Twenty-Six Seconds

by Alexandra Zapruder

  When LMH hired McCrone Associates to create the record copy of the film in the National Archives, Jamie again proposed that MPI create a documentary film. This time, the project had several functions. First, the main feature of the documentary would be McCrone’s reproduction of the Zapruder film, digitized and assembled into moving footage, at last making an extremely high-quality reproduction widely available at low cost and resolving researchers’ frustrations about accessing it. Further, MPI filmed the duplication process and would incorporate it into the documentary, confirming the accuracy of the visual images and the efforts undertaken to safeguard the original. Finally, there was the hope that the distribution and sale of the documentary might help subsidize the very high cost of having had McCrone Associates produce the record copy in the first place.

  Seen in this light and given the history of the film, it was not the craziest idea. VHS was in its heyday in 1998, and although DVDs had recently been invented, it would be another ten years before they fully replaced the videotape format. At that time, well before the quantum leap into the digital age of the 2000s—with its ubiquitous access to the Internet, smartphones, and social media—there was no cheap, easy, and free way to distribute visual information such as the film. In time, the existence of YouTube in particular would entirely solve the problem of access to the Zapruder film, but that invention was years away.

  On the other side, the risks were pretty clear. Would making the film available to a mass market fly in the face of our long-standing policy to avoid exploitation of the film? Would it be disrespectful to the Kennedy family? Would we be criticized for seeking to profit from the film? “Your father didn’t like it,” Jamie remembers. Henry’s internal barometer about what was and wasn’t appropriate tallied more or less with that of mainstream society, which could not have foreseen how soon we would be just a few clicks away from the most violent, graphic, sexually explicit, vulgar, and tasteless material the world has to offer. While he could see why people wanted access to the film for research purposes, he never wanted to normalize it by making it available for casual viewing or, worse yet, for entertainment. Conversely, it was clear that the public had a claim on the film that could not be ignored. Perhaps it was time to just let the world see it. Perhaps it was time to put the question of access to rest once and for all.

  When the video was finished, it did include not only several versions of the film running at different speeds and with different degrees of close-up but also a history of the film, interviews with a variety of people connected to it, and documentation about the digital reproduction of the film that had taken place at NARA. In his letter to our family about the effort to reach an agreement with the government, my father mentioned the upcoming film. “A video containing the film, in a digitized format and with inter-sprocket material, will be released during July or August. We agreed to this release on two bases—we have for years provided videos on an individual request basis for study, research, and personal use. This method is cumbersome both for the requester and for us. When we made the copies of the film as part of an offer we made to provide a free copy to the Assassination Review Board, we incurred very substantial costs and the license helped finance some of those costs.”

  The content was certainly controversial and undoubtedly would have been met with some criticism under any set of circumstances. The fact that it was home video was problematic; it seemed a big step from previous showings of the film, even in commercial settings such as television or movies. Unfortunately, its packaging—and the marketing and promotion that went with it—did not help. A large-scale brochure, with a close-up image of Mrs. Kennedy leaning in toward the president an instant before the fatal shot, includes this introductory text: “One of the most important documents of the 20th century is now available to the public for the very first time! Witness the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in the first-ever digitally enlarged version of the Zapruder film.” At the bottom of the page, after a bulleted list of the video’s features, we read that it is “A collector’s item for all Americans!” Similar language and imagery appeared on the cover design for the VHS copies. I don’t know if Henry was just not aware of the marketing plan or he missed a step somewhere along the way. Maybe he was distracted and preoccupied by negotiating the value of the film and working with Skadden on trying to persuade the government to enter arbitration. Maybe he didn’t focus on it carefully enough. Maybe he deferred to others when he should have been more involved. I’m sure he cringed—as I do—when he saw the promotional materials. I have to believe that he also braced for impact.

  When the film was released in early July, several weeks in advance of the scheduled August 1998 date, it was greeted nearly immediately by an onslaught of press attention. This wasn’t the usual handful of articles in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Dallas Morning News. It was nearly five hundred printed articles, editorials, comments, cartoons, and other items from large and small newspapers from one end of the country to the other. By the third week in August, there had been as many as 1,300 calls from reporters and members of the press requesting interviews or comment for inclusion in print, radio, and broadcast pieces. While a number of articles were neutral, simply describing the release of the film, the vast majority of them landed on one side or the other of an impassioned and vitriolic debate about whether, how, and under what circumstances the Zapruder film should be made widely available to the public.

  The main criticism was, of course, that the video showed the violent assassination of the president and that it should not be distributed for that reason. There were countless editorials and headlines decrying the video’s degradation of American culture, the disrespect to the president, his memory, and his family, the damage to future generations, and the harm that would come to those who would see it now. A common theme was the concern that kids or even adults would go down to their local video store on a Friday night, grab some beers and popcorn, and sit around watching the president getting murdered. Some felt the video “cheapened history”; others found it “nauseating” or called it “true pornography.” It was repeatedly called a “snuff film,” and the Storm Lake Pilot-Tribune called it “The Granddaddy of all Money-Grubbing Videos.”

