Twenty-Six Seconds

by Alexandra Zapruder

  It’s clear that for Groden and his colleagues, the airing of the film on national television was critical in that it moved the debate forward and opened the possibility of a new investigation, which is of course exactly what eventually happened. For Geraldo, it’s hard to say. Did he air the film on television—in flagrant disregard of its copyright, risking a lawsuit or blowback from the executives at ABC—because he was deeply committed to the conspiracists’ cause? That seems doubtful. Was it because he felt that—regardless of how one interpreted the evidence—it was a moral imperative to share the film with the public? Or was it just because it was a huge media coup guaranteed to bring huge ratings (which it did) and cement his growing reputation as a fearless young reporter who would stop at nothing to bring the truth, no matter how horrible, to his audiences?

  For LIFE, the airing of the film on Good Night America was the final blow after years of headaches. They had come to the conclusion that there was no way to use it respectfully and tastefully, and that there was therefore nothing to be gained by owning it. Geraldo’s program must have confirmed this belief.

  Groden says that the following day, Time Inc. issued a one-time agreement with ABC to allow the use of the film, but there is no such record in the LIFE archives. In fact, the next item in the records is a letter from Bob Richter with a new prospectus that he hoped LIFE would consider. He couldn’t, it seems, resist a little dig: “Considering the fact that the footage has been shown so widely in recent months, it seems to me that circumstances have changed regarding its uniqueness and monetary value.” In other words, the film was no longer an exclusive; the first-time showing had been blown, and there was no way that LIFE was in a position to charge the kinds of fees they had been proposing even a few months before.

  I am certain that my father was chagrined about the film airing on Good Night America, and I suspect he was glad his own father wasn’t alive to see it. But you’d never know it if you didn’t know him—especially because on March 13, there is a new development. An unsigned memo states:

  Zapruder now wants to buy the film from Time Inc., and exploit it as he sees fit. Harry Johnston feels this is OK but I have insisted on one major reservation: Zapruder must put up the cash. We cannot accept a percentage as the film generates revenue for Zapruder nor can we accept timed payments spread over a number of years. Either recourse, to my mind, gives Time Inc. a vested interest in the income from the film when said income may be resulting from tasteless forms of use that we would never authorize on our own. Harry decided that we would give Zapruder until next Wednesday evening to put up a $60,000 purchase price. If he has not, we will unilaterally give the film to the National Archives.

  This is a puzzling reversal, and a critical one, because it led to our family regaining possession of the film, which in turn led to endless aggravation for my father and the years-long struggle with the government for final ownership of the film. I cannot help but be both amused and slightly annoyed by LIFE’s worry that Henry Zapruder would generate income from “tasteless forms of use” of the film that the magazine would never have authorized. For crying out loud, where did they think the original moral imperative regarding the film had come from?

  In fact, it’s clear from their records that from the beginning of their dealings with Henry, the editors at LIFE approached him with a considerable measure of mistrust, supposing that his only reason for wanting to have the film back was that he wanted to “make a buck” off it. It comes up again and again. I don’t know if this is just because now they were no longer dealing with Abe Zapruder, the gentle Jewish-immigrant dressmaker, but with his big-shot son, a Harvard-educated tax attorney in a boutique Washington law firm. Maybe they just assumed the worst. It wouldn’t be the first or last time someone jumped to conclusions regarding Henry and the Zapruder film. Then again, maybe Henry was tough with them in their negotiations. Although he could be charming, endearing, and engaging, he could also be reserved, keeping his cards close to his chest, especially in an uncomfortable situation. And there was perhaps nothing more uncomfortable for him than dealing with the Zapruder film.

  Inside our family and circle of friends, everyone knew that Henry never wanted anything to do with the film. Even those who knew him only tangentially saw his reluctance to deal with it, whether he might make money from it or not. I have to believe that he would have been perfectly glad to cooperate with LIFE in giving the film to the National Archives and taking the tax deduction. But as so often happens in families, and in history for that matter, there was an opposing inexorable force that could not easily be ignored or overcome. In this case, it came in the form of my grandmother Lil.

  As it turns out, Lil never wanted Abe to sell the film to LIFE to begin with. She was, after all, a pragmatist, and as much as she felt deeply the horror of the film, she would be unlikely to let that stand in the way of something that might have a financial benefit for her family. She had grown up in harsh poverty in a tenement in Brooklyn. She knew as well as anyone that money meant security and made important things—education, a home, contingencies for a sickness or a crisis—possible. Abe had a more uncertain view. On one hand, he had been poor, too, even worse off than Lil, and was not insensitive to the peace of mind that financial security could bring. On the other hand, he had experienced the trauma of witnessing the assassination, and he urgently wanted to be rid of the film and responsibility for it. Perhaps the most important factor in their distinct viewpoints was the difference in their personalities and temperaments. He was more sensitive and philosophical in nature, deeply concerned with questions of right and wrong. If Lil’s idea of doing the right thing was focused on the outcome for her family, Abe’s encompassed a larger set of concerns.

