Transcripts For CSPAN3 The Presidency JFKs Legacy On Centennial Of His Birth 20171220

Is a joint program tonight between our center for president ial history and our Clement Center for southwest studies. Always exciting when the two History Centers here at smu can come together and its wonderful for us, the younger partner, the Clement Center has been the leading center for southwest studies at least a generation. So we as still in our toddler phase, look up to them and they also babysit us. It works out really quite nicely. Im really thrilled to have you all here tonight for our continuing series looking at history and president ial history especially since this one in particular our talk tonight has of course a dallas flair to it, its fundamentally a dallas story and we all know especially having gone through the last 50th anniversary of the fateful day in 1963 how much dallas is continuing to wrestle with what happened here, how much dallas is coming to terms with it and i want to take a moment and point out one of our good friends who is from the sixth floor museum which i said this in front of her before, is to my mind the single best public history mud yum in the country and [ applause ] precisely because it takes a hard look as much as possible and thats what were going to do tonight especially with this dallas story. I also want to point out that you may have heard that about 25 years ago, in fact, exactly 25 years ago, congress in its great infinite wisdom and foresight, not a phrase usually associated with congress, they knew we were going to have this event tonight and consequentlily wrote the law specifically so that all those jfk documents would become available. If you have not heard, in fact, i was just shown the phone just ten seconds ago, President Trump has decided to release most of the documents, which is great for us because that means that whenever we do a kennedy event Going Forward well always have a bigger audience because people will always say what about those other documents, so i guarantee you theres nothing of interest in those documents. I have not seen them but im feeling very confident about that. We are here tonight to discuss a particular moment from that 1963 event and a particular moment that you have all seen, one of the fascinating things to me about the entire sequence that will hear tonight about the za is pruder film, because human ma memory is formed thorough images you have been to the sight of the zapruder film. You have no idea that you were not there because your processing the information and its really become a way that that sight, dealy plaza has become a global sight. You dont ever have to have been there to be there. Were going to hear that story tonight. Well hear it from Alexander Zapruder who began her career as one of the founding staff of Holocaust Museum in washington, d. C. She graduated from Smith College and got a masters degree in education from Harvard University and in 2002 completed her first book entitled, savage pages, young writers diaries of the holocaust from Yale University press which that year won the National Jewish book award for the best book exploring the history of the holocaust. It was also subsequently made into part of a mtv series called, im still here, and she has recently come out in a second paperback edition. In november of 2016, she published this book, her second book, this is my personal copy, so i get this back, a personal history 26 seconds, a personal history of the zapruder film which is the subject of her remarks tonight. Help me in welcoming our speaker tonight, alexandria zapruder. [ applause ] thank you so much. Can you all hear me . Can you yall hear me . I want to thank andrew grabul who is the director for the center and also Jeffrey Engle director of the center for preservation history for inviting me tonight. Im so glad to see this great crowd of people and of course in the front row, my beloved family, my aunt murna, dear family friends, and that always makes it extra special for me to be in dallas. So what i thought i would do is begin by talking a little bit about how this book came to be. In the years that i was growing up, i think it would be safe to say that the one thing that the zapruder family did not talk about what the zapruder film. We with just it was something that was compartmentalized completely in our lives. It wasnt that we didnt know about it, it wasnt that i wasnt aware of it but it wasnt something that we ever really talked about. I overheard my parents or i saw people stop my parents and ask them about our name, but i cant recall a single time in my childhood when i really asked a direct question about the film. What i knew growing up really were the stories about my grandfather that my father told about who he was, his sense of humor, his personality, his eessential trick sides and jokes and talents, but the film was something that was off to the side and it might have stayed that way except that my dad got sick in 2004 and died rather young in 2006 and at some point during his illness he said to me he, you know, somebody really should interview me about the film. And i remember thinking this is theres something he has something to say but i didnt interview him, which of course i regret now, but it was not something that i could do. It was not something that we could do as a family and so after he died, i began thinking about the documents which were scattered around, things at my aunts house, things in the lawyers offices, papers, records, photographs and i started to feel that it was important would be important to bring these documents together and preserve them and i was not alone in the family in thinking that this was something that we needed to do and also to interview people who were close to our family or who were involved in the life of the film who might be able to shed light on it. But what i realized is that i didnt i didnt know what to ask. I didnt know i knew nothing about the life of the film, really. The nar ra tif was completely unknown to me even being able to conduct this first thing and figuring out what about this body of material might represent i need today educate myself. I started reading about the film, being a writer and someone whose curious about the past and what i found as i began to read the books that had been published was that there were these gaps in the historical record. All these places where there were parts of the story that were missing and there were parts of the story that had been told in the absence of any information from our family, conjecture, assumptions, you know, ways of interpreting our familys motives or behavior and i began to understand that our familys public silence had left out, really, a critical thread in the understanding of the film and the essential piece of that is that when people wrote about the film, they forgot that it was a home movie. The centralality of the home movie was never lost for us, this was so personal for my grandfather and personal to our family and all the decisions that he made and that my father made in later years grew out of our familys values and our familys sense of what was important and my grandfathers history and that shaped the life of the film and that