  A number of editorials (though not as many) defended the video, arguing that it was the public’s right to see it, that the horror of it was part of history, and that it was long overdue. In the Muskegon Chronicle, an article is titled “Public Needs to Have Zapruder Film.” The Long Beach Press-Telegram reported “Zapruder Film is More than Just Voyeurism,” and the Rockford Register Star printed “Zapruder Film is Must Viewing for Americans.”

  In a perfect example of the kind of back-and-forth that went on during this hype, there is a letter to the editor from Kathryne Kirkpatrick in the Tennessean that reads: “What kind of demented person would pay $20 for six separate showings of Kennedy’s head exploding? This isn’t a Hollywood movie, folks. There are no special effects. It is real blood.” In response, Robert T. Grammer wrote: “I will probably buy a copy of [the video] but I am not a ‘demented person’ as she so aptly put it. One has to have reverence when watching such an event on film. I think Ms. Kirkpatrick underestimates the American public’s values and morals in regard to such things. Everyone who thinks that the video should not be released also underestimates [them].”

  I didn’t realize until I did the research for this book the absolutely massive coverage that this event garnered and the personally hateful criticism we received. We were accused of shameless greed, disrespect for the Kennedy family, insensitivity to history and the public, a lack of morality, and on and on. Many writers linked the video’s release to the government taking of the film, the status of the film’s copyright, and the efforts to negotiate just compensation. In a safely anonymous editorial from Jena, Louisiana, the Jena Times chastised us for the damaging effect of the video on the youth of America, writing: “The government offered the family $3 million, but the family wants $18
million. The country would be better off if the government paid the bloodsuckers what they want to keep it out of the sight of children.” As always, Henry endured the criticism without defending himself and only admitted in private that although he felt that the decision was grossly misunderstood, he regretted that the film was released in that particular way.

  I have one vivid memory from this time. The subject of the MPI video was debated on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, with Doris Kearns Goodwin, Michael Beschloss, and Haynes Johnson on one side and Waleed Ali on the other. The broad outlines of the debate went predictably, with the guests lamenting the bad taste, lack of dignity, and the sad selling of tragedy that the video represented. Waleed defended the film, explaining the reasoning behind it and pointing out that while many people were criticizing the content of the film, he felt that it was really the home video format that most offended people. After all, the film had been shown publicly many times, and it had been used in Oliver Stone’s movie—repeatedly and in close-up—but no one had objected to that.

  What I remember most is Doris Kearns Goodwin’s comments, because I had read No Ordinary Time in my early twenties and I had long seen her as the kind of writer I wanted to be. Like her, I wanted to write deeply researched, provocative, beautiful prose on big subjects, and like her, I wanted to be part of a public conversation about ideas and history. So her criticism of our family felt like a personal slap in the face. I can still feel the burn on my cheeks when I remember that public censure.

  Now, reading the transcript and focusing on her remarks, I realize that her comments—far from elucidating a clear point—capture all the ambivalence that is inherent in the life of the film. She began by saying:

  Well, there’s no question that the film itself is a piece of history and that the enhanced version of it may contribute to history, but I don’t see any historical value in its mass marketing to the public as a whole. In fact, I find it really troubling that for the collective mind of so many people who may see this enhanced version it will wipe out—it is so powerful—the other images that we tend to hold of the Kennedys. I think most of us—though we obviously knew he died—we had that blurry image, which was crowded out before by images of him smiling, talking at Berlin to tens of thousands of people, holding that buttercup in front of Little John, next to Caroline on the pony… I don’t want the American people to have this so powerful image in their head that it wipes out the rest of what we remembered about the Kennedys.

  I am so struck by this statement. It reminds me of what my father wrote to the young girl who had requested a copy of the film from him so many years before—that he hoped she would learn about President Kennedy’s accomplishments and not just focus on the terrible fact of his death. The difference was that my father was talking about Kennedy’s actual accomplishments, not a rosy, romantic image of Camelot; not only that, but he was writing to a teenage girl. This was Doris Kearns Goodwin, who was arguing on television that making the Zapruder film available thirty-five years after the assassination would somehow blot out the idyllic image of the Kennedys, an image that was as carefully constructed as the image of the assassination is horrifyingly real. I can’t help but think, too, of The Eternal Frame and Doug Hall and Chip Lord’s guerrilla efforts to break exactly this kind of stranglehold, reenacting the film in order to escape not only its singular perspective on the killing but also the image of the Kennedy mystique created and constructed by the media.

