Video | Zapruder captured JFK’s assassination in chilling detail. It brought him ‘nothing but heartbreak’
As the world awaits the release of the final cache of classified JFK documents, new scrutiny turns to the most famous 26 seconds of film in history
At first, he wasn’t even going to bring his camera.
On November 22, 1963, the day Abraham Zapruder would forever surrender his name to an American tragedy, the Dallas dressmaker who loved to shoot home movies had decided to leave his Bell and Howell Zoomatic at home. It was his assistant who convinced him that US president John F. Kennedy’s motorcade through Dealey Plaza might be worth getting on film.
Four hundred and eighty six frames later, Zapruder had not only captured history, he had made it. The 26-second Zapruder film of Kennedy’s assassination marked the predawn of the viral video age – ordinary citizens with cameras documenting extraordinary events. His 8-mm images initially helped guide Warren Commission investigators to their conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Later, parsed and scrutinised to this day, the Zapruder film cast doubt on the official explanation and spawned a swirl of conspiracy that would define not just the event but the modern era.
The climax of the film is not the scenario that they put forward. If it weren’t for the film, the logical problems of the Warren Commission would not have been exposed
“Without the film, I don’t think there ever would have been a controversy over the Warren Commission or anything like what has gone on for the last 50 years,” said Josiah “Tink” Thompson, author of Six Seconds in Dallas, a seminal assassination analysis.
When the reluctant Zapruder finally climbed up on a concrete pedestal, less than 20 metres from Elm Street, he gave himself a nearly perfect vantage point on destiny.
“It is exactly where a Hollywood director would have set up,” Thompson said. “At the limo’s closest approach to his camera, Kennedy’s head explodes.”
On Wednesday, US President Donald Trump reiterated his promise to release the final cache of classified JFK documents being held by the National Archives.
As historians, journalists and the public wait to begin reading them Thursday, memories quickly revert to that silent, flickering sequence, as chilling as it is familiar: the approaching convertible, the waves of a crowd about to lose its innocence, the president clutching his throat, the crimson bloom in frame 313 (which wasn’t shown publicly for 12 years), Jacqueline Kennedy’s primal scramble over the trunk, the rush of the motorcade off to a hospital and an America forever changed.