private life was braided together with the public life in a way that had never really been explored and it hadnt been for that im not sure i wouldve written this book because i dont think that i would have felt there was a public story to tell but i began to understand only a zapruder could fill in those gaps and in order to do that i was going to have to become an expert on this topic. So that is what this book does and what im going to do tonight is just introduce you a little bit to the life of my grandfather and our family and talk about the taking of the film and how my grandfathers past influenced it and the lie of the film over 50 years. So our grandfather was born in 1905 in russia, that is him in his mothers arms in the photograph there, the little blonde boy probably the age of two or three. His mother hannah, had four children. They were extremely poor. They lived exactly in the circumstances of hardship and suffering that all jews would have in imperial russia at that time. Antisemitism not being able to be educated, poverty, depravation of all kinds and his own father left russia where they were from in 1909 to come to america and left hannah with her four children, and they remained in russia until they did not reach the United States until 11 years later in 1920, and during that time there was, of course, world war i. There were many, many, many antisemit antisemit antisemitic violence to the jewish community. Sometime in those years the brother, so you can see theres abraham and then there are three siblings, ida whos all the way to the left, maurice the little boy in the middle, and fanny the little girl to his right, at some point in those years maurice, between 1915 and 1920, maurice either died or was killed, the circumstances are not clear and this photograph and this document shows hannahs emergency passport application. The father, israel, had gotten his naturalization, u. S. Naturalization, citizenship and so she was able to apply for emergency for an emergency passport from warsaw and make her way to the United States but by the time she did that, maurice was uncertainly dead and i think you can see the difference in her from the time of the first picture that was taken and her face in this later one after having lived through the war and 11 years of having been a mother to her four children alone at the loss of the son, the revolution and trying to make her way to america. They arrived in 1920, were reunited with my great grandfather israel and our grandfather was someone who in russia had always anted to study and always wanted to play music. He had a deep, deep love of music and was extremely talented. He was able to play music by ear. He never had a lesson but he was just this was a great passion of his and when he came to america he said about becoming as thoroughly american as he could as quickly as he could like so many people did. And this i found this document in the family papers, his certificate of literacy having gone to night school to learn english. This like so many jews of this generation of this time and place, he of course went to work on 7th avenue in the garment industry. This is his industrial Ladies Garment Workers Union booklet that shows inside that he paid his dues faithfully i want you to know and then this 1925 is abe in the middle with hair which is not how hes usually seen and holding a bango with his friends in lake ronkonkoma. And i think its so amazing to see that first picture of him, this little boy in imperial russia and 20 years later there he is with his bow tie on the lake with his friends and embracing his new life in america as thoroughly as he could. I like to say that i dont know if this is true, my aunt is here so she can correct me if im wrong, i like to say that our grandfather had three great loves, he loved music, he loved cameras and gadgets and he loved my grandmother and this is what she looked like standing in front of the tenement that they both lived in. Thats how they met. On beaver street in brooklyn in 1933 and she really loved him from the very beginning. She was just smitten or so i was told by allis feld who was her oldest friend and she set her cap at him and that was it. They married in 1933 and here they are at niagara falls, where else and the thing about my grandfather that is so relevant for this story because so far this story is probably like a lot of your parents or grandparents stories. Its extremely familiar. Coming to this country very poor, becoming american, embracing a new life. For my grandfather and my grandmother, being american, snappy dressers, not having an accent, you know, embracing a social life, adopting american ways was deeply important to them. My grandfather wanted to shed everything that had to do with the old ways, with russia and with everything that that represented. His older sisters, on the other hand and his parents, were not so successful in doing that and it was something that i think he saw that they were just of an age where it was that much harder for them to really let go of the past but as a boy of 15 coming to this country and coming of age here, this was incredibly important to him and the other thing i should say is that they went to the other thing they done their honeymoon was to go to the 1933 chicago worlds fair and the theme of the worlds fair was a century of progress and that really encapsulates this other great love of his, gadgets, cameras, anything that represented madernity. He loved to tinker around the house and make things better. This gave him enormous pleasure and that relates to him being such a home movie enthusiast. Just briefly show you, they moved to dallas 1941, here they are together in dallas, a picture that i think really captures something of their rapport. I should have said in the beginning i never knew my grandfather. He died with when i was 11 months old so everything that i know about him i know from stories and from interviews and from the photographs and so and i always grew up with a sense of his absence and this book gave me an opportunity to fill in a great many gaps about his story and who he was. And then here he is with my grandmother and my aunt myrna and my dad looking adoringly to his father. They moved out to marquette street in Highland Park and really attained the middle class. Did exactly what one was supposed to do coming to america as an immigrant and found their way. So will fastforward now to 1963. Heres my grandfather, this is how most people are used to seeing him and with his his receptionist marilyn who had no idea she was so hot until i found this picture. Shes kind of fabulous with the cigarette and everything. So they this is a good moment to sort of talk about i think the zapruders and the kennedys because at this time in the early 1960s, everyone in our family were devoted kennedy supporters. My grandfather and grandmother, of course, my aunt had volunteers for the campaign, had sold poll tax in south dallas and my dad, one of the Amazing Things that happened in the course of this research was that i found well, first one of these letters, there was a letter that my father had written to senator kennedy during the campaign that came to me through gary mack, the former curator of the