Twenty-Six Seconds

by Alexandra Zapruder

  Just about two months later, on July 22, 1964, Abe walked a little less than a mile from his office at 501 Elm Street to the Post Office and Courthouse Building on North Ervay Street in downtown Dallas. It was the hottest month of the year, with the mercury climbing day after day to a blistering 99 degrees. He entered the handsome limestone building through the formal colonnaded entry and made his way to the US attorney’s office, where he was met by a young staff lawyer for the Warren Commission, assistant counsel Wesley J. Liebeler. Abe had been called to give his testimony as an eyewitness, as had hundreds of others who were present on Dealey Plaza on the day of the president’s assassination. Liebeler had a slightly round baby face, dark hair, and thin lips, and he wore browline glasses. From the beginning of his testimony, Abe sounds a little nervous, explaining that he had been out of town when he was summoned and that his secretary had made the appointment for him. The first part of the interview is fairly routine—there is some back-and-forth about where he was standing, and his position is established in a photograph from a series shot by Phil Willis, who was standing on the opposite side of Elm Street, but closer to Houston Street, at the time of the assassination. Then Liebeler asks him to describe how the film was taken.

  MR. ZAPRUDER: Well, as the car came in line almost—I believe it was almost in line. I was standing up here and I was shooting through a telephoto lens, which is a zoom lens. And as it reached about—I imagine it was around here—I heard the first shot and I saw the president lean over and grab himself like this (holding his left chest area).

  MR. LIEBELER: Grab himself on the front of his chest?

  MR. ZAPRUDER: Right—something like that. In other words, he was sitting like this and waving and then after the shot he just went like that.

  MR. LIEBELER: He was sitting upright in the car and you heard the shot and you saw the president slump over?

  MR. ZAPRUDER: Leaning—leaning toward the side of Jacqueline. For a moment I thought it was, you know, like you say “Oh, he got me” when you hear a shot—you’ve heard these expressions—and then I saw. I don’t believe the president is going to make jokes like this, but before I had a chance to organize my mind, I heard a second shot and then I saw his head opened up and the blood and everything came out and I started—I can hardly talk about it (the witness crying).

  MR. LIEBELER: That’s all right, Mr. Zapruder, would you like a drink of water? Why don’t you step out and have a drink of water?

  MR. ZAPRUDER: I’m sorry—I’m ashamed of myself really, but I couldn’t help it.

  MR. LIEBELER: Nobody should ever be ashamed of feeling that way, Mr. Zapruder. I feel the same way myself. It was a terrible thing.

  After Abe composed himself, Liebeler asked him to verify various frames of the film and asked him some questions about where he thought the shots were coming from. Interestingly, he always said that he heard only two shots, even after he learned that there were, in fact, three shots fired. Liebeler also asked him where he thought the shots were coming from. At first he said that at the time he thought the shots were coming from behind him, but he almost immediately qualified his statement, saying that he wasn’t sure what he heard, and given the circumstances, he had “no way of determining what direction the bullet was going.” Mr. Liebeler then asked him, “Did you form any opinion about the direction from which the shots came by the sound, or were you just upset by the thing you had seen?” “No, there was too much reverberation,” Abe answered. “There was an echo which gave me a sound all over. In other words, that square [Dealey Plaza] is kind of—it had a sound all over.”

  What I notice in my grandfather’s testimony, beyond his obviously emotional state, is how hesitant and faltering his English seems to be and how careful he is to avoid making any kind of declarative statement or seeming to have any authority about what happened by virtue of having taken the film. In fact, in the very beginning, when Liebeler asked him to describe what he saw that day, Abe said, “Well, of course, what I saw you have on film.” This is something that I’m told he often said. It is not that he didn’t think about what had happened, or that he didn’t read about the various theories and try to understand them. Apparently, he did. He knew the film well, and he understood about the camera speed, the critical frames, the time required to fire the rifle, and how all those elements related to the time clock of the assassination. In fact, according to his daughter, Myrna, he talked so much about it in the months after the assassination that there was eventually a blowup at the dinner table, when she and her husband, Myron, told him he had to stop obsessing about it. Although she deeply regretted those words in retrospect, at the time they felt that the family needed to move on and that talking about the assassination was both painful and unproductive. While it’s clear now that he had been traumatized by what he had experienced, it’s not surprising in the context of the era that he did not get the psychological or emotional support he needed in order to process the events and move on. Still, whatever he said within our family, he was aware that he had to be careful not to be drawn into making the case for anyone’s pet theory. He was generally consistent in his accounts, even when he knew that his memory was wrong (as in the case of the two shots), and when he was unsure, he preferred to defer to the film.

  Toward the end of the interview, Liebeler entered deeply uncomfortable territory. He asked Abe about what happened to the original film and the copies, and then said, “The commission is interested in one aspect of this and I would like to ask you if you would mind telling me how much they paid you for that film.” Abe deflected the question, saying, “I just wonder whether I should answer it or not, because it involves a lot of things and it’s not one price—it’s a question of how they are going to use it, are they going to use it or are they not going to use it, so I will say I really don’t know how to answer that.” Of course, it really wasn’t a hard question to answer—there was a figure he could have cited—but I hear the emotional truth under the deflection: It was a terribly difficult question for him to answer. So he didn’t. Mr. Liebeler went on to say that he would not pressure Abe to answer but that the commission thought it would be helpful. I can’t help but wonder why. How would the purchase price for the film have had anything at all to do with the question of who shot the president, how, when, and why?

