Crossfire

by Jim Marrs

  Despite immediate attempts to establish the Texas School Book Depository as the sole location from which shots were fired, public attention, both in 1963 and even today, continued to be drawn to the wooded hillock to the west of the Depository that has become known as the Grassy Knoll.

  The Grassy Knoll

  Probably no small section of land in the United States has been the object of more controversy than that small northern portion of Dealey Plaza known as the Grassy Knoll.

  While Elm Street and two large grassy areas of Dealey Plaza dip down approximately 24 feet as one travels the 495 feet from Houston Street on the east, the Grassy Knoll remains at ground level.

  There actually are two grassy knolls on both the north and south sides of the west end of the plaza, but during the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, it was the north knoll that drew public attention.

  Located between the Texas School Book Depository and the Triple Underpass, the Grassy Knoll provided an ideal ambush site. Running along the top of the knoll was a wooden picket fence about five feet high. In front of this fence were shrubs and evergreen trees that, even in late November, provided a leafy canopy over the fence. The fence ran east approximately seventy-five feet from the north edge of the Triple Underpass, then turned north for about fifty feet, ending in a parking area behind a concrete pergola located to the west of the Depository.

  It was from a vantage point atop a low concrete wall on the south end of this pergola that the most famous home movie of all time was made—the Abraham Zapruder film.

  The Zapruder Film

  A 26.6-second, 8 mm film made on November 22, 1963, became the cornerstone of investigations, both public and private, in the years after the Kennedy assassination. It has been long regarded as the most objective, and thus most important, piece of evidence in the attempts to unravel what actually happened to President Kennedy. And it almost didn’t happen.

  Abraham Zapruder, a native of Russia and a thirty-third-degree Freemason, in 1963 was a ladies’ dress manufacturer with offices in the Dal-Tex Building at 501 Elm Street in downtown Dallas near Jack Ruby’s nightclub and across the street from the Texas School Book Depository. He had a new camera but had not intended to film that day. What with his work and the morning rains, Zapruder thought “I wouldn’t have a chance even to see the President.” But his secretary, Lillian Rogers, urged him to make use of his new camera—a Bell & Howell 8mm camera with a telephoto lens. So Zapruder made a fourteen-mile round-trip drive to his home to pick up his camera. By the time he returned, crowds were already gathering to watch the motorcade.

  After trying several different locations—none of which proved suitable for viewing the president without obstructions—Zapruder finally climbed onto a four-foot-high concrete block at the end of two steps leading to the pergola on the north Grassy Knoll. He almost lost his balance while testing his camera on some nearby office workers, so he asked one in the group, his receptionist Marilyn Sitzman, to join him and provide steady support. From this excellent vantage point, Zapruder and Sitzman watched the motorcade approach Elm Street. Having set the camera’s speed control on “run” and his lens on “telephoto,” Zapruder proceeded to film the entire assassination sequence.

  The film must be seen run in its entirety for a viewer to actually receive its maximum impact. But, in synopsis, the film shows:

  The motorcade curves onto Elm and begins moving slowly toward the camera. President Kennedy and his wife are smiling and waving to opposite sides of the street. Then the presidential limousine disappears for a brief second behind a freeway sign and when it emerges, Kennedy is already reacting to a shot. He clenches his fists and brings both up to his throat. He does not appear to say anything, but only remains stiff and upright, sagging slightly to his left. Connally turns to his right, apparently trying to see behind him, then begins to turn back to his left when he freezes. His hair flies up and his mouth opens. He is obviously struck by a bullet. Mrs. Kennedy meanwhile has placed her hand on her husband’s arm and is looking at him horrified as he continues to sag toward her. A few seconds pass and, by now, Kennedy is bent slightly forward. Suddenly, after an almost imperceptible forward motion of his head, the entire right side of his skull explodes in a halo of blood and brain matter. Kennedy is slammed violently backward to the left rear where he rebounds off the back of the seat and falls toward the car’s floor. Mrs. Kennedy climbs onto the trunk of the limousine in an effort to grab something while a Secret Service agent leaps onto the rear of the car, which finally begins to accelerate.