sixth floor museum and when i was corresponding with the president ial the kennedy president ial library i came upon another letter that my father had written to president kennedy in 1962. He had just graduated from harvard law and he wrote this beautiful letter pleading for a job and saying, i want to be part of the new front frontier im asking you what can i do and so it really represented for me not only a window into my father as a young man and a very much an idealist and very much of this time, but also the depth of attachment that our family had for president kennedy and the kennedys as so many other people did. This wasnt something that came about retro actively but was something that existed from the very beginning. On the morning of november 22nd, 1963, you all we will recognize, of course usually i have to show people this map and show them where my grandfather was standing but i have a feeling in this particular room i could dispense with that activity. My aunt myrna and ruth who is also in the front row, went down to love field to welcome the president and the first lady and were there at this moment when they got off the plane. My uncle was waiting on main street looking out of his Office Building to see the motorcade go by and and my grandfather had that morning gone to his office, which was located at 501 he will am street just ajasent to where the motorcade was going to pass by and had said several days before that he planned to bring his movie camera and i should have said by now that 1963, he had started taking home movies in 1934 when my aunt was a baby and there are a lot of i mean, forgive me, but really boring home movies of her taking a bath and of her waking up from a nap and sitting and eating in her high chair. So he was he was really someone who had been taken movies for a long time and he was quite good at it and the Previous Year he had bought some of you may have seen coming in, the bell and howell director series zoom mattic camera he had bought this brandnew top of the line camera but he had left it home that day and its such an interesting story. People have always said, this is a great example of where being a zapruder helps. He forgot it or it was rainy or he was thought he was too short but the truth is that, he was always as ive learned, always a little ret sent, a little hesitant to put himself forward, a little insecure, perhaps because he hadnt had an education or because he was an immigrant. Lillian rodgers who was his long time assistance and became a dear friend of the family, basically nagged him until he went home to get it and, you know, people always say this is so amazing, this is so incredible, this is such a twist of fate but if you knew him and her, you knew that this is how everything happened in their relationship. He hesitated, she nagged, he demurred, she nagged a little bit more and then he did it. Thats how it went. And so again, its this weird way in which for me i understood at some point as i began to do this work that i knew things that i didnt even know i knew. I didnt know the history of the zapruder film but i knew the zapruder family. I knew how things worked. I knew our story and and those were the pieces that could be put together with this bigger history to tell it in a fuller way. He went down to dealy plaza with the camera, scouted out a spot, again, being quite a good photographer, he tried a couple locations before eventually settling on this four foot highly concrete abutment where he stood, set the camera to full zoom. He had mayorrilyn the hot receptionist standing behind him because he had vertigo and to make sure he didnt get dizzy and im just saying, and and waited for the motorcade to pass by. So im going to im going to let my grandfather take over and some of you may have seen this short interview that he gave describing what he saw that day. A gentleman just walked into our studio that im meeting for the first time as well as you. May i have your name please, sir. My name is abraham zapruder. And would you tell us your story, please, sir. I got out and about a half hour earlier to get to a good spot to shoot some pictures and i found a spot in one of these concrete blacks near the park near the underpass and i got atop there. There was another girl from my Office Behind me. And as i was shooting as the president was coming down from houston street and making his turn, about half way down there i heard a shot and he slumped to the side like this and then i heard another shot or two, i couldnt say it was one or two and i saw his head practically open up, all blood and everything and i kept on shooting, thats about all it. Im just sick. I think that pretty well expresses the entire feeling of the whole world. So that interview was taken was made just within hours of the assassination. What weve now has been pieced together about the events of that immediate afternoon were that, immediately after the assassination, of course, our grandfather knew exactly what had happened and knew for sure that the president was dead, which not no one else around him knew this. He got down from this concrete ledge and was distraught, screaming that the president was dead, that hed been killed and was dazed on the plaza and was approached by a reporter from the Dallas Morning News who saw him with the camera and said, what do you have do you have film of what happened . And our grandfather immediately responded that he needed to talk to the federal authorities. Immediately aware that there was going that he had to be in touch with someone from the federal government. So Harry Mccormick new the head of the secret service and found him. So my grandfather went back to the office. Theyre waiting for him was darwin payne, another reporter who interviewed him at that very moment and the notes for that interview, hands written notes from that interview are powerfully poignant and in the museum. My grandfather immediately tried to reach my father. My parents meanwhile, my parents meanwhile had my dad had gotten a job in the Justice Department working for bobby kennedy, his long awaited dream job working in the administration. They had married on october 31st, 1963, had their honeymoon and come to washington so this was two weeks after he had started this job that he had wanted so much and my grandfather was able to get my father on the phone and the way that my father remembered this was that he was distraught, he was crying, he kept saying over and over again that the president was dead but the thing that stood out to me when i read this account that my father had given was that he kept saying he couldnt believe that this had happened in america. He couldnt believe that the president could be shot down like a dog on the street. And again, i think it takes knowing his past to understand that he had just been a witness and the recorder of this moment that belonged to the exact past that he had fled from. This was exactly the kind of senseless violence, political assassinations, somebody being dragged off a train and killed, that that he had left behind in russia for america because of everything that america represented. And although i dont think that he could have put that into words in that way at that moment, the fact