  Nevertheless, I understand her feelings, especially when I think of her as a participant in that history, as someone who had her own memories to protect. It wasn’t unlike how my parents felt. The problem came in trying to extend this highly personal feeling to the public, because with all due respect, who is Doris Kearns Goodwin, or anyone else, to “want” the American collective mind to have one image of the Kennedys over another? This is exactly the kind of paternalistic impulse that led C. D. Jackson to purchase the film to keep it away from the public. Then again, that was in 1963, days after the president was assassinated. Times had changed since then, as Henry had reluctantly acknowledged when he first permitted the film to appear in home video back in 1998.

  Jim Lehrer responded by asking Kearns Goodwin what she would have done with it, and like most who criticized our family, she didn’t really know. She said again and again that she recognized the film’s importance, and when pressed (perhaps remembering that it was 1998 and not 1963) conceded that it wasn’t right to keep it from the public. Still, the fact of its distribution bothered her. “I’m not saying that it shouldn’t be out there, that we can’t do it. All I’m expressing is my sadness that it’s there. I wish it had been done in a different way. I wish they had put it in the National Archives, as it’s been for these last twenty years, that somehow it had been made more available to scholars who wanted to see it, more available to anyone who wanted to go there.” Of course, it was in the National Archives. Making it more available to scholars wasn’t the point at all. And what might that “different way” be, that perfectly calibrated approach that would somehow magically take the Zapruder out of the Zapruder film? Her vagueness speaks to the very real problems that the film poses.

  Waleed immediately accused her of elitism, asking why it should be available only to scholars and researchers. “Nobody is saying that you cannot make it,” she said. “All we’re expressing—at least I am—is sadness that our standards are such now that such violence might become something popular and this might become mass marketed. I’m not saying you can’t do it. I’m just expressing sadness that it’s happening… There will be people who will want to see somebody at the moment of a death. It’s the mystery that we’re all confronting with ourselves. I’m not denying it. It may be out there, but it doesn’t mean you can’t have some standard and feel bad about it.”

  This moment is absolutely classic in the annals of public debate about the Zapruder film. The tone is totally different from some of the accusatory editorials that flooded through the public discourse but the essence is the same. The Zapruder film makes people uncomfortable. It makes them sad, or angry, or disgusted, or horrified. It feels degrading, tasteless, insensitive, grotesque. It is offensive, appalling, nauseating, and repulsive. All of that is true. But how to reconcile those truths about the film with the fact that it also records a watershed moment in American history, a public event that belongs not just to the Zapruder family, or to the scholars who study it, but to everyone? How to reconcile them with the fact that time, tastes, standards of appropriateness, and technologies change? How to reconcile them with the fact that people want to know what happened to their president, or they want to try to untangle its confusions, or they even—as Doris Kearns Goodwin suggests—just want to see someone die?

  One way is to assume that those who have made it available are lacking sensitivity, public concern, or care for the Kennedys, and to imagine that the only reason to make such a film available is money. That is the easy narrative so many adopted in the absence of any effort to see it from all sides. Another way is to conflate the content of the film with the responsibility for managing it, and to render those who handle it responsible for the feelings it evokes. I think we can agree that the Zapruder film makes us sad. It’s sad that the president was killed, and it’s sad that he was killed in a horrible, graphic way, and it’s sad that it was caught on film. But someone still has to figure out what to do with it.

  What is interesting to me is that between 1963 and 1998, the intrinsic questions about the film never really changed; only the context did. Some would always feel that making the film public—whether in the form of stills in LIFE magazine or a bootleg on Geraldo’s Good Night America or a video for purchase at a local store—was tasteless, exploitative, and crass. They would say there was no virtue in it, that it offered nothing new, and that sharing it simply hastened the demise of decent society. Others would always feel that it was the public’s right to see it, to examine and study it, to confront history, no matter how bloody and
horrific it was. They would argue that it was not democratic for a small elite to have access to it when it was everyone’s history, and that a media company, a family, or the government shouldn’t decide what the American people should or shouldn’t be able to see about their history. The hard truth is that they are all right.

  In October 1998, LMH and the federal government entered into an agreement for binding arbitration to determine just compensation for the in-camera original of the Zapruder film. The copyright was excluded and remained, for the time being, owned by LMH. Each side would pick an arbitrator and, together, the two parties would pick a third. Each side would prepare a pre-hearing brief and provide affidavits from witnesses who would speak to the value of the film. The witnesses would have the opportunity to read the material written by the other side and write rebuttal affidavits in response. There would be a two-day hearing in May 1999 in which the government and LMH would present their cases to the arbitration panel. Post-hearing briefs were allowed shortly after. The arbitrators would render a decision that would be binding.

  The end was very nearly in sight.

  CHAPTER 14

  ARBITRATION AND RESOLUTION