  On July 22, 1964, Zapruder told the Warren Commission, “I heard the first shot and I saw the President lean over and grab himself like this [holding his left chest area].”

  His testimony is very pertinent because the Warren Commission, in its attempt to prove a lone assassin fired from the sixth floor of the Depository, stated:

  The evidence indicated that the President was not hit until at least frame 210 and that he was probably hit by frame 225. The possibility of variations in reaction time in addition to the obstruction of Zapruder’s view by the sign precluded a more specific determination than that the President was probably shot through the neck between frames 210 and 225.

  By placing the moment of the first shot at the point where Kennedy was out of Zapruder’s sight behind the sign, the Commission moved the shot closer to the visual effect of a strike on Connally, buttressing the “single bullet” theory. By moving the time of the shot forward, the Commission also abolished the worrisome problem of how an assassin in the sixth-floor window could have accurately fired through obscuring tree branches.

  The problem with the Commission’s scenario of a hit between frame 210 and 225, of course, is that Zapruder claims he saw Kennedy react to the first shot, which had to have happened before he disappeared from camera view.

  Zapruder went on to tell the Commission that following the shooting, he saw some motorcycle policemen “running right behind me . . . in the line of the shooting.” He said, “I guess they thought it came from right behind me.” When asked where he thought the shots came from, Zapruder replied, “I also thought it came from back of me.”

  In fact, Zapruder stated on four separate occasions in his testimony that he thought shots came from behind him in the direction of the picket fence on the Grassy Knoll.

  But when Commission attorney Wesley J. Liebeler asked Zapruder, “But you didn’t form any opinion at that time as to what direction the shots did come from actually?” Zapruder—who by this time was fully familiar with the public position that Oswald had fired three shots from the Depository—was confused and replied, “No.” This response has been seized upon by some debunkers who claimed Zapruder did not know from which direction the shots came.

  Zapruder, who was very shaken by the assassination, noted that there was considerable reverberation in Dealey Plaza at the time. He said he did not remember jumping down from the cement block and crouching for cover inside the white pergola with Sitzman as determined by photographs taken at the time or going back to his office. He recalled only walking back up Elm Street in a daze, yelling, “They shot him, they shot him, they shot him.”

  His secretary called authorities and soon Dallas Secret Service agent in charge Forrest Sorrels and Dallas Morning News reporter Harry McCormack came to take his film for processing.

  The day after the assassination, select frames from Zapruder’s film had been sold to Life magazine. In charge of the sale was Life’s publisher, C. D. Jackson, who later claimed he was so horrified by the film that he wanted to lock it away. However, in later years, Jackson was shown to have been closely associated with CIA officials and ranking globalists such as Allen Dulles, John J. McCloy, and Joseph Alsop, the latter being instrumental in establishing the Warren Commission. As revealed in British Security Coordination (BSC) files declassified in 1998, Dulles, who represented prewar Nazis and later served as CIA director, was recruited as a British agent in 1940. When the first CIA director, Wal
ter Bedell Smith, wanted prominent Americans as members of the shadowy and elitist Bilderberger organization, he said he “turned the matter over to C. D. Jackson and things really got going.”

  The sale of the Zapruder film to Life might be the only instance of a private company purchasing critical evidence in a major crime prior to any court trials. Asked about the sale by Liebeler, Zapruder said, “Well, 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.”

  He finally said, “I received $25,000, as you know, and I have given that to the Firemen’s and Policemen’s Benevolence with a suggestion, [to use the money] for Mrs. Tippit [wife of the Dallas policeman slain the afternoon of the assassination].”

  Later in his testimony, Zapruder told of giving his camera to Bell & Howell for its archives. He said, in return, he asked the company to donate a sound projector to the “Golden Age Group.” He told Liebeler, “I didn’t want anything for myself. . . . I don’t like to talk about it too much.”

  After the trauma of the assassination, the American public was gratified to learn from the media that Zapruder had received only $25,000 for his film and that the money was to have gone to the widow of the slain Officer Tippit. Like so much of the Warren Commission testimony, Zapruder’s statement was less than truthful.