that he kept emphasizing that he couldnt believe it happened here i think speaks so much to the particular irony of him having been the person who caught this on film and what it really meant for him to be that person, witnessing it in that particular moment. There was not time to think about that then. Things happened very quickly. Forest soerlz came to jennifer juniors. They set out to try to get the film developed and here is another very important, one of those little moments, things that happen in history that change the course of history that in ways that you couldnt predict, forest soerlz did not in that moment say, mr. Zapruder, were going to take your camera with the film in it and get it developed and well be in touch with you. He said lets go see if we can get the film developed and so they set off together and this interview was done at wfaa where they went to try to get the film processed unsuccessfully, went on to kodak and they learned that oswald had been arrested. If it comes out would you give us a copy and my grandfather said, sure. And that was that. It is one of the things about this story that i thought so much when i was writing it is that you cannot forget that it was 1963. Its moments like this that remind you of a time when that would have been an interaction between these two people over this object instead of it being immediately swarmed upon and understood as something that could potentially be of enormous significance. It took the rest of the day to get the film developed, to get duplicates made, to deliver two copies of the film to the secret service in dallas and by the end of the night, my grandfather came home in his car with the original camera, the original film and a copy of the film with him, walked into the house that night and without saying anything to anybody set up the projector and showed the film to my grandmother and my uncle. My aunt reports that she was much too distraught to watch the film at that time. And i ended up beginning the book with this story of the film being shown in the den of the zapruder family home on the night of november 22nd, because i think again it puts the film where it belongs understood as a home movie exactly the way that the films had always been shown in the den to the family, that even though this had this tremendous significance it was nevertheless deeply, deeply personal to him and that was something that never changed. That night before my grandfather could go to bed he got a call from richard stali who had come to dallas, learned my grandfathers name, looked him up in the phone book and called the house wanting to know if he could come over and see the film and this is a photograph of a young dick stali. The immediately my grandfather understood i think the outlines of the problem that was facing him. There was going to be a media frenzy over this film. He was traumatized, of course, deeply fearful that it would be exploited or used in a way that was not in keeping with his values, but aware that he needed to be rid of it, that he wasnt going to be able to keep it and that he had this object in his hands that he was going to have to figure out something, what to do with it. And in that context i think that the call from dick stali was something of a relief. Life magazine was very much beloved, a very trusted pictorial magazine at the time. They were decent, respectful people, they had a relationship with the Kennedy Family and i think he felt in that moment that this might offer him a way out of the situation, a way to entrust it to someone and to an institution that would treat it respectfully but also not have to keep it and that is, in fact, what happened. Im not going to take too much time to go into all the details. You can read the book if you want to. But i will just say that over the course of the weekend, first the print rights were sold on saturday morning and then the film rights on monday. There was an unbelievable frenzy in the office on, a scene that i describe in great detail over what the reporters desperately trying to get their hands on the film and trying to convince my grandfather to sell to them and not to richard strks ali and a rather colorful episode with dan rather that occurred on monday and ill just leave that there. One of the things that sorry. Theres one missing here. One of the things that made this is a little bit out of order but one of the things that made this story complicated were just missing a slide. Thats interesting how that happens. Okay. One of the things that made this story very difficult for me to take on was that there was a moral dilemma at the heart of it, a moerl dilemma that my grandfather was very much aware of im actually going to go back to this one that my grandfather was very much aware of in that kind of reverberated through my family even though we didnt talk about it and that was the obvious thing, how does one ultimately financial profit from a National Tragedy like this without taking a moral hit . This was something that plagued my grandfather over the weekend of the assassination. What to do . What to do . It represented aid financial opportunity, the truth is that he grew up incredibly poor in russia and i think anyone can understand how hard it would have been to walk away from that in that moment and yet it felt wrong. It felt like there was something about it that was deeply unpal patable to him and contrary to his values. He struggled over those days trying to figure out what to do and ultimately what he did i think is is that he walked the line and by that i mean he did sell it to life magazine, he sold it for 150,000 but he made life promise to treat the film with dignity and good taste which is in the contract, you can just stop and imagine for a moment a contract with a major magazine that requires that they handle this film with dignity and good taste, thats the last time that ever happened i can tell you that right now, but also that they would defend the copyright, prevent the film from being exploited or sensationalized for from being widely distributed in illegal copies and he donated 25,000 to the widow of j. D. Tibbet who was the officer who was shot in the texas theater. I think he was trying to find a way to find a balance, not to give it away, not to walk away from the money but also not to sell it to the highest bidder, to put certain things in place to try to protect it and to do something good with the money that he had, and this kind of balance would be repeated throughout our familys life again and again and again every time we had to deal with the film and we fashioned this kind of dilemma that was more or less the approach that our family took. So the middle section of the book im going to shift gears here because for 12 years from 1963 to 1975, the film was owned by life magazine not by our family and one of the great things that happened in the course of my research was that i went to the life magazine archives and i asked if i could see all the files related to the zapruder film fully expecting them to say no and they said sure and they just turned them over which was just unbelievable, actually. And what i ended up finding in these hundreds of pages was this very revealing i think and important story