranteeing that LIFE would “present the film in a manner consonant with good taste and dignity.” In addition, LIFE agreed to defend the copyright of the film. While it was in LIFE’s business interest to do this, I believe Abe’s reasons had more to do with controlling how widely the film was disseminated and how it was used.

  There was one other noteworthy clause in the agreement. Abe retained rights to gross revenues over $150,000, meaning that after LIFE recouped its initial investment, they would share future income with him. Abe’s continuing financial interest in the film provided him with an ongoing relationship to it and a sense that his wishes and concerns for it would not easily be disregarded. Although there was never any additional income from the deal, this clause would have enormous significance for our family when LIFE wanted to get rid of the film twelve years later.

  But even this was not quite enough. Sam Passman recollected that in the course of these difficult co
nversations, he suggested that Abe might donate part of the money from the sale of the film to a charity. “Abe thought that was a great idea. He really wanted to do that,” Sam Passman said. It was Bill Barnard from the AP who came up with the idea to give the money to the family of J. D. Tippit, the police officer gunned down by Oswald. Clearly, Abe was relieved to have a way not only to do something positive with his financial gain but also to offset the guilt and anxiety he felt about making money from the film. He acted on that suggestion immediately, turning over his first check for $25,000 from LIFE magazine to the Policemen’s and Firemen’s Welfare Fund for the family of Patrolman J. D. Tippit.

  The very next day, Tuesday, November 27, the Associated Press reported the donation in a small news item. Abe is quoted as saying, “I had intended for these films to be home movies for the future enjoyment of my family and friends. Now, from the revenue that has been offered for such a significant film, I wish to contribute to the well-being and future of the family that lost a very brave and gallant husband and father. It is the saddest moment in my life. Normally, I would not be able to give so generously, but I am deeply gratified that I can be of assistance to such a wonderful, worthy family.”