  While Abe and Lil might not have seen eye to eye about the financial potential of the film, I wonder if they would have felt similarly ambivalent about LIFE giving the film to the National Archives. The original contract provisions to prevent such a third-party transfer existed precisely because Abe feared that one day LIFE would want to unburden itself of the film and it might end up with someone who didn’t know or care about handling it sensitively. For her part, I suspect that Lil resisted the transfer of the film to the National Archives not only for financial reasons but because she believed it was what Abe would want. She was, after all, his defender and his champion; if he believed that, outside of LIFE, the best guardians for it were the members of his own family, she would stop at nothing to fulfill his wishes.

  At the same time, as much as she wanted to respect Abe, Lil would have been in a bind if she had been unable to think of anyone in the family who could handle the responsibility of the film. But there was Henry. And Henry was not, in her eyes, merely capable. Like all those she loved, he was the object of her unabashed adoration, faith, and devotion. I keep remembering her 1973 phone interview with Richard Stolley. In that conversation, Lil asked Stolley if he met with Henry and Abe when they came to LIFE in the late 1960s. Stolley is momentarily confused and says he doesn’t remember. “Oh, if you met Henry, you’d remember,” she says breezily. Of course. No one could forget her son. I have no doubt that in this critical moment of the film’s life, she not only believed that Henry could handle it, but that there was no one in the universe who could do it better.

  It was unfortunate for Henry. He didn’t want the responsibility and he wasn’t interested in the film, which brought back painful memories and unwelcome burdens. But he would not ignore his mother’s wishes. As it is remembered among family and friends who were there at the time, Lil did not simply express her views and leave the final decision to my father. She pressed and insisted and pushed until the matter was settled. Her way.

  Amid all this back-and-forth, Henry turned to a trusted friend for help navigating the situation with LIFE. He and Bob Trien had both lived in Hastings Hall at Harvard Law School and had been fast friends for fifteen years. I had known the Triens all my life. We spent time together in the summers and visited them in New York.
Bob and my dad shared a love of music, and I vividly remember them playing the guitar together when we were kids in the seventies, singing Dylan, the Beatles, and all the old folk favorites. They were goofy hippie dads in those days, with their beards and their bell-bottoms and their peace-loving music. Bob played the piano and composed music and awed us kids (and had the adults in hysterical laughter) playing music on an old carpenter’s metal saw.

  In 2011, I went to New York City to visit Bob and his wife, May, in their apartment. I didn’t know until after my father died that Bob had been involved in the dealings with LIFE, and I wanted him to tell me what he remembered about that time. It was one of the many times during my work on this book that I found myself triangulating this history—asking those whom my father loved and trusted to tell me the story that he hadn’t told me himself—in order to fill in the gaps and correct the one-sided public record. These interviews, conducted in the years after my father’s death, were emotional, not only for the people I was interviewing but also for me, as I realized that there were parts of my father scattered around the world and that no matter how much I tried to gather them up, to paint a whole picture of this part of his life, nothing was going to restore him to us. I wasn’t even sure it was a part of his life that he would have particularly wanted me to be prying into. But it had to be done. This was the missing information that I needed.

  The final twist in the unbelievably torturous saga of LIFE’s ownership of the Zapruder film came in April 1975. At the insistence of my grandmother, our family was preparing to purchase the film back from LIFE magazine for $60,000. It was not only insiders at LIFE (and executives of its parent company, Time Inc., which included Time, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated, among others) who had misgivings about this decision. Then Sports Illustrated executive editor Ray Cave wrote a memo to editor in chief Hedley Donovan reporting on a conversation he had had with the Warren Commission attorney David Belin. “Belin makes a fair enough claim of concern that Zapruder intends to exploit the film. I said we were concerned, too, but had no real options and pointed out that the bootlegged version of the film is being thoroughly exploited in the worst possible ways already.” It seems that no one thought the Zapruder family could be trusted to handle the Zapruder film.

  Then, in the next paragraph, comes a surprising bit. Cave goes on, “The film sale was discussed by the Thursday lunch group at [head of public relations for Time Inc.] Don Wilson’s behest; Wilson saying he now felt we should not sell the film to Zapruder. The lawyers and I explained the history and the options, with some success. At [vice chairman of LIFE] Mr. Larsen’s suggestion, it was finally decided to give the film to Zapruder for $1. That pleased Wilson. It sure should please Zapruder. I still don’t agree—I think we should have taken the $60,000.”

