The Day Kennedy Died: 50 Years Later LIFE Remembers the Man and the Moment

The Zapruder Legacy

The film developed a life of its own. Meantime, the man who took it and his family had to come to terms with a very strange modern kind of fame. ALEXANDRA ZAPRUDER describes how her grandfather’s film changed his life.

I NEVER KNEW MY GRANDFATHER Abraham Zapruder, who is known to the world as the author of the home movie of President Kennedy’s assassination. He died when my twin brother and I were 10 months old and, although my three living grandparents were much-loved figures in my life, I felt his absence keenly. He was the missing one. My sense of him was almost mythical, formed by funny stories told about him, his expressions and catchphrases that were part of our family lexicon, a few photographs around my grandmother’s house, and my father’s evident sadness when his name came up. At the same time, I was dimly aware that our grandfather was important outside our family, too. I knew that he had done something big, something for which he was famous, but something that, in our family at least, no one tended to talk about. I don’t know when I learned what “it” was, but I know that for most of my life, it existed in the background, a sort of shadow that I accepted without question the way that children do.

Now, as an adult, I have found myself drawn to my grandfather’s story and how he so suddenly and violently intersected with one of the most important events of the 20th century. It is a story of chance and coincidence, without precedent in American history and with implications that reverberated far beyond anything anyone could have imagined at the time. In fact, over the decades, the Zapruder film has become not only evidence and artifact, but collective memory and cultural icon; artistic, literary and popular reference point; symbol of the limits of visual representation and truth; ancestor of citizen journalism and possibly even reality television; and endless source of vexing questions about privacy, ownership and the public’s right to information. But while there is much to consider about the accidental legacy of the Zapruder film, I often think about my grandfather himself, the questions I would have asked him if I could, and the way he might have told his own story. (He didn’t particularly want to tell it, in fact, and he might not even have approved of my doing so in this essay. Yet I imagine he would have grudgingly agreed that it is the duty and the right of children to ask questions, even questions that might be in opposition to family culture and habit.) For if, in today’s world, anyone can see what Abraham Zapruder saw through the lens of his camera, it is much harder to uncover and understand what it must have meant to be the man holding the camera that day, and to be irrevocably bound to a historical moment fraught with shame, loss and inconceivable horror. This essay, then, offers a glimpse of Abraham Zapruder before and after that critical moment in Dallas and how the event that changed the nation also changed his life and legacy.

ON THE MORNING OF NOVEMBER 22, 1963, Abraham Zapruder went to work as he always did at his office at Jennifer Juniors, a dress manufacturing company located in the Dal-Tex building at 501 Elm Street in downtown Dallas. The city was alive with excitement about President Kennedy’s visit. But even though his building was just adjacent to the route that the motorcade would take through the city, and even though he was an avid home moviemaker, he had not brought his camera with him. He had left it at home in part because of rainy weather that morning, and in part because he thought, pessimistically, that he would not get near enough to the President to even see him, let alone film him. As the morning wore on, the clouds gave way to warm fall sunshine. His longtime assistant, Lillian Rogers, nudged him to get the camera. “You ought to go home,” she told him, “you’re the one that makes the beautiful movies.” He resisted. She pressured him for a few more minutes, reminding him that it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. When he continued to hesitate, she gave up and went back to work. A few moments later she returned to his office and found that he was gone. Where?

Home to get the camera, of course.

Most of my grandfather’s home movies are unremarkable to anyone outside his own family. He shot beach scenes at Far Rockaway, family gatherings in Brooklyn, and eternal sequences of his infant daughter having a bath, eating in her high chair and learning to walk. But if these movies are of little historic significance, they have the familiarly wistful, nostalgic quality of their genre. They capture a fleeting, tantalizing peek at a life before ours, a time now irretrievably lost. They remind us that our grandparents and great-grandparents inhabited the world fully, seamlessly, exactly as we do—even if the clothes and the buildings and the cars are different—and that those lives now exist only in momentary glimpses and jerky, too-short film clips. So will it be for all of us.

For my grandfather Abe, who had come to this country as an emigrant from Russia at age 15 and who left behind poverty, anti-Semitism and a futureless fate, America had fulfilled its many promises. Like countless new arrivals before him, he had lived in a Brooklyn tenement, attended night school to learn English, and went to work on Seventh Avenue in the needle trades. Within 15 years, he and my grandmother were married and fled the tenements for an apartment in a small building on Park Place in Brooklyn. His two sisters and their husbands, as well as his parents, occupied the rest of the building. From the beginning, he had embraced his new American identity as fully and completely as anyone could. Photos of him and my grandmother from these years show a handsome young couple, always well-dressed and smiling, surrounded by the early trappings of the good life—vacations with friends in the Catskills and the Finger Lakes, around the seder table at Passover, on their honeymoon in Niagara Falls in 1933. Two children followed and, by 1941, Abe and Lillian Zapruder, with the children in tow, had left the familiar world of Brooklyn for the new frontier of Dallas, Texas, home of Neiman Marcus, to pursue a business opportunity in its burgeoning fashion industry. By 1963, two decades later, Abe Zapruder was firmly established in the middle class. He owned his own business, had seen both of his children educated and married, and was living a comfortable life and enjoying his many pleasures—playing piano and violin, making home movies, spending time with friends, traveling with his wife and tinkering around the house.