  A copy of his contract with Life made public much later revealed that his film brought him more than $150,000. This would be close to $1 million in today’s money. He also received 50 percent of Time-Life profits from rights to the film. Why so much for one film? Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that no member of the American public saw the Zapruder film run as a movie while it was in the sole possession of Time-Life Corp.

  While few, if any, of the Warren Commission members viewed the film, single frames from this important piece of evidence were printed in Volume XVIII. But an odd thing happened. No one who has viewed the Zapruder film has been unaffected by the final, gory head shot followed instantaneously by Kennedy’s violent fall rearward. Most researchers consider this moment in the film as obvious evidence of a shot from Kennedy’s right front, the location of the Grassy Knoll.

  Yet when published by the Warren Commission, the critical frames that depict the rearward motion of Kennedy’s head were transposed to indicate a forward motion. In 1965 FBI director J. Edgar Hoover explained this reversing of the Zapruder frames as a “printing error.”

  Further twisting of what was depicted in the film came soon after the assassination. In its December 6, 1963, issue, Life magazine reported the fact that the Dallas doctors regarded a small wound in Kennedy’s throat as an entrance wound, a real problem considering that the Texas School Book Depository was to his rear at all times. So a Life writer simply threw out the explanation:

  But [Zapruder’s] 8mm film shows the President turning his body far around to the right as he waves to someone in the crowd. His throat is exposed—toward the sniper’s nest—just before he clutches it.

  This account is patently wrong, as anyone who has seen the film can attest. The reason for such wrongful information at such a critical time will probably never be known, as the author of this statement, Paul Mandel, died shortly afterward.

  Then there is the story of news anchor Dan Rather, which has been known to assassination researchers for years. Rather, then a CBS newsman, was the only reporter present at a private screening of the Zapruder film the day after the assassination. He described what was in the film over nationwide radio and was fairly accurate until he described the fatal head shot.

  Rather stated Kennedy’s head “went forward with considerable violence,” the exact opposite of what is in the film. In his 1987 book, The Camera Never Blinks, Rather ironically attempted to explain this misstatement by claiming he must have blinked at that moment in the film. Several months later, Rather was promoted to White House correspondent for CBS and by the 1980s, he was chief news anchorman.

  Another questionable statement by Rather involves his location at the time of the assassination. In his book, Rather wrote how he was waiting to pick up news film from a CBS cameraman in the presidential motorcade. He wrote he was standing on the west side of the Triple Underpass and missed witnessing the assassination by only a few yards.

  However, recently discovered film footage of the west side of the underpass has now become public. This film plus some still photographs show the Kennedy limousine speeding through the underpass and onto Stemmons Freeway—but no sign of Dan Rather.

  The American public finally got the opportunity to view the Zapruder film only because of the Clay Shaw trial in New Orleans during 1967–1969. During that turbulent trial, New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison attempted to prove there was a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy and that New Orleans Trade Mart director Clay Shaw was a member of that conspiracy.

  As part of Garrison’s attempt to prove the existence of a conspiracy, he subpoenaed the Zapruder film from Time-Life Corp. Time-Life fought this subpoena all the way to the Supreme Court, which finally ruled that the corporation had to comply with the legal subpoena.

  Time-Life grudgingly turned over to Garrison a somewhat blurry copy of the film—but that was enough. Soon, thanks to the copying efforts of Garrison’s staff, bootleg Zapruder films were in the hands of several assassination researchers.

  Finally in March 1975, a copy of the film was aired nationally about midnight on ABC’s Goodnight America thanks to guests Robert Groden and comedian Dick Gregory. At long last, the American public was able to see for themselves the assassination of the thirty-fifth president. Within a few years clearer copies of the Zapruder film became available to the public.

  From the beginning, researchers have used the Zapruder film as the cornerstone of assassination evidence—a virtual time clock of the events in Dealey Plaza, based on the known average camera speed of 18.3 frames per second.