  In response to this pushback, Abe mentioned the $25,000 payment and the donation to the fund for the Tippit family. “I didn’t know that—you received $25,000?” Liebeler said. “$25,000 was paid and I have given it to the Firemen’s and Policemen’s Fund,” Abe answered.

  “You gave the whole 25,000?”

  “Yes. This was all over the world. I got letters from all over the world and newspapers—I mean letters from all over the world. It was all over the world—I am surprised that you don’t know it—I don’t like to talk about it too much.”

  “We appreciate your answer very much.”

  “I haven’t done anything, the way I have given it, at a time like this.”

  Again, Abe’s internal conflict is written all over this exchange. He wanted to avoid the question, but if pressed, he would deflect it; and if pressed further, he would make it seem that he had given away the money; but then when he was acknowledged for his generosity, he certainly wouldn’t accept any praise. It is a study in emotional complexity and ethical uncertainty.

  As it turned out, the commission was not prepared to let it lie. A few weeks after his testimony, in August, Abe told his attorney, Sam Passman, that Mr. Liebeler had called him wanting more information about the sale of the film to LIFE magazine. Sam advised him to tell the commission attorney that it was a private matter and he did not want publicity about it. In an internal memo that Sam wrote to the file, he noted: “Mr. Liebeler indicated that he might take additional depositions but we’ll just have to take that risk. Of course, Liebeler could get this information from LIFE magazine, if he wanted to, but maybe we can get away with it.”

  A few days later, Sam wrote a longer memo
to the file, after having received a call from Liebeler himself. During their phone conversation, Sam had repeatedly explained to Liebeler that “it would be very harmful to Mr. Zapruder to have this come out here” and that “it would result in some unfavorable comment here.” It’s clear that Sam is referring not just to a general desire to keep the financial terms of the deal private but to Abe’s very real anxiety about the reactionary climate in Dallas and the possibility of an anti-Semitic response. Liebeler pressed on, pointing out that there was some confusion within the commission about how much money Abe had made on the deal and that, based on his testimony, it appeared that he had earned only $25,000. Sam pressed back, repeatedly asking what this had to do with the work of the commission and why Abe’s privacy couldn’t be respected.

  Finally, Liebeler provided what, at least from the written memo, appears to be a confused explanation having to do with evidence being sold to people who would suppress it or fail to provide it to the authorities or use it for their own purposes. Of course, as Sam pointed out, this was not at issue in this instance, since Abe had ensured that the federal government had copies of the film before he sold it. Finally, in one last effort, Liebeler asked Sam if he would advise Abe to refuse to turn over the LIFE contract if the commission issued a subpoena for it. Sam noted in the file, “I replied that this would put us in a position of publicly refusing to do something which the commission requested, but asked what would be the purpose of that, as then the only purpose would be that we’d be placed in an embarrassing position of explaining publicly why we would not do it in the first place. That any type of publicity would be just as bad, one as the other, and agreed that he does have the power to harm us.” Liebeler assured Sam that he did not want to embarrass them publicly and that he would take the matter under advisement. Again, Sam said that if the information were “important in any way that would help the true purpose of the commission,” to please let him know. The matter was left there and the commission dropped it.

  As Abe concluded his testimony for the Warren Commission, Mr. Liebeler told him how extraordinarily helpful the film had been to the work of the commission and thanked him for coming to give his testimony. “Well, I am ashamed of myself,” Abe says. “I didn’t know I was going to break down and for a man to—but it was a tragic thing, and when you started asking me that, and I saw the thing all over again, and it was an awful thing. I know very few people who had seen it like that—it was an awful thing and I loved the president, and to see that happen before my eyes—his head just opened up and shot down like a dog—it leaves a very, very deep sentimental impression with you; it’s terrible.”

  In June 1964, a letter arrived in the mail at Abe’s home. It was from a man named William Manchester, who had been invited by the Kennedy family to write an authorized account of the president’s assassination. Abe was still reluctant to speak with anyone publicly about the assassination. Lillian recalled, “He talked to Manchester because of the Kennedys. Mrs. Kennedy okayed it. That’s the reason he talked.” And indeed, years later, as I was sifting through my grandfather’s few remaining personal papers, I came upon not only the original letters from William Manchester but also a typed note from Jackie Kennedy’s personal secretary requesting that Abe cooperate with Mr. Manchester. On the envelope is Jacqueline Kennedy’s original signature. If he’d had any hesitation, this alone would have been enough to persuade him. He would never have said no to anything that Mrs. Kennedy asked him to do, no matter how remotely the request was made.