Like most immigrant Jews of his generation who had narrowly escaped life under a repressive and autocratic regime, my grandfather also embraced socially progressive ideas and liberal values. He and his family had been for Kennedy from the beginning. His grown daughter, Myrna, had volunteered in the 1960 Kennedy campaign and sold poll tax in a supermarket in South Dallas to register black voters. They joined the millions who not only supported the President’s Democratic political agenda but adored his exquisite wife and family. Photos of the period show my grandmother, aunt and mother dressed exactly like Jackie, from the tailored suits and high-heeled pumps right down to the dark curled hair and pearls. And just weeks before the President’s visit to Dallas, my newly married parents had moved to an apartment in southwest Washington, D.C., so my father could begin his career as a lawyer working in the Tax Division of the Justice Department under Kennedy’s administration.

By the time my grandfather returned to Jennifer Juniors with his movie camera, Kennedy’s motorcade was about to pass by Dealey Plaza. Nearly everyone in the office went down to watch. It took a little time for him to find just the right spot for filming. He tried out several locations and rejected them until he noticed a concrete abutment that would offer a good vantage point for the motorcade, which would swing left from Houston Street and travel down Elm. But since he suffered from vertigo, the combination of standing on the narrow ledge several feet up and looking through the zoom lens made him feel dizzy. He asked his receptionist, Marilyn Sitzman, to stand behind him and keep him steady.

The original reel of Kodachrome II 8 mm color film that ran through his Bell & Howell 414 PD Director Series Zoomatic camera begins with a minute of his young grandchildren playing outside. They are smiling and waving at the camera. Then, the film cuts to a series of choppy scenes inside his office, with Lillian Rogers mugging for the camera, trying on clothes and pretending to make him wait while talking on the phone. Suddenly, we are outside on Dealey Plaza, where the film shows Marilyn Sitzman waving to the camera and payroll clerk Beatrice

Hester and her husband, Charles, sitting on a bench. The next sequence begins with a group of official motorcycles rounding the turn from Houston to Elm Street but then breaks off. When the image flickers to life again, the now-famous series of images begins to roll.

“And then I watched for the arrival of the cars, I saw the motorcycles, and then the car approached,” my grandfather recalled in a 1966 interview. “As they turned I started shooting the pictures, they turned from Houston Street to Elm Street, and I was shooting as they were coming along, and Jacqueline and the President were waving, and as it came in line with my camera, I heard a shot. I saw the President lean over to Jacqueline, I didn’t realize what had happened, actually, then the second shot came. And then I realized, I saw his head open up, and I started yelling, ‘They killed him, they killed him!’ And I continued shooting until they went under the underpass.”

Amid the chaos that followed, my grandfather didn’t remember getting down from the ledge or exactly what happened next. It seems that he remained on the plaza for some time, distraught and in a daze, with his camera still in his hand and the case slung over his shoulder. There, Harry McCormick of The Dallas Morning News, who had rushed over from the Dallas Trade Mart when he heard of the shooting, noticed my grandfather holding the camera and approached him with a few questions. When my grandfather refused to answer, saying that he would not talk to anyone but the federal authorities, McCormick promised to find the Dallas chief of the Secret Service and bring him to Jennifer Juniors.

Meanwhile, my grandfather somehow made his way back to his office. “Well, I was in a state of shock when I got back,” he remembered, “and I was kicking and banging the desk, I couldn’t understand how a thing like this could happen. I personally have never seen anybody killed in my life, and to see something like this, shooting a man down like a dog, I just couldn’t believe.” He relinquished the camera, and Lillian put it in the safe. Overwhelmed, he called my father in Washington for advice. They agreed that he would try to get the film to the federal authorities at once.

The rest of the day must have been a blur. The Dallas police and the Secret Service turned up at Jennifer Juniors, together with two news reporters. Soon after, my grandfather took his film (in the company of his partner, Erwin Schwartz, Secret Service agent Forrest Sorrels and news reporter Harry McCormick) to the offices of the Dallas Morning News and then to the studios at WFAA-TV to try to get the film developed. When they were unable to do it, the group traveled to the Kodak labs, where the film was processed. Agent Sorrels and Harry McCormick left to tend to other matters while my grandfather and Erwin took the film to Jamieson Film Company to have three duplicates made, and then returned to Kodak so the additional rolls could be developed. By day’s end, there was the original and three copies of the film: My grandfather gave one to the Dallas Secret Service and another was put on a plane bound for the FBI in Washington, D.C. He returned home late that night with his camera, one “first-day” copy and the original film.

