Transcription
There's a spot in Dallas, a small concrete abutment about 4 ft high, barely wide enough for two people to stand on, where Abraham Sruda stood on November 22nd, 1963 and pressed his eye to a camera. 26 seconds later, he lowered it. And for the last 7 years of his life, he never picked up a camera again.
We've spent a long time thinking about what he said after that day. Not the quotes that get replayed in documentaries. The ones you've probably already heard. We mean the ones that explain why a man who loved America, who loved that president, and who had already survived one of the most violent centuries in history spent his final years waking up in the middle of the night. Because here's what we think most people miss about this story. It's not really about the film. It's about what it cost a man who made it.
A boy from Kovville. To understand what happened to Abraham Zapruder on that concrete pedestal, you have to go back 45 years to a small city in what is now Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire called Kovville. Zapruda was born there in 1905, Jewish workingass. By the time he was a teenager, Kovville had become a battlefield. World War I brought 50,000 casualties to the region in a single year. But the thing that broke the Zapruda family wasn't a battle. It was a train platform. In 1918, Abraham's older brother Morris was pulled off a train by guards and shot. Executed on the spot because he looked Jewish to the wrong person. Abraham was spared reportedly because he had blonde hair. The family fled to Warsaw, then to America aboard the SS Rotterdam. Zapruda arrived at Ellis Island at 15, penniless, speaking no English. He studied at night school, found work in Manhattan's garment district, met a woman named Lillian, moved to Dallas, and built a dress company that grew to gross $2 million a year. By 1963, he was 58 years old. His son worked in Kennedy's Justice Department. His daughter had volunteered for Kennedy's 1960 campaign. He was in every sense a man who had come to America to be safe and America had delivered until it didn't.
The camera he almost didn't bring. The morning of November 22nd, 1963, it was raining in Dallas. Abraham Zapruda left his Bell & Howell movie camera at home and walked to work. Despite having one of the best views in Dallas for a presidential motorcade from his fourth floor office, directly across from the Texas School Book Depository, what changed his mind was his receptionist, Lillian Rogers. When he arrived without his camera, she urged him to go back for it. He made the 14-m round trip anyway. The camera was a Bell & Howell Zumatic Director series model 414PD, a top-of-the-line consumer camera with an exceptional lens loaded with Kodakchrome 2 film stock known for its remarkable clarity in bright sunlight. Consumer Reports would rated highly in its December 1963 issue. The same week, the footage became the most important film in American history. Zapruda had vertigo, so his receptionist, Marilyn Sitzman, stood behind him and held his coat for stability. That's how two employees of her Dallas dress company ended up on a 4ft pedestal 65 ft from Elm Street at 12:30 p.m.
Then the motorcade turned the corner, 26.6 seconds. We're not going to describe frame 313 in detail. You know what it shows. What we want to focus on is what Sruda did in the seconds immediately after. He kept filming. Other photographers on DI Plaza ducked, froze, or simply couldn't process what was happening fast enough to keep shooting. Zapruda filmed until the limousine disappeared into the underpass. He later told the Warren Commission he didn't even know how he'd managed it. "I was still shooting the pictures until he got under the underpass. I don't even know how I did it." And then when he lowered the camera, he started screaming. Witnesses on the plaza heard him. "They killed him. They killed him." He was shaking. He wandered from the plaza for several minutes before making his way back to the office. He locked the camera in a small safe. He asked Lillian Rogers to call the Secret Service. And then he picked up the phone and called his son Henry in Washington. Henry had a job in Kennedy's Justice Department. and his father called him weeping and told him, "The president is dead. There's no way that he could have survived." "I saw everything." Then he said something else. Something that tells you everything about who Abraham Zapruda was and what that moment meant to him. He said, "They shot him down like a dog on a street." This is what would happen in Russia. We'll come back to that line because that's the whole story right there. We just have to earn it.
The afternoon he went on television. At approximately 2:10 p.m., Sapruda walked into the WFAA television studio and gave a live interview broadcast nationally on ABC. Program director Jay Watson had no idea who he was. But something about the man, still visibly shaking, made him put him on air immediately. What followed is one of the most raw pieces of television in American history. Zapruda described hearing shots, watching the president slump, watching the final shot. His voice broke repeatedly. At one point, he said, "I saw his head practically open up, all blood and everything, and I kept on shooting. That's about all. I'm just sick. I can't." And he stopped. He wasn't performing grief. By all accounts, he walked in because he thought that was what a citizen was supposed to do, share what he'd witnessed.