about the beginning of the life of the with zapruder film in america and the dilemmas that began to swirl around it from the very beginning which only grew greater and greater and greater over the years. These are some of some of you will recognize these images. The first one printed on november 29th of the film in the issue about the president s assassination and this one in color, from the memorial edition. From the very beginning life magazine faced its own dilemma which was how to use the zapruder film with dignity . How to balance the publics need to see this these images or desire to see these images with the very strong editorial feeling that these were inappropriate as indeed they were to the time and that the American Public shouldnt see them, shouldnt see them because they were disrespectful to the president , shouldnt see them because they were too violent and graphic. This basic problem remained the problem of life magazine for the 12 years that they owned it but with each passing year, the pressure grew on life magazine to make this film available. Of course, with the Warren Commission and later the conspiracy theories that began to grow and the suspicion that the Warren Commission that the conclusions of the Warren Commission were inaccurate, the fact that people could not see the film continued to feed this sense that something was being held back. In reality, life magazine was not in collusion, the records clearly show that life magazine wasnt in collusion with the federal government to hide something from the American People, but they were really reflecting a time when there was a strong sense that this was something that people shouldnt see and even as that changed, they were protecting their financial and commercial interests in the film. They did not have a way to show it as a film and they didnt want to give it to somebody else like cbs news for example, who wanted to see it and requested repeatedly and so instead they just sat on it and the more they sat on it the more frenzied the desire grew to see the film. All of this is even more complicated by the fact and im just going to this is just a little sense of some of the documents all of this was further complicated by the fact that gradually, starting in the late 60s versions of the film began to leak out and people began to see it and when they saw it, because of the way that the film looks, it did not look like what the Warren Commission concluded. You all know what im talking about. It looks like the president was hit in the front of the head. Even if you believe the president was hit in the back of the head, it still looks like he was hit in the front of the head and so there was this intrinsic problem which was every time someone saw it seemed to be further confirmation of the fact that life magazine was suppressing this film because it did not conform to the findings of the Warren Commission. So this these are the outlines of this tremendous tension that took place inside life magazine and this this rising pressure Walter Cronkite went on the air and criticizing life magazine for not making it public, bootlegs began to get out, lawsuits against life magazine and eventually in 1969 there was of course the famous clay shaw trial. Jim garison in new orleans accusing businessman clay shaw of conspiring to kill the president and there was a subpoena to get the film and to show it. This was the first time this is now 1969. The first time the film was ever shown in a public setting in the courtroom and as you can see this is the headline of the new Orleans States item, our grandfather was compelled to testify much to his regret. He did not want to testify but he did, and one of the outcomes of this trial was that jim cigarrison who got a hold of the copy of the film through his subpoena set about making as many bootleg copies as he possibly could and distributing them as widely as he could and one of the very interesting things for me about this is that, of course this wasnt what our family wanted, but there is a way in which you can understand that the people who were bootlegging the film and the people who were distributing it really believed that there was a coverup and that this was truth that was being suppressed and that they were doing the right thing. And so the thing about this book that i found so fascinating in the end is that at so many different junk tours there are people who disagree with one another but no one withs really wrong, you know. People are reflecting different times or different values or different spirits or a change in culture but ultimately the desire to see this film was something that simply couldnt be suppressed and life magazine was not in a position to make it available for all the reasons that ive said. So theres the conundrum that continued to get played out over and over again. This is a photograph of our grandfather who died on august 30th, 1970 and five years later the film was returned to our family. It was her rald dough rivera aired a bootleg copy of it on his program. This increasing pressure sense, the zapruder film showed the truth that until the zapruder film was made public it would always be, you know that this truth would always be suppressed and life magazine by this point had really had it. There was nothing in it for them. They couldnt use the film because they couldnt do so in keeping with the terms of their contract essentially. There was no way to use the film in good taste. It cant be shown in good taste. Its not in good taste and so there was no way for them to do it. The records show them trying to do it. It always somehow fizzled and all the criticism coming at them from all of these different quarters and finally the bootlegs which they were contractually obligated to defend the copyright but it was impossible to defend. No one could defend it. Thats all they would have done and, in fact, in one of the memos one of the executives said i get it from all sides. I get it from the networks, i get it from the public, i get it from the zapruders. They had it and so they decided that they were going to get rid of it and heres another part of the story my aunt is shaking her head. There was always sort the story was always known that life magazine returned the film to our family and paid and we paid 1 for it. That was always wellknown what people didnt know is that the force behind that decision was my grandmother who was force is the right word. She was a force of nature for all those who knew her. You can testify to that and she felt very, very strongly that the film should be back in our family, that this is what her husband would have wanted, that it was our responsibility, perhaps that it might have some value some day. I hate to say it but thats true and and no one else in the family really wanted to deal with it and life magazine would have been happy to donate is to the library of congress or National Archives but my grandmother basically, to use a yiddish expression, just bugged him until finally he agreed to negotiate with life for the return of the film and i love this because this is how history really happens. It really does happen with just inside families or a person whos not my grandmother isnt a historical figure. Shes not known