by BJW Nashe
On this day fifty years ago, Abraham Zapruder — the owner of a women’s clothing company in Dallas — rose early in the morning and went to work at his office in Dealey Plaza, just like he did on every other busy weekday. Today was special, however. The sky was crystal clear, the sun was shining brightly, and the President of the United States was coming to town. Sometime just past noon, the presidential motorcade would be passing by on Elm Street, which was only a short walk from Zapruder’s office in the Dal-Tex building, just across the street from the Texas School Book Depository. A true patriot, a man who supported and admired President John F. Kennedy, Zapruder was excited by the event.
During his lunch break, Zapruder strolled down to join the crowd of Texans who had gathered to catch a glimpse of JFK’s million dollar smile, as well as his glamorous young wife Jacqueline. Zapruder even brought along his top-of-the-line home movie camera. He hoped to film the president driving by in his limousine. The camera — an 8 mm Bell & Howell Zoomatic Director Series Model 
414 PD — was one of Zapruder’s favorite new toys. Pick it up and hold it in your hands, and you became a symbol of modern American technological progress and innovation. Plus it was just plain fun to use.
Zapruder’s lunch break on November 22, 1963 should have been yet another emblematic moment in the bright new era dawning in America. Here was a proud Jewish-American immigrant who as a young boy had fled with his family from the Russian Revolution and then gone on to become a successful businessman in the USA — here he was heading down to Elm Street to cheer for the nation’s first Irish Catholic President, a wealthy, charismatic war hero from Massachusetts. And this was happening in Texas, of all places. Elsewhere in the South, the Civil Rights movement was in full swing. The country definitely seemed to be changing.
But Zapruder’s patriotic lunch hour did not go as planned. The bright new dawn was soon blown to smithereens. Instead of capturing a few moments of American glory on film — a memento that he might cherish and share with friends and family — Zapruder ended up rushing away from Dealey Plaza with the most famous snuff film in history. By some cruel twist of fate, he had inadvertently filmed the precise moment when President Kennedy was gunned down by an assassin (or assassins). By sheer chance, Zapruder had stepped into one of history’s black holes. Now, through no fault of his own, his legacy would be swallowed up in decades of conspiracy, suspicion, and fear. Nerves frayed, he must have felt like he was carrying a time bomb with him as he hurried from the Plaza on that afternoon, desperately clutching his fancy camera. And his feelings were entirely justified. His life, and the life of the nation as a whole, would never be the same again.
Zapruder handled himself admirably, given the circumstances. He managed to contact a Secret Service agent, Forrest Sorrels, who was working out of the Dallas office. He agreed to provide Sorrels with copies of the film, provided that the footage only be used for investigative purposes. In hindsight, it’s surprising that Zapruder was never coerced into handing the undeveloped film over to the Secret Service. One wonders why agents did not simply seize the footage. In any case, Zapruder was able to maintain autonomy throughout this tense episode. He was wise to keep the original film firmly in his control, so he could share it with his fellow Americans in a relatively sensible manner. If he had merely surrendered the film to Agent Sorrel, none of us would have ever seen it.
Getting the film developed and copied proved to be a challenge. When a local television station, WFAA in Dallas, was unable to do the job, Zapruder took the film to Eastman Kodak’s Dallas processing plant, where the original film was developed. For duplication, he took the developed original to the Jamieson Film Company, where three additional copies were exposed. Then it was back to Kodak for processing. All of this was accomplished by 8 p.m. on the evening of the assassination, with the entire Dallas area — and the whole country — in a state of shock over the day’s events. Zapruder kept the original film, plus one copy, and gave the other two copies to Agent Sorrels, who sent them to Secret Service headquarters in Washington.
It didn’t take long for journalists to hear that a man named Abraham Zapruder had accidentally filmed the assassination. Richard Stolley, an editor at Life Magazine, was one of the first to contact Zapruder at home on the night of November 22nd. They arranged to meet the following morning to view the film. Stolley arrived to find a group of other journalists also eagerly waiting for a chance to get first dibs on this explosive material.