That evening, the film was developed at the Eastman Kodak plant in Dallas. Three copies were made. Zapruda kept the original. Two copies went to Secret Service agents, one flown to Washington before dawn. That night, he had the nightmare that would define the next decade of the film's history. A man in a double- breasted suit outside a Times Square theater shouting, "See the president's head explode." That nightmare is why frame 313 stayed hidden from the public for over a decade.
Because what Suda did next is more complicated than most people realize. Richard Staly, Lillian Rogers, and a basketball team from Illinois. Live magazine's Los Angeles bureau chief Richard Stalie received a tip Friday evening about a local businessman who'd filmed the shooting. She couldn't spell the name, but she could pronounce it. Zapruda. Staly found Zapruda Abraham in the Dallas phone book and called every 15 minutes for 5 hours. When Zapruda answered around 11 p.m., Stoy resisted the urge to rush over and agreed to meet the next morning instead. A decision he later called the smartest I ever made. He arrived an hour early, but still had to outlast two Secret Service agents and two dozen competing journalists. What won him the film wasn't aggression. It was a conversation with Lillian Rogers while waiting. She was from southern Illinois. So was Staly. He knew her favorite high school basketball team. When Zaprder emerged, he said, "Because Mr. Styley of Life was the first to contact me, I feel obliged to speak with him first." They settled on $50,000 for print rights. 2 days later, on the day of Kennedy's funeral, Life bought all rights for $150,000. Then Zapruda donated the entire first installment, $25,000, to the widow of officer J. D. Tippet, the policeman Oswald had killed $45 minutes after Kennedy. Before the Warren Commission, he deliberately left the impression that $25,000 was all he'd been paid. His lawyer had warned him about anti-Semitic backlash. He said later, "I don't like to talk about it too much." He hadn't made the film for money. He'd made it because a receptionist told him to go home and get his camera.
The 12-ear coverup that wasn't really a coverup. Here's something that doesn't get talked about enough in JFK documentaries. Life magazine didn't just buy the Zudruda film, they locked it away. For over a decade, 1963 to 1975, the most important visual record of a presidential assassination was never shown as a moving image. Life published still frames but held motion and television rights tightly. When researcher Josiah Thompson wanted stills for his 1966 book, Life refused, even after he offered to donate all profits. He was forced to commission charcoal drawings instead. Time incorporated sued him for copyright infringement. Anyway, they lost. There was also a quiet early disaster. On the day life acquired the film, a lab technician accidentally destroyed several frames. More troublingly, frames 314 and 315 were transposed into Warren Commission's published volumes. The FBI called it a printing error. When a life editor asked about it, he received what he later described as an icy stare. The film's national television debut didn't come until March 6th, 1975, when Heraldo Rivera showed a bootleg copy on ABC. The public reaction was immediate and furious, outraged not just by what they saw, but that it had been hidden for 12 years. The apparent backward snap of Kennedy's head directly fueled conspiracy theories and led to congressional investigations into the late 1970s. In April 1975, weeks after the Rivera broadcast, Time Incorporated sold the original film back to the Zapruda family for $1.
The witness who nobody called. Marilyn Sitsman's story tends to disappear into footnotes and it shouldn't. She was 23 years old on November 22nd, 1963. A receptionist at Jennifer Juniors, the woman gripping Zapruda's coat on that pedestal. She saw everything he saw from inches away, and she was never called before the Warren Commission. In a 1966 interview with researcher Josiah Thompson, she described a detail nobody else had mentioned, a young couple nearby eating lunch whose soda bottle shattered on the ground when the shots rang out. Louder, she noted, than the shots themselves. She believed the shots came from the book depository, but later allowed for a second shooter. "I'm almost sure there was someone behind a fence up there, but I'm just as sure they had silences because there was no sound on the camera. jiggle visible after the fatal shot." She gave the simplest possible answer, seeing what we saw when a bullet hit Kennedy's head and it opening up like this. "You don't stand there very calmly and do nothing." Marilyn Sitsman gave her final videotaped interview in June 1993. She died 2 months later of cancer. She was 53 years old. The woman just behind the most famous footage in American history, never appearing in a single official record.