in the world and yet she exerted her will in a certain way that completely changed the life of this zapruder film and had all these reverberating effects that no one would ever have been able to anticipate and that only, you know, now are we able to look back and to see. When my father got the film back in 1975, he inherited all the problems that life magazine had not dealt with, that is, how to make it available to the public, on what terms, for how much money, when, why, who . And all i can say is that this is the last thing in the world that he wanted to do, but he did it, and the story of the next chapter which is really the last chapter of the life of the film is really about this very difficult problem of figuring out inside our family and really my father most of all how to respond to the growing public demand and interest in access to the film while also respecting our familys values, our grandfathers wishes for the film and the sense that it shouldnt be exploited, it shouldnt be sensationalized, it should be used with respect. Theres no clearcut answer and this is something that i wrote about in the book. On one end of the spectrum he couldve put it in the Public Domain which is what a lot of people wanted and made it available to everyone for free under any set of circumstances. But as he said to me, one of the few things he actually ever said to me about this when i asked this question, he said, you know, then it would be on hats and tshirts downtown National Mall and we cant have that, this is our name and this is your grandfather and his wishes. We cant allow that to happen. On the other hand, he also couldnt say no like life magazine did to everyone and refuse to allow people to see it. That time had passed and so what was the middle ground . The middle ground was to respond individually to every single request, hundreds of requests a year, every single one, is this and the other thing that he didnt want was to be a censor. I dont want to be in the position of deciding whether or not its right for someone to use it or wrong for someone to use it and yet someone had to bear that responsibility. It was a thankless task, let me just tell you. There was no approach that he could take that was going to satisfy everyone and as a result what he said about doing was to develop a policy that really reflected our family. He made it available for free to anyone who wanted it for scholarly purposes or educated purposes, teachers, students, kids who were writing their report on president kennedy but when there was a desire to use it for commercial purposes he charged for its use and that was really those were the broad grounds but the last thing that i will say about that is that, the other thing about the life of the film in writing this book that was so fascinating is that times kept changing so its not just that the film it had to reflect our familys values or there was an approach that you could take but as the culture changed, as after following watergate, for example, and a rise in a sense of the possibility of conspiracies that were, in fact, true covered up by the government and changing technologies, all of these things meant that with each passing year, these questions had to be looked at anew. It wasnt simply make a decision and then hang on to it the whole time but rather that it was something that was going to have to be decided and then decided again and decided again. How am i doing for time . Im okay. Shes in charge. So that all sort of was everything was sort of going along. My dad had more or less figured out a way to deal with the film. I went through all of the legal records, all of the license requests, every single one for the years from 1975 until 1992. What i found was exactly in the way that my grandmother had shaped history unwittingly, my dads secretary shaped history too because he deferred to her very often when he did not want to make a decision about the film, he allowed her to make a decision. This was something that was being that was functioning inside really inside our family in a very kind of small scale way until 1992 when oliver stones movie jfk came out. This is the esquire cover which they requested the use of the film, it was granted and it was as you all know oliver stones film that led to the passage of the jfk act on october 26th, 1992, exactly 25 years ago. The result for our family of the passage of the jfk act was that the film which had been put in safe keeping in the National Archives in 1978 became caught up in this effort to make everything that belonged to the federal government that was related to the kennedy assassination available to the American People. It triggered a question, did the law mean that the federal government was taking the zapruder film under the takings clause of the constitution, taking the film from our family, taking possession of it and for those of you who dont know ill just briefly give you this very brief outline. You know how this works, right, the takings clause, if you have a house and the government decides that they want to build a highway through it and tear it down, they have to pay you just compensation for your home. How do they determine just compensation . Comparables. How do they find comparables . How much are the houses worth on either side of your house on your street . What are the comparables for the zapruder film . Whats going to happen if the federal government decides theyre going to take the original zapruder film and theyre going to have to pay our family just compensation for it . This was the last thing that my father wanted. He did not want the federal government to take the film, not because he didnt want the federal government to have the film but as he said to me several times, why would they take a film they already have . Its in the National Archives. Its not going to move. Its already there. But if they take it then theyre going to trigger this process by which the american taxpayers are going to be on the hook for just compensation and my dad was irony of ironies a tax attorney so he understood exactly what this meant in a way that perhaps another person wouldnt. And i really this was a very difficult part of the book to write because i adored my father and i you know, i wanted to be fair and be truthful and it seems disingenuous to paint him as someone who, you know, didnt care about the money, but the truth of the matter is that when it came to the original zapruder film which was sitting in the National Archives our family never thought about the financial value of that as an artifact. It honestly had never occurred to anyone, but when this happened it suddenly threw our family into this dilemma of allow the government to take it, fight the taking, dont fight the taking, fight for justice compensation, dont fight for just compensation which was a battle that ended up going on for nine years. These are just a handful of the articles that were published. I was in my 20s when this was happening so i was a little more aware although really not fully aware of just how just how complicated this was. And here i think its important to say that, you know, we were always very aware that our grandfather was a private citizen who was thrust into a public role and we have