  Today the Zapruder film itself has been called into question. In 1971, author David Lifton was permitted to view an exceptionally good-quality copy of the Zapruder film in Time-Life’s Los Angeles office. He said the rear of Kennedy’s head in the critical moments following the head shot appeared to have been “blacked out” and he discovered “splices on the film which had never been mentioned by Time-Life.”

  His suspicion that the film may have been tampered with by persons with access to sophisticated photographic equipment was heightened in 1976 with the release of CIA Item 450. This group of documents, pried from the agency by a Freedom of Information Act suit, indicated the Zapruder film was at the CIA’s National Photo Interpretation Center possibly on the night of the assassination and “certainly within days of the assassination.” One of the documents tells of the existence of either a negative or a master positive of the film and calls for the production of four prints—one “test print” and three duplicates. Interestingly, that number of prints is exactly what existed in Dallas the day after the assassination—one original and three copies.

  Lifton wrote:

  In my view, previously unreported CIA possession of the Zapruder film compromised the film’s value as evidence: (1) the forward motion of Kennedy’s head, for one frame preceding frame 313, might be the result of an altered film, and if that was so, it made the theory of a forward high-angle shot . . . completely unnecessary; (2) an altered film might also explain why the occipital area [of Kennedy’s head], where the Dallas doctors saw a wound, appears suspiciously dark, whereas a large wound appears on the forward, right-hand side of the head, where the Dallas doctors saw no wound at all.

  The late Jack White, a photographic analyst and researcher who testified to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, concurred with Lifton, stating he detected evidence of photographic retouching in some Zapruder frames. Interception and alteration of the Z film prior to its delivery to Time-Life has now been confirmed by documents, witness testimony, and t
he scrutiny of Hollywood experts, as will be detailed later.

  Long considered one of the best pieces of evidence, if the CIA indeed tampered with the Zapruder film after the assassination, it becomes problematic in evaluating what really happened in Dealey Plaza.

  And like so much else in the assassination case, the suppression, alteration, and deception surrounding the Zapruder film may eventually reveal more than the film itself.

  In April 1975, for $1 Time-Life sold the Zapruder film back to the heirs of Zapruder, who died in 1970. The film was placed in cold storage within the National Archives for safekeeping. With the passage of the JFK Act in 1992, the Zapruder family, fearful that the film could be taken as an assassination record, tried to retrieve it but was rebuffed by the National Archives and Records Administration. Their fear was justified, as the Assassination Records Review Board designated the film as a JFK record belonging to the government. In 1998, the film was digitally replicated under license of the Zapruder family and distributed under the title Image of an Assassination: A New Look at the Zapruder Film. The government kept the film but compensated the Zapruder family with $16 million of taxpayer money.

  In December 1999, the original film was donated to the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, where it resides today.

  Just down the slope of the Grassy Knoll from Zapruder was the Bill Newman family. They not only noticed Zapruder with his camera, but in later years, Newman told this author, “At first I thought he shot the president.”

  Bill and Gayle Newman, along with their two young sons, had gone to Love Field to see Kennedy. But when they didn’t get a good view, they rushed downtown and situated themselves on Elm Street just below the concrete cupola on the Grassy Knoll. Newman recalled for this author:

  We hadn’t been there five minutes when the President turned onto Elm Street. As he was coming straight toward us there was a boom, boom, real close together. I thought someone was throwing firecrackers. He got this bewildered look on his face and was sort of slowly moving back and forth. Then he got nearer to us and, bam, a shot took the right side of his head off. His ear flew off. I heard Mrs. Kennedy say, “Oh, my God, no, they shot Jack!” He was knocked violently back against the seat, almost as if he had been hit by a baseball bat. At that time I was looking right at the president and I thought the shots were coming from directly behind us. I said, “That’s it! Get on the ground!” The car momentarily stopped and the driver seemed to have a radio or phone up to his ear and he seemed to be waiting on some word. Some Secret Service men reached into their car and came out with some sort of machine gun. Then the cars roared off. Very soon after this a man asked us what happened and we told him and he took us to Channel 8 [WFAA-TV] studios.