In the midst of all the clamor around Zapruder’s office, it was Richard Stolley from Life who would ultimately secure a deal for the film rights. Zapruder apparently trusted Stolley more than any of his competitors. He found Stolley to be a well-mannered gentleman, while the others were practically foaming at the mouth in a fit of media frenzy. Zapruder initially sold the print rights to Life Magazine for $50,000. On November 24th, Life purchased all rights to the film for a total of $150,000 (an equivalent sum today, adjusted for inflation, would be approximately $1.125 million). Zapruder donated $25,000 of his earnings to the widow of Dallas policeman J.D. Tippit, who was murdered on the same day as President Kennedy. Zapruder felt uneasy about profiting from images of the president’s death. Yet he was no fool. He knew what he was in for, both in terms of the glare of media publicity and the subsequent murder investigation. So he decided he ought to be compensated. He stipulated, however, that Life Magazine not go public with the most infamous part of the film, frame 313, which showed the fatal head shot.
Even today, after years of repeated viewings, the Zapruder film remains blunt and shocking. The grainy quality of its outmoded 
color film stock only adds an underground documentary feel to the footage. It has the odd look of something we are not meant to see. The film consists of a 26.6 second sequence, comprising exactly 486 frames, of eerily silent trauma. The film shows the presidential limousine turn onto Elm Street, and then proceed forward into gunfire and chaos. The top is down, and the President and First Lady are initially seen basking in the glory of the event. The Dallas crowd lining the parade route has been warm and inviting. Zapruder’s camera angle is partially obscured when the limo passes by a street sign. Then, as the motorcade comes back into full view, we can see the president grimace and raise his arms up to his throat as he is hit by the first bullet. We see Texas Governor John Connolly also contorted in pain. Then, in shockingly gory detail, we see the impact of the fatal head wound, as Kennedy’s head is blown open. The film also shows the president’s wife Jacqueline instinctively crawling onto the back of the limousine to retrieve a piece of her husband’s skull. Then the motorcade speeds off to nearby Parkland Hospital.
Zapruder’s personal torments began immediately after his scrambling efforts to get the film developed and copied. He later spoke of a nightmare he had on the night following the assassination, in which he saw a booth in Times Square advertising, “See the president’s head explode!” For the remaining seven years of his life — until his death from cancer in 1970 — Zapruder would be 
haunted by what he had witnessed, and what he had filmed, on that fateful day in Dallas. He broke down and wept as he recalled the assassination when he was called to testify before the Warren Commission. He broke down and wept again when he testified at the 1969 trial of Clay Shaw in New Orleans. He reportedly never again owned or used a camera on any occasion during his lifetime.
Life Magazine published 30 black-and-white stills from the film in its November 29, 1963 issue. On December 6th of that same year, Life published color stills from the film in a special JFK memorial issue. Further pictures appeared in later issues in 1964, 1966, and 1967.
Several years would pass before the Zapruder film was broadcast in public. In 1970, a late-night television show called Underground News, originating from WSNS-TV in Chicago, aired the film for the first time. In 1975, another late-night show, an ABC program called Good Night America, presented the network television premier of the Zapruder film. The public’s response to that first nationally televised showing — the sense of collective outrage it inspired — played a significant role in drumming up support for subsequent inquiries undertaken in the 1970s. After the Vietnam War and Watergate, the public had grown angry at being lied to by the government. Now, after seeing the Zapruder film for the first time, citizens were demanding answers and accountability. Thus we had the Hart-Schweiker investigation, the Church Committee Investigation on Intelligence Activities in the U.S., and the House Select Committee on Assassinations investigation.
Oddly enough, even though the Zapruder film clearly shows the fatal shot that killed Kennedy, it has not helped to solve the basic mystery that surrounds the events of that day. No final answers have been provided. For every tentative explanation, a host of doubts and questions remain. What exactly happened on November 22nd in Dallas? How many shots were fired? From where? Did Oswald act alone? Or was he part of a larger conspiracy? The Zapruder film has been endlessly analyzed and dissected, yet it yields no greater truth. It simply shows us a man’s head exploding. The fatal shot appears to strike Kennedy from the front. Yet even this seems to be debatable. Experts have argued that the shot came from behind. Experts have argued that the shot came from the front. Experts have argued that shots were fired from multiple directions, in a burst of deadly crossfire. Even now, after all the expert analysis, all the hearings, and all the reports, we are left with little more than the anguish of indeterminacy.
