Twenty-Six Seconds

by Alexandra Zapruder

  REPORTER: Is it a confrontation with death?

  ARTIST-PRESIDENT: No, it isn’t. It’s close, though. It’s… But it’s not a confrontation with death, no. Ask me another question.

  REPORTER: Would you call this art?

  ARTIST-PRESIDENT: (Pause) It’s not not art.

  Later in the film, Doug Michels, who played the role of Jackie, is asked on-screen what this project is all about. “What it is is figuring out what it is,” he says. Even so, a lot of people didn’t buy it. Doug recalled, “We just didn’t have any idea what would come out of it. I think we were all very anxious about that. A lot of people in the art world were really upset with us. In the Bay Area, it was: ‘Don’t talk to those guys, they’re just fucked.’ And initially, we had difficulty getting anyone to look at it after it was finished.”

  In January 1976, National Lampoon published stills from the reenactment of the film, mimicking the layout of the Zapruder film images and the descriptions that had accompanied them in LIFE magazine. Eventually the raw footage was edited into the film, which was called The Eternal Frame—a play, of course, on the eternal flame that burns in President Kennedy’s memory at Arlington Cemetery—with staged speeches by the Artist-President, interviews with the actors both in character and out, clips from their rehearsals, and the original footage of the Zapruder film. Then, in 1976, The Eternal Frame was shown in the Long Beach Museum of Art, as an installation in a re-created, kitschy living room from 1963.

  Growing up as I did with reverence for the Kennedy family and a very personal sense of the tragedy of the president’s death, my first encounter with The Eternal Frame did not go down easy. In fact, I was so uncomfortable with it that for a long time I tried to pretend it didn’t exist. But since a central aim of this book is to understand the ways in which the film broke new ground and raised new questions for a changing society, avoidance would not do.

  I started by reading about The Eternal Frame, but much of the scholarly writing on the subject was rife with academic jargon and impossible to decipher without a PhD in critical theory. So I reached out to Chip Lord and Doug Hall to ask them, as nicely as I could, what the hell this project was all about. As I exchanged e-mails with them and read their interviews, I was struck by the fact that even though the reenactment was irreverent and even vulgar, there is also something sorrowful about it, as if, in their own way, the young artists were seeking to break the stranglehold of this event on their lives. There was no way to undo the president’s death, but they chose to smash the idol that had come to represent it. In so doing, they refused to let their experience of the assassination be entirely defined by its images. Certainly, it was very theoretical and it didn’t have much to do with how many people felt about it at the time. But the job of the avant-garde is to be ahead of the curve.

  To me, what is most interesting is how prescient they turned out to be. As I thought about The Eternal Frame and what it has to do with present-day media coverage, I thought back to 1991, when I sat with my family and watched the coverage of the Gulf War on television. I remember the repeated broadcasts of the smart bombs, the reports framed with graphics, theme music, and a logo. Thanks to my brothers and a group of very astute high-school friends who were early adopters of a critical posture toward mainstream media, I knew enough to see in the packaging and presentation of the war something controlled and manipulative. Apparently, even our wars need a logo. Then over the years, there came the many showings of the Rodney King beating, children running out of schools where there had been shootings, and—in the closest analogy to the Kennedy assassination for our time—the planes hitting the Twin Towers and the disbelief that came with watching them fall. If these images become a stand-in for events in which we are to participate collectively, and it is the media that chooses, packages, and presents them to us over and over again, then the Zapruder film was indeed the prototype of its kind. Ant Farm and T.R. Uthco saw it coming. I am not sure how it could be otherwise, what alternative there is for a news media that relies on images to communicate critical national events. But The Eternal Frame stands as a reminder that even the images we hold most sacred are just images, and that the emotional truth to be found in the events they depict always requires more than passively sitting, watching, and accepting what is served to us.

  At the same time that Ant Farm and T.R. Uthco were carrying out their guerrilla performance art in Dallas, the conspiracy community was nearing success in pushing for a new investigation into the murder of President Kennedy. These researchers occupied, in many ways, the other end of the spectrum from the members of Ant Farm and T.R. Uthco. They not only held the Zapruder film as sacred, but to many it was the Holy Grail, the suppressed evidence that offered definitive proof that the president had been killed by a conspiracy. Still, they did have something in common with Ant Farm and T.R. Uthco in that they were deeply cynical about authority—in their case, governmental more than media—and they were decidedly outside the mainstream, although less and less so as the years went on. They had suffered a serious setback after the debacle of the Shaw trial in 1969, when the district attorney’s gross abuse of power and corrupt methods badly damaged their credibility in the eyes of the general public.