  Abe’s interview with William Manchester took place in September 1964. Manchester’s few pages of notes still exist, and they are strangely scattered and not very satisfying. Nevertheless, in the interview, Manchester captured the basic outlines of the story that Abe had already recounted on television on the day of the assassination and again for the Warren Commission. He mentioned how much he loved Kennedy, and he told Manchester that his son was a “young lawyer” in the Justice Department. He remembered that when he got back to the office after the assassination, he kept saying, “They shot him down like a dog”—reiterating the deep impression of disgrace, humiliation, and shame that reminded him of the Russian lawlessness that he never expected to see in America. As for Dallas, he recalled an episode that captured some of the right-wing flavor of the place. “In a Dallas department store, I met a young man who was arguing with me about civil rights. He said, ‘God made little people and small people and Colt made the .45 to even things out.’ ‘People like you we don’t need,’ I said.” In the short two-page interview, there is one line that seems to capture the essence of his feelings: “I am not a great man,” he said. “I just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  Years later, when Manchester’s book came out, Abe was horrified to see himself described as “stubby” with “short legs.” Lillian Rogers recalled in her interview that “Mr. Zee was furious. He was furious. So time went on, and the book laid there in the office, and it laid there, and it laid there.” While I suspect that Manchester intended his brief portrait of Abe Zapruder to be comically affectionate, he portrayed him as a bit of a Jewish caricature, hapless and henpecked by his secretary. I can see why it touched a nerve, especially for our grandfather, who was self-conscious about having been an immigrant to this country and not having a proper education. Moreover, he had worked hard to establish the very opposite identity: not a greenhorn but a successful American businessman. If his reaction seems overblown, consider that it is the peril of anyone who gets unwillingly thrust into the public eye. In such moments, we risk being exposed or presented in ways that do not conform to our sense of ourselves, which is not only internally jarring and unsettling, but potentially humiliating.

  How he was represented to the public remained a sensitive topic even after he died. In 1973, when my grandmother was interviewed by Richard Stolley for a piece he was writing for the tenth anniversary of the assassination, she made sure that her husband’s posthumous image was protected. “Now, I understand that you’re going to describe him as a short, pudgy man. He was not short and he was not pudgy,” she said. Stolley laughed. My grandmother went on, “I don’t want him described that way.” Stolley tried to speak but she cut him off. “My husband was about five foot eight and a half, five foot nine.” Stolley tried to speak again, saying only “He was—” before my grandmother stepped in once more, this time with the last word on the subject. “He was not pudgy,” she said firmly. “I thought he made a nice appearance, as a matter of fact,” she added, laughing a little at herself. Toward the end of the conversation, when she was thoroughly finished contradicting him on every last point, Stolley gently pointed out, “You might be slightly prejudiced, Mrs. Zapruder.” And she finally agreed. “Well, yes, I think I must be because… he absolutely, honest to God, my husband was a man of integrity. I’ve never met anybody like him yet.”

  While my grandmother was there to defend not only Abe’s height but also his character after he died, there was no one to correct the record when Henry was misrepresented and his character assailed far more seriously by the media decades later. It was one of the many burdens and responsibilities of dealing with the film that he quietly bore and about which he never complained. I don’t know if it hurt him the way it hurt his father. He never said. But I know that it hurt me.

  CHAPTER 6

  MOUNTING PRESSURE

  The Warren Report was published on September 24, 1964. The commission found no evidence of a conspiracy to kill the president and found that Lee Harvey Oswald alone was responsible for firing all three shots from the Texas Book Depository Building. While they concluded that one bullet hit both the president and Governor Connally and another bullet caused the president’s fatal head wound, they could never firmly assert which bullet missed the motorcade, nor could they establish with absolute certainty what the time frame was for the shooting. The vagaries and inconsistencies in the report caused widespread skepticism among an already disturbed public about its accurac
y and veracity.

  LIFE devoted its October 2, 1964, issue to an examination of the Warren Report. On the magazine’s cover, running vertically as in the original 8mm strip, were a series of images from the film in color—clearly after the president was wounded but before the fatal shot to the head. The cover remains arresting and powerful to this day. What was published on the inside was a little more complicated. As a member of the commission, Gerald Ford was invited to write an article describing its work, explaining, in the words of the editors, “how the Commission pieced together the evidence.” Accompanying the article, the editors ran eight large color frames from the Zapruder film. In the initial print run, they used frame 323, taken just a half second after the fatal shot to the president’s head, as image number six. In it, the viewer can clearly see the huge bloody crater on the right front of the president’s head as he fell toward his wife. The caption described the president having been shot from the rear, causing a massive wound and causing his head to snap to one side. Since the wound is clearly visible in the front of his head, and there is no text explaining that entry wounds are small whereas exit wounds are much larger and more damaging, the image seemed to directly contradict the caption or vice versa. At some point during the run, the editors decided to replace this image with a different one. They broke and reset the plate—a disruptive and expensive procedure—using instead the even more controversial frame 313, in which the president’s head virtually explodes. They did not change the caption. This was a confusing editorial decision, since the replacement image corresponded even less convincingly to the caption than the previous one. Finally, a third version of the issue was printed with frame 313 but with a clarifying caption that conspiracy theorists the nation over would deride. It read: “The direction from which shots came was established by this picture taken at instant bullet struck the rear of the President’s head and, passing through, caused the front part of his skull to explode forward.”