7 years of nightmares. After November 22nd, Abraham Zrudera kept going to work, running Jennifer Junior's, attending synagogue, having dinner with his family. By all appearances, he was the same man. But he wasn't. He had recurring nightmares, waking in the dark when, as one account described it, his sleeping eye came upon frame 313. He received up to 10 sacks of mail a day. When his name appeared on hotel registers, people recognized it. He hated it. When the Warren Commission asked him to describe the final shot, he broke down completely. The transcript records simply the witness crying. Then he said, "I'm sorry. I'm ashamed of myself. Really, I didn't know I was going to break down. I love the president and to see that happen before my eyes." "His head just opened up and shot down like a dog. It leaves a very very deep sentimental impression with you." He rejected conspiracy theories firmly. When author Mark Lane visited to pitch one, Zapruda asked him to leave. What troubled him wasn't uncertainty about who pulled the trigger. His granddaughter Alexandra captured it. He said so many times how painful it was to be associated with Kennedy's death when it was Kennedy's life that he admired. He didn't want to be the man who filmed the death. He wanted to be the man who filmed the president. He never picked up a camera again. Not once in 7 years. Abraham Zapruda died of stomach cancer on August 30th, 1970. He was 65 years old at Parkland Memorial Hospital, the same hospital where Kennedy had died, where Oswald had died, where Ruby had died. Dallas had a way of doing that.
The $16 million question and the family's burden. After Zapruda's death, the film passed to his family and for the next three decades, it became a different kind of burden. In 1992, Congress passed the JFK assassination records collection act. In 1997, the government essentially seized the film under eminent domain, declaring it an assassination record that belonged to the public. When settlement talks broke down, both sides went to binding arbitration. The Zapruda family's appraisers compared the film to Van Go paintings and Leonardo da Vinci notebook that Bill Gates had recently bought for $30 million. The government's appraisers responded that without a projector, it was just celluloid on a plastic reel. The arbitration panel ruled in August 1999. The government would pay $16 million, roughly $615,000 per second of footage. The backlash was immediate. The family was called blood suckers, propheteers. Abraham's appruder's son, Henry, told Newsweek he felt terrible about the whole proceeding. Alexandra later wrote, "People said tough things. We were called blood suckers. All we cared about was the money." There was a lot of that kind of talk. But here's the other side of it which tends to get lost. Without copyright protection, the footage could appear on coffee mugs, on t-shirts, on the side of a tour bus in Di Plaza. Nobody in that family wanted that.
On December 30th, 1999, the last day of the millennium, the Zapruda family donated the film's copyright to the Sixth Floor Museum at Di Plaza along with first generation copies, frame enlargements, and everything else. They retained nothing. The film now lives in a cold storage vault at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. Kept at 25° Fahrenheit and 30% humidity. It was added to the Library of Congress National Film Registry in 1994. Bob Dylan referenced it in his 2020 song Murder Most Foul. Abraham Zapruda's granddaughter, Alexandra, published a book about the film and the family's long silence around it in 2016. She said that even after all those years watching it again every time that first shot comes, there's some part of me that just thinks maybe this time it will turn out differently.
So, let's go back to the beginning. The title of this video asks, "What was the last thing Zapruda said about his film, and why did it haunt him?" The answer isn't one clean final quote. It's something more like a pattern, a phrase he kept returning to in different forms across seven years. He said it first on the phone to his son Henry minutes after lowering the camera. "They shot him down like a dog on the street. This is what would happen in Russia." He said it again, breaking down before the Warren Commission when he described Kennedy's head opening up, "shot down like a dog. It leaves a very, very deep sentimental impression with you." He said it with his silence when he put the camera in a safe and never touched it again.
Think about what that phrase means coming from this man specifically. A boy who watched his brother executed on a train platform in Ukraine. A 15-year-old who crossed an ocean because he believed America was different. That here you were not shot in the street for who you were. That the president rode in an open car through a cheering crowd because there was no need to be afraid. He had spent 43 years proving that belief right. And then in 26 seconds he watched it collapse. The film haunted him not because of what it showed the world. It haunted him because of what it meant to him personally. The shattering of the most fundamental thing he believed that this country was safe in a way his homeland never was. "This is what would happen in Russia." He came to America to get away from exactly that. and his camera, a consumer camera he almost didn't bring that morning, urged to go home and get it by a receptionist who had no idea what she was setting in motion, proved that you can't get far enough away. We think that's the real last thing Abraham Zapruda said about his film.
>> Not a quote, a life. Abraham Zapruda 1905 to 1970.
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