  Then, in the early 1970s, Carl Oglesby, who had been president of the radical antiwar group Students for a Democratic Society in 1965–66, started the Assassination Information Bureau in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Over the next five years, this group of young critics gave lectures and speeches, circulated petitions, and lobbied members of Congress, relentlessly pushing them to take action and reexamine the evidence surrounding the president’s murder. The centerpiece of each presentation was a showing of a bootlegged copy of the Zapruder film. They had acquired copies from the same sources as the earlier bootlegs that LIFE had tried to track down—Jim Garrison, Mark Lane, Penn Jones Jr., and others who had obtained copies of the film and sold them as widely as they could. Although the copies were generally of very poor quality, many times removed from the original, they showed the only thing that the conspiracy activists needed people to see: the backward head snap of the president. David Wrone describes these showings in his book The Zapruder Film:

  Although public showings of the bootleg Zapruder film could take place in such diverse places as the living rooms of the wealthy, the back rooms of taverns, or the meetings of small social clubs, the most typical one was in colleges across the nation. A typical showing of the film in a college lecture hall would occur before an audience of two or three hundred students, a scattering of local people (conservatives and liberals) and representatives of the press… A student sponsor typically would introduce the subject with a few words on its importance and then present a second student, who was in charge of the meeting. She or he would then explain the credentials of the speaker and how important the subject was to America, often criticizing both the right wing and liberals for permitting a cover-up… The featured presenter would then launch into a speech. In animated terms, he would hammer at the evidence and the cover-up, describe fallacies, frauds, and corruption, and then ask for the lights to be dimmed. The Zapruder film typically would be shown several times, at first without explanation, then with comments by the speaker to bring attention to main points.

  The film would be the highlight of the evening, the central point in the speaker’s argument, and at the end the audience would usually be silent, sensing the profound seriousness of the problem. The lights would go on, and questions would be taken, often for as long as the speaker’s formal presentation. After the speech, various books on the subject of the assassination and copies of the film and slides were often sold.

  It’s impossible to disentangle these efforts from the changing cultural and political climate of America in the early 1970s. By 1975, the country had witnessed the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy. Following the death of Dr. King, grief and outrage in the black community led to race riots in major cities around the country. The long, divi
sive, bloody Vietnam War came to an end in April, but the disillusionment and mistrust that it had engendered would remain. Perhaps most significant for this story, the Watergate scandal had revealed an actual conspiracy carried out at the highest levels of government. This was no mere paranoid fantasy; the public had seen evidence that government agencies—the president, his aides, the CIA, the FBI, and the IRS—were capable of working in concert against the interests of the American people and democracy itself. This fact lent legitimacy and momentum to the conspiracy community.

  It was against the backdrop of rising mistrust, and in the wake of relentless agitating by the Assassination Information Bureau and other individuals and organizations that likewise sought to reopen the investigation, that Robert Groden had aired his copy of the Zapruder film on Geraldo Rivera’s program Good Night America in April 1975. Suddenly, it seemed that the whole nation could see what the small counterculture had been trying to say for so long. Public trust in the findings of the Warren Commission, which had been shaky for some time, plummeted. In September 1976, the conspiracy proponents succeeded in their efforts when the US House of Representatives authorized the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) to take on a new investigation of the murders of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.

  Rep. Thomas Downing, the first chairman of the committee, retired from Congress in January 1977, and his position was taken over by Texas representative Henry Gonzalez. Considerable conflict between Gonzalez and chief counsel Richard Sprague led to the resignation of both from the committee. By March 1977, when the committee began in earnest, Louis Stokes of Ohio was chairman, with Richardson Preyer of North Carolina in charge of the Kennedy investigation task force. By the summer, G. Robert Blakey was named chief counsel. They had until the end of the Ninety-Fifth Congress, which concluded on January 3, 1979, to complete their work.

  The work of the select committee has been amply described elsewhere, notably in Richard Trask’s book National Nightmare, in which the author meticulously details its changing leadership, the time and budgetary pressures, and its methods of inquiry into the ballistic, forensic, acoustic, and visual evidence. In his book, Trask focuses especially on their analysis of the Zapruder film, describing the new photographic methods that attempted to deblur certain frames and to pinpoint the exact moments of the president’s and Governor Connally’s reactions to external stimuli—namely, bullet wounds or the sound of gunfire. This work was undertaken by the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory of the University of California, and it focused especially on examining the frames that seemed to raise the most questions. The photographic evidence panel, composed of twenty-some consultants and experts, reviewed multiple versions of the film in moving and still frames on one hundred different occasions. In the end, their findings differed from those of the Warren Commission and Itek in the details but not in the essentials.

  According to their review, Governor Connally reacted to something—a sound, perhaps—by suddenly turning his head to the right and shifting his body in the same direction considerably earlier than others had observed. They saw this in frames 168–170, well before the limousine passed behind the freeway sign. His sudden movements coincided with those of Rosemary Willis, who was a little girl at the time and can be seen on the grass behind the car. She was running toward the limousine and suddenly stopped and turned her head in the direction of the Texas School Book Depository. As Trask points out, she later said that she had stopped running because she heard a gunshot, though at this point, no one in the car had been hit.