this strange name, zapruder, that is not easy to dodge, you know. When people talk about the zapruder film theyre not talking about somebody else, theyre obviously talking about us. Its not the miller film or the smith film. And so i think the fact of our name and the uniqueness of our name and the tachment of our name to this film is also part of the story because it wasnt just our familys values but, you know, your name and the virtue of a good name really means something to people and it certainly meant something to us, but the other side of it was that our family was criticized in ways that were very, very painful and this was something that i really had to take on in the writing of this book. But not in a way that meant being instantly defensive but trying to understand what is the other side . What were people criticizing . What were they reacting to . Is there something in the other side that is legitimate . And what did my fathers point of view represent . And all of this came about through interviews and trying to talk to people who knew my father in trying to think of what i knew about him in order to get the fullest possible picture of these very real dilemmas that do not have easy answers. The very last chapter of the book centers on the arbitration hearing ultimately our family was not able to come to an agreement with the federal government, the federal government decided to take the film in 1997 but we were very far apart on price for just compensation which i know will come as a giant shock to everyone in this room and so it was agreed to have an arbitration hearing and the last chapter of the book is about this hearing and one of the things that is so fascinating about it is that, while it is true that its about money, it also is really about what the zapruder film had become . What does it represent in American Life . What does it mean to the American People . How did its complex history shape it as an icon . How did its own story make it what it is . And how do you assign a monetary value to something that has become a national mem relative a tragedy that was the lightning rod for so many issues around media rights and copyright that was used in film, literature and art as a sort of touchpoint for issues around visual truth and what we even are looking at when we look at a film and why this particular film doesnt do what film is supposed to do which is to answer the question of what happened to the president , all of these things became part of this dialogue and debate about what the film represented. With that im going to finish by reading just a very brief part of the epilogue to the film to the book in which i attempted to sum up to some degree what the legacy, the public legacy of the film is. I also wrote about the private legacy. For our family, i think there was something about this book that i didnt do it for this reason, but i will understood afterwards that, you know, Everyone Needs a story. You need a story in your family. You need to understand where you came from and the forces that shaped who you are and i understood that my parents and my aunt and my uncle and my grandparents were so wounded by the assassination, it was so deeply painful that they really didnt that is really why they didnt talk about it and our association with it was painful and so but the net result for our generation was that we didnt have we didnt know the story and there was something about pulling it into the light and constructing it, facing all of the scary questions, looking at the moral dilemmas among other things that i think i think it was was important in healing for all of us to move past this idea that there was something to hide or that there was something to be ashamed of or there was some dark secret that might be lurking but rather that, you know, at the end of the day were just people like other people. We did the best we could just like other people do the best they could, not always perfect but the thing that i always come back too especially with my grandfather and my father, they dealt with these problems with humanity, they did they took it seriously and they did the best that they could. So thats thats the end of the story for us. This is the more on the public legacy. Ill finish by reading these with two pages and ill be happy to take questions. What is its public legacy . What is the compelling lure that makes the assassination researchers, the film, art and cultural historians, the writers and journalists, the academics and students and hobbyists and kennedy buffs return to it as a touchstone time and zwaen . I have come to think that it because the zapruder film is in every way a ca nun drum. It contains its only irrecognizable contradictions. Its visual evidence of who murdered the president , why and how . Its a single strip of film in which we all see Different Things. It shows the entire course of history changing under the influence of a single bullet. It is quite possibly the most important historical film ever made and yet it is an amateur home movie. It is six feet of eight millimeter film on a plastic reel that turned out to be worth 16 million. It is the most private and the most public of records. It is gruesome and terrible but we cannot stop looking at it. But more than that the deepest most compelling conundrum of the film is an consistent chal one. It lies in the arc of the film itself, the fall from grace, it is a sunny day, a handsome husband and his beautiful wife are riding down the street smiling and waving and within less than half a minute his head explode and he is dead and shes splattered with brain and blood. He is alive and then she is dead. She is a wife and then she is a widowed. She is sprawled across the back of the car. How can it be that our protections and illusions can be stripped from us so quickly . Most of us are able to live our days exactly because we are not confronted with this vulnerability, the capriciousness of fate, the permanence of death, and yet there is the zapruder film. It exists and we cannot turn away even though we fear it and we avert our eyes and we wish desperately it would end differently every time. Maybe it is the same impulse that causes us to watch the challenger explode or the twin towers crashing down into Lower Manhattan on a crisp fall morning . It is because we resist the knowledge that hope sometimes turns to despair in an instant and that tragedy comes out of nowhere on a beautiful sunny day. And paradoxically because sometimes we need to confront that very truth simply to see the thing we feel cannot happen in order to touch the very limits of what we know about life and to remind ourselves of the fer jillty of it all. Thank you. Bla [ applause ] [ indiscernible ]. Thank you. That was amazing and amazingly sincere and genuine and moving. We have the opportunity for questions. We also are being filmed this evening by cspan, so if you would not mind when you ask a question, please wait for the microphone so that we can record your own message for posterity, well argue over the copyright later and then also if you wouldnt mind try to face the camera a little bit when you do it. Ill turn it over to you. Great. I hope thats not going to intimidate people from asking questions. We