  I never understood why LIFE gave the film back to our family for $1. The reversal of the plan is not explained in detail anywhere in the LIFE records or news coverage of the time. It wasn’t until I spoke with Bob Trien that the missing piece fell into place. He recalled, “There was one newscaster, his name was Tom Snyder, who was a popular newscaster of the era… he was on one of the major stations. And he was pissed. So he gets on the airwaves, on television, and he badmouths Time-Life and the Zapruder family… And he went on at great length. Time-Life was very upset about all of that. So [LIFE] called me up and said, ‘We want to get this over with. We’re going to give it to you for nothing.’”

  Sure enough, Tom Snyder’s program had aired on Tuesday, April 1. The Thursday lunch group met on April 3, and it was Don Wilson (a man who, in a New York Times article about his retirement from the company in 1989, was described as spending twenty years figuring out how to make Time Inc. look good) who proposed returning the film to our family for a dollar. Now it all makes sense. Time Inc., which had taken plenty of beatings over the Zapruder film, hoped at least to get some positive media attention for giving up the film without making any profit. LIFE issued a press release on April 8, and articles appeared in the New York Times and elsewhere at the same time. The release read:

  Time Inc. will return the original Zapruder film of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and all commercial rights to it to the heirs of Abraham Zapruder for the sum of one dollar, it was announced today. The magazine publisher had been unable to donate the original film and its rights to the National Archives and Records Service in Washington DC because of legal obligations to the Zapruder heirs. It is reported, however, that the Zapruder family is arranging to physically store the film in the National Archives.

  In the contract, signed by Lil, Myrna, and Henry, the terms of returning the film to the Zapruders were spelled out. The physical transference of the original 8mm reel, together with an assortment of copies (one first-day copy, a black-and-white duplicate, and color copies of the film “containing a complete set of all available frames”), was to take place in Room 3201 of the Time & Life Building in Rockefeller Center in New York by the end of the day on April 9. Bob Trien went to represent our family that day. Henry had indeed been in touch with the National Archives and had set up an arrangement whereby the film would be kept in safekeeping there. According to the plan, Bob was supposed to bring it from New York to Washington to deposit it at the Archives. However, at some point that day, he had second thoughts about going anywhere with the one and only original copy of the Zapruder film. “With all of these conspiracy theorists out there and all of this,” he told me, “everybody out there looking to the Zapruder film as being the best evidence that anybody had about what happened on that fateful day… and there being a lot of people out there with certain agendas, I was frankly afraid to get on a plane with this thing. I was afraid that someone would bop me on the head and take it, you know, just to get it! I did not want to walk out of the building!”

  I didn’t blame him for being nervous about leaving with the original film, but I was beginning to wonder where he was going with this. I waited. “So I didn’t,” Bob says, smiling at me. “There was a bank downstairs. I put it in a bank vault.” My mind is racing now, and I already know the answer before I ask: “Did they know that it was the Zapruder film?” No. Bob is still smiling. “So you said, ‘I want a… I want a…’” I am literally unable to finish my sentence. Bob helps me. “I want a vault.” “Safe deposit box,” I say. “Put it in there. Locked it up. And they never knew.” Bob is looking at me very seriously now. “Locked it up and that was the end of it.”

  It never occurred to me not to believe Bob, but it certainly seemed possible that others wouldn’t. Then, among our family papers, I found several yellow-orange “Lease and Notice of Rental Due” slips, each dated April 9, from the Manufacturers Hanover Trust Company located at 1275 Avenue of the Americas. Robert Trien is listed as the renter of safe deposit box number 476.

  The film remained there for three years.

  I sometimes think of the inconspicuous, utterly unremarkable safe deposit box number 476 that housed the little 8mm reel of film, maybe still in a yellow Kodak package, in a wall of identical boxes containing strangers’ family papers, jewelry, keys, and legal documents. I think of the employees passing by it, unlocking and pulling out the boxes nearby, the bank customers walking in and out of the bank, conducting their business, chatting or gossiping or laughing or crying, with no idea that the original Zapruder film was sitting quietly just a few feet away. But more than anything else, it is a perfect metaphor for how the film would be compartmentalized within our family, separate and contained but relentlessly present, with obligations not met, questions with no easy answers, and unprecedented problems waiting to spring out and steal my father’s time and his peace of mind.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE ETERNAL FRAME AND THE ENDLESS DEBATES

  At the time the Zapruder film came back into our family, my twin brother, Michael, and I were five, and our older brother, Matthew, was seven. It remained part of our family for the next twenty-five years. These were the years in which the film came out of the shadow
s—and as it became more accessible, the multiplicity of ways in which it could be interpreted, used, read, examined, commented upon, and ultimately parodied and embedded in popular culture only grew. The film, although described as a singular object, in reality had many lives that traveled in parallel, sometimes briefly linking or crossing paths but often existing quite independently. This is how it happened that filmmakers and artists used it as a cultural commentary at the same time as the federal government examined it as evidence and my own father grappled with questions of how to make it available to the public without its being exploited or sensationalized.