When he arrived home, he found his wife, his daughter and son-in-law waiting for him. It was Friday night, a time when my grandmother typically made dinner for the whole family but, of course, no one was cooking that night. His daughter, Myrna, recalled what happened next. He walked in the door, and before taking off his hat or saying a word, he got his movie projector, set it up in the den, and showed the film to his shocked wife and son-in-law. Myrna refused to watch and remained in the living room. I can only imagine what words passed between him and my grandmother in the aftermath of that moment. Then, before he could fall into bed that night, shell-shocked and exhausted, he answered a phone call from Richard Stolley of LIFE magazine. This short conversation led to a meeting between Mr. Stolley and my grandfather on Saturday morning, and, in very short order, the sale of the film’s print rights to LIFE. Within a week, images from the film in LIFE would be in the living rooms of people around the country and everyone would share in the horror that it depicted. Eventually, it would become the world’s memory of the assassination itself. But, in that moment in the Zapruder home, it was still my grandfather’s home movie. Perhaps sharing it with his family that night was a necessary act, his only way of conveying the enormity of what he had witnessed and the awful reality of what had happened to the President and to the world that day.

Throughout the next several days, Abe Zapruder’s family, like the nation, was wrapped up in grief for the Kennedy family. Myrna recalled that in her state of shock, all she could do was cry and watch television for four days straight. My parents were equally devastated. Throughout my life, I heard the story of how they, like tens of thousands of people, waited in line all night to pay their respects to the young President, filing past his body lying in state in the rotunda of the Capitol in Washington. Their experience was entirely typical of most Americans that weekend. For them, as Myrna put it, “the focus was on the loss of Kennedy, not on the film.” But if for the family, the film was not the point, Myrna recalled that for her father, “it became the total point. Because the phones never stopped ringing.”

Through the rest of the weekend, my grandfather felt mounting pressure to dispose of the moving picture rights to the film, as well. While no one from the federal government contacted him, or requested anything, reporters hounded him mercilessly, calling at all hours, even showing up at the house in the middle of the night. After receiving another call from Richard Stolley, my grandfather agreed to discuss the moving picture rights to the film on Monday, but not until after the President’s funeral. His regular attorney was out of town, so he contacted Sam Passman, his son-in-law’s uncle, for help in the matter. Sam recalled in a private family interview in 1994 that other news outlets besides LIFE were interested in bidding on the film—including AP and CBS News in the form of Dan Rather—but that “Abe was really concerned about whether he should sell it or not, whether he should take the money and so on.” His deep ambivalence about the film took shape in a nightmare he had that weekend—and that recurred for the rest of his life—in which he was walking in Times Square and saw, in front of a movie theater, a man hawking tickets to see the cheap thrill of the President’s murder on the big screen.

For this reason, my grandfather was in some ways relieved when executives at LIFE decided that they did want the moving picture rights as well. He had already established a relationship with Richard Stolley, and he believed that LIFE would honor his wish to protect the Kennedy family, and Mrs. Kennedy in particular. Many people recalled this aspect of the story later. But Sam Passman may have said it best: “Abe was concerned that the Kennedy family might be harmed in some way, or might be offended, or that certain portions of the pictures would be terribly distasteful. He just didn’t want to do anything that might harm them. He was really crazy about the Kennedys, he really was.” In fact, he was so worried about its exploitation or misuse that he included a clause in the contract with LIFE that the film be treated in a manner “consonant with good taste and dignity.” It is perhaps difficult today to imagine a time when such earnest words could be uttered in a high-stakes negotiation. But if it reminds us of a long ago time, it also suggests my grandfather’s feeling of personal responsibility for the home movie he had taken and his ambivalence about sharing it with the public. For to do so was to be confronted with a painful irony: His home movie, taken in homage to the President he admired, ended up instead exposing the details of his gruesome death, robbing him of his dignity and exacerbating the grief of his young widow. It is no wonder that my grandfather forever wished that he had never taken the film.

My grandfather lived for only seven years after the assassination. In many ways, outwardly, his life eventually returned to normal. He continued to work and to travel with my grandmother. He saw the birth of four more grandchildren. He spent time with friends and he played music. But he would never fully escape the consequences of having been behind the camera that day. My father recalled that he no longer took home movies after the assassination, and that he found it very difficult to even look through the lens of a camera. My aunt says that for many months, he talked and thought obsessively about the film. Others say that he was imprinted with a kind of sadness. He certainly continued, periodically, to have nightmares of the President’s murder. “The thing comes back every night,” he once said.