  The panel then looked at the president’s movement to see when he first reacted to any kind of stimulus. In previous investigations of the film, it was generally agreed that he showed signs of having been wounded after coming out from behind the Stemmons Freeway sign at frames 224–225. This panel saw a reaction as early as 1.5 seconds earlier, at frame 200, when, they said, he suddenly stopped waving and seemed to freeze momentarily. Further, they saw evidence of a severe reaction by frame 207, when he went behind the sign.

  They also found that his position and that of Governor Connally were aligned, and their reactions synced in such a way as to confirm that a single bullet could have hit them both. The panel believed that by the time they reappear from behind the street sign at frame 224, they had clearly both been shot. Five seconds later, the president was fatally shot in the head, at frames 312–313. Based on the photographic evidence and the corresponding forensics, they believed that Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots from the Texas School Book Depository Building, that one of them missed (though when it was fired is not clear), one hit both the president and Connally (albeit a bit earlier than other investigations had found), and another had fatally wounded the president. They did not find visual evidence that supported a second shooter firing from the grassy knoll. In essence, their findings as they prepared to wrap up their work in December 1978 conformed with the Warren Report.

  I have to wonder if some readers will glaze over at this point. Others will ask, as I have, what difference it could possibly make. What are we trying to pinpoint here? And how it is possible that each successive examination of the film shows something slightly different but not so different as to make a real difference or tell us anything that we didn’t already know? Bear with me. There are times when understanding the Zapruder film requires zooming out—to see it as a whole, to look at it in its cultural context and think about the questions and meanings that it offered to different people at different times. For example, Antonioni’s film Blow-Up from 1966 seems positively prescient in light of the events of 1979. After all, the thousands of hours, financial resources, photographic techniques and methods, imagination, energy, and eye strain spent on the Zapruder film did not lead to consensus or clarity any more than Thomas’s enlargement of the suspected dead body proves that it was actually there.

  There are other times, however, when understanding the Zapruder film requires zooming in, scrutinizing each frame and following the arguments of each successive investigation—whether by an individual, a private group, or a governmental organization—if only to try to understand the collective effort of a great many people who tried to find answers to the confounding questions of what happened to the president. And while the Zapruder film is not the only piece of evidence—though many have suggested, probably rightly, that it has been privileged as evidence in ways that have not always been helpful—the minute examination of it reveals the lengths to which people went to create a narrative of events in hopes of getting closer to knowledge and understanding. There were many who felt that it was simply unacceptable to let the matter lie and accept not knowing. For some of them, abandoning the quest was tantamount to abandoning their responsibility to a president they loved. These are not my questions, but I understand that they were vitally important and remain so to this day for some people. And it is impossible to understand the meaning and significance of the Zapruder film without them.

  At the eleventh hour, new evidence was introduced that dramatically changed the course of the committee’s investigation. This was the Dictabelt recording from a microphone stuck in the “on” position that was said to belong to a police officer who had been stationed in Dealey Plaza at the time of the shooting. A flurry of acoustical analysis followed, a highly detailed and careful account of which can be found in Richard Trask’s book and elsewhere, though I will not analyze it at length here. The panel concluded on the basis of two studies of the acoustics that four shots were fired at the president, three from the TSBD and one from, you guessed it, the grassy knoll. In the words of the final report, “Scientific acoustical evidence establishes a high probability that two gunmen fired at President John F. Kennedy; other scientific evidence does not preclude the possibility of two gunmen firing at the president.” In other words, although the Zapruder film did not alone prove that the president was hit by a second gunman, as the conspiracy community believed, it also did not prove that he wasn’t hit by a second gunman. As the Artis
t-President had said in The Eternal Frame, “It’s not not art.”

  In the end, the select committee concluded “on the basis of the evidence available to it, that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. The committee is unable to identify the other gunman or the extent of the conspiracy.” They went on to say that they did not believe that either the Soviet Union or Cuba were involved, and that they did not believe that it was the work of anti-Castro groups or the Mafia, though they could not say that individuals from these groups had not been involved. The committee wrapped up its work in January 1979.

  As it happened, the victory for the conspiracy community was neither sweet nor long lasting. Many felt that the committee did not go nearly far enough and were disappointed by its findings, since it conformed with the Warren Report in many ways. Even the “probable” second shooter was unsatisfying, since the report didn’t provide any conclusions as to who the shooter might have been, whom they represented, or what larger significance a second shooter might have had. Not only that, but this mysterious second shooter hadn’t even hit anybody, which made his role considerably less relevant. One year later, the acoustic evidence itself was called into question when assassination researcher Steve Barber determined by careful examination that the recording had actually taken place a full minute after the shooting had occurred. In the fall of 1980, at the behest of the Justice Department, the National Research Council established the Committee on Ballistics Acoustics to reexamine the evidence. Chaired by Norman F. Ramsey, the committee published its study in 1982, concluding after exhaustive analysis of the methodologies used in the previous studies and its own original examination of the evidence that the sounds on the Dictabelt did not record a gunshot from the grassy knoll. The HSCA conclusion of a “probable conspiracy” in the murder of the president had to be discounted.