We may never know the precise truth about the Kennedy assassination. What we do know is probably even more important, however. We know that there was a massive cover-up of the whole affair. The Warren Commission Report on the assassination of JFK is little more than a heap of obfuscation and misinformation. Few sensible people today will deny that the CIA and FBI went out of their way to conceal the truth in the days and months following JFK’s death. The question is why?
We now know that there was ample reason to halt any serious inquiry into the JFK assassination.Whether or not Oswald was the lone gunman, it is clear that any legitimate investigation of the crime would have exposed a vast underworld of criminal 
conspiracy that coexisted alongside the political establishment, and included a whole range of covert and illegal operations. We now know that the CIA, for instance, was working closely with mob bosses such as Santo Trafficante, Johnny Roselli, and Sam Giancana to initiate assassination plots against Fidel Castro in Cuba. Those plans may have been turned around and used in the U.S. against President Kennedy himself. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. We now know a good deal about what the CIA was doing at the time in Central America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. We also know about secret CIA programs such as MKUltra which were utilized at the height of the Cold War to develop torture techniques and explore various methods of mind control and psychological warfare. Likewise, we are fully aware of the FBI’s illegal surveillance and counter-insurgency activities directed against persons considered to be “enemies.” Targets here included civil rights activists such as Martin Luther King, and would later include scores of anti-war activists.
Back in the early 1960s, the U.S. government desperately wanted to keep all of this information secret. They wanted to keep the shadow government, and all of the “black ops,” hidden in the dark. It would take more than a decade for the American public to start to learn certain truths about the inner workings of their government. This process of discovery is still ongoing. Each new era seems to bring its own horde of scandals and revelations. The Kennedy assassination was the first big event that threatened to blow the lid off of the whole corrupt can of worms. And the Zapruder film was Exhibit A in that case. An analogous scenario today might be the NSA information leaked by Edward Snowden to the Guardian. Snowden has had far less impact than the horrors of the Zapruder film, yet still, his leaked information plays a similar role insofar as it points the way forward in exposing official secrets and lies and abuses of power.
The Zapruder film also foreshadows the increasingly ubiquitous role of technology in all facets of American life, from sex to politics to crime. Zapruder’s camera work in Dallas was perhaps the first time that a monumentally scandalous event was captured on film by a “citizen journalist.” These days, we take it for granted that people everywhere are armed with cell phones and cameras. All of our disastrous events (the 9-11 attacks, Hurrican Katrina) are brought to us live and in color. Moreover, we are now quite accustomed to viewing incidental footage of cops beating up citizens (a la Rodney King), or mayors smoking crack (a la 
Marion Barry and Rob Ford), or celebrities fornicating (a la Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian). So prevalent are recording devices these days, that it’s hard to imagine a public assassination such as JFK’s being carried out without someone — or multiple persons — capturing it on a digital screen. It would be on YouTube within an hour or so. We are now a Zapruder culture on steroids.
Finally, the Zapruder film has now become an iconic pop culture artifact, with all the fetishism that implies. Directors such as Oliver Stone have incorporated the film into their own work. Conceptual artists have reenacted the film in Dealey Plaza. Movie fanatics have used it as a centerpiece or springboard for specialized atrocity film festivals. On the Worldwide Web, in particular on YouTube, the Zapruder film has its own especially vast area of dominion, featuring a mind-boggling array of different presentations and interpretations. Naturally, there are those who go to great lengths to prove that the film is a hoax.
Above all, the Zapruder film signifies a distinct point in modern American history when our collective minds were blown open, as it were, and innocence and naivete were no longer an option. Fifty years on, this remains more true than ever.
Click here to view our earlier post on the theft of JFK’s brain:
New Book Claims Robert Kennedy Stole President John F. Kennedy’s Brain Following His Autopsy