The film continued to haunt him in other ways. Although he said in no uncertain terms that he never wanted to see it again, he was compelled to do so from time to time. He testified in the Warren Commission hearings in 1964 and in the Clay Shaw trial in 1969, where he openly wept as he watched repeated showings of the film in the presence of the press and a jury in a New Orleans courtroom. And he grew to dread the anniversary of the assassination, as it inevitably came with calls and requests for interviews from the media. In 1966, in a rare interview with radio personality Marvin Scott, he reflected on the lingering effects of the film for him personally. “Well, as I’m standing right here, I believe, I can almost see it as a picture before my eyes,” he said. “It’s almost three years. It’s left in my mind like a wound that heals up and yet there’s some pain left as to what happened.” At the same time, the most lasting consequence for my grandfather was one that he never lived to see. Fifty years later, his home movie is still known to the world as the Zapruder film, forever linking him and our family name with the graphic collective memory of one of America’s darkest days.

ALEXANDRA ZAPRUDER, the author of Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust, is currently at work on a memoir about her family and its history with the famous film.

COURTESY OF ALEXANDRA ZAPRUDER

Abraham Zapruder, seen here in Dallas’s Fair Park in the 1940s in a family photo supplied to LIFE by his granddaughter, was always dapper (in fact, this photograph is atypical as Zapruder often sported a bow tie).

DONALD UHRBROCK

Here is an aerial view of Dealey Plaza as it existed in 1964. The Texas School Book Depository, a seven-story, 80,000-square-foot brick warehouse at 411 Elm Street, is seen here with a Hertz sign on its roof. The so-called “sniper’s nest” was on the sixth floor—just below the top floor—behind the window seen here at far right. Oswald peered through his sight at the motorcade weaving through the plaza, like the traffic seen here, headed for the underpass. The grassy knoll and the wall where Zapruder positioned himself are at left. The dark car seen here in the center lane of the curving street is close to where JFK was mortally wounded. Zapruder’s offices and those of several other dress manufacturers were in the Dal-Tex building, which in this picture is just above and across the street from the Texas School Book Depository.

If it is one of the hallmarks of November 22, 1963, that no American who was alive that day would be unmarked by the events, an attendant phenomenon is that many very normal people, just going about their business that day, would—because of all the unanswered questions—become eternal players, famous and less so, in one of the nation’s most-dramatic-ever stories. Abraham Zapruder certainly was one of those people; it is very unlikely that his name would signify today to any beyond family and friends had he not been where he was, when he was, with that camera. Many professional and amateur theorists and historians who continue to study the Kennedy assassination also know the names of not only Marilyn Sitzman but Beatrice and Charles Hester, who accompanied Zapruder that day. Here, we see the film’s lead-in frames described by Alexandra Zapruder in her essay. Abraham is trying out his new toy on his friends and colleagues, making sure his take-up reel is operating properly. He tests the camera and spring by filming Sitzman beside a bench at the north pergola in Dealey Plaza. Seated on the bench are the Hesters. Zapruder then turns his attention to the motorcycles that herald the motorcade’s arrival into the plaza.

JAMES ALTGENS/AP

This is a view of the pergola on the north side of Elm Street in Dealey Plaza moments after shots have felled President John F. Kennedy and Texas governor John Connally, who are in the presidential motorcade. The man with his back to the camera in the shadows at left, barely discernible, is Abraham Zapruder, and alongside him, even harder to see, is Marilyn Sitzman. Charles and Beatrice Hester are sitting on the ground. As said earlier: They are all now being drawn, unwittingly, into a narrative from which they will never escape. Charles Hester, for instance, will give a “voluntary statement” on “Not Under Arrest Form No. 86” later this day to the sheriff’s department of the County of Dallas: “My wife, Beatrice and I were sitting on the grass on the slope on Elm Street where the park is located. When President Kennedy’s car got almost down to the underpass, I heard two shots ring out. Thye [sic] sounded like they came from immediately behind us and over our heads. We did [not?] see the shooting. I immediately turned and looked at the Texas Book Depository building and did not see anyone. The shots sounded like the [sic] definitely came from in or around the building. I grabbed my wife because I didn’t know where the next shot was coming from and dragged her up next to the concrete imbankment [sic] and threw her down on the ground and got on the ground with her. Then there was utter confusion. The Police rushed toward the railroad tracks and I finally found an officer to go to the Texas Book Depository Building. The officer I contacted was Officer Wiseman of the Dallas Sheriff’s Department.”

Around the world, people would soon be reacting and acting. Charles Hester already had.