have a gentleman here. Are we going to run a mike over to him . You want me to turn like this or my name is paul peters and my dad was one of the doctors that took care of kennedy when he was assassinated and ive heard, you know, all the stories growing up and i answered the phone when kennedy was assassinated and when he called from the parkland er and said, son, i need to talk to your mom. The president s been shot and he so that vividly engrained in my mind over the years. I saw Something Interesting when you showed the picture of the esquire magazine with that frame from your grandfathers film, when the 50th anniversary of the assassination occurred, i had my dad had passed away but i had dr. Mckellyen who was also one of the main physicians there come and talk to the Salesmanship Club about his opinion on the assassination and as hes giving the presentation, a guy out in the crowd stands up and says, can i come to the podium . Im john conleys son and so we were showing some frame by frame pictures of the assassination and he wanted to point out something that he thought was important i guess for the conspiracy theories, et cetera, but when john kennedy was shot he grabbed his throat and sort of slumped to the side. And supposedly that same bullet went through john conley through his lung and rested in his wrist. Well if you look at the frames and actually the frame from esquires probably the right frame to see, he is turning around looking at jfk and jfks already been shot and so john conleys son said, my dad swore to his dying day that that bullet didnt hit him because he was able to turn around and look at kennedy with his hands on the his throat slumped to the side and he hadnt been hit yet. This is a great example of ive heard this that conley said that and although im really not versed in all of the ins and outs of what different people have said and what they believe, i think that it is, you know, its very telling. There are there are inconsistencies throughout the record that im not sure will ever be resolved. Just to give you a good example, both my dad and dr. Mckellyland were standing right beside them in his dieing moments and both of them have different interpretations. That is the thing. This idea that you can look at it and look at it and look at it and and people are looking at the same document and see Different Things and interpret it differently and it became something one of the things that was so interesting is the Cultural Impact of the film, that it became kind of it began to reflect a kind of post hoernd dilemma. What are the limits of visual representation . What is truth . How can you have a record of what happened that does not show you what happened . Or it shows you what happened in the largest sense but not in the way that you need it to . And of course the famous movie blowup is a great great commentary on this and then it was done and other people over the years who picked up on this and reflected on, you know, sort of living in a time when we dont have consensus over even the basic things that are before us. Other questions or thoughts . I was wondering how old were you when you first looked at your dad and said, why does everybody look at me funny when i say my name zapruder . I dont think i ever said that because you know how it is you grow up you dont know anything other than what you grow up with, so i i dont remember ever learning about the film. It was never like they sat me down and said, we have something to tell you, you know but i always knew about it. I began the book with this after this little prolog after this home movie. The one thing i do remember is that when i was 10 or 11 years old i went into my School Library and got a copy of William Manchesters death of a president and looked up my grandfathers name in the index and read the account of what had happened and the truth is that i was just like any other 10 or 11yearold girl. My grandfather was famous. This was the coolest thing in the entire world. I had no sense of the gravity of this and this is what my parents impressed upon this, this is not something to brag about, this is not something to call attention to. This is a terrible was a terrible National Tragedy. We wouldve preferred to have nothing to do with it and so that was the message that i got very loud and clear and i will say that that was a message that was very hard toover come in the decision to write this book, that one of the very hardest things about writing this book was to go so much against the prevailing cultural in our family and even though i asked my family how they felt about it and at the end of the day the decision was mine and to confront it and to be public about it in a way that our family had never wanted to be was a difficult difficult choice to make one that i dont regret now but certainly brought with it a great deal of complicated times. Other thoughts . Were on tv so you have to ask questions. One of the things you talked about wonderfully in the book and tonight as well is the way in which a single human life can interact with a great moment unexpectedly and it ripples throughout time and your family. Im curious if now that the book has come out and youve had a chance to have it been received, have you interacted with other people who i know there are no comparables but other people who had comparable experiences where they were next to history, thrust in history and if youve been able to learn anything from their experiences . Thats a great question. I think i have you know, people like this gentleman who asked a question before, i think ive found there have been many people who have been near this history approximate to it in the way that i am but also this book the amazing thing to me about this story is how much it lives still in peoples lives. So i was recently, for example, at i dont remember where i was i was some where, i was in ohio and paul landis who was the secret Service Agent in the car behind the president came to this talk and so ive met a lot of people like that whos lives were changed by the assassination and i just my experience of that really is that its very humbling, of course, because my own connection to it is so distant in a way, but im also amazed by how nowhere more than in texas but how much it lives in people. I went i gave a talk in houston and there was a woman who came and she had a baggie with a ticker tape that she had gotten on the day of the parade and she had it with her and wanted to show it to me. This is something that she started crying talking about this day and what it meant to her, so i think that is something that that is very touching but also somewhat surprising i think that it lives on in this way for people. I dont know if that really answers your question. I have a question. Oh, good. Did your father think that oswald worked alone . Did he have any thoughts about it . Both my grandfather and my father believed that oswald was was the lone gunman. My my grandfather was 58 years old when this happened and was a russia immigrant and a deep patriot and the idea that he would believe anything other than the Warren Commission is unthinkable. It really is. It wouldnt have been he wasnt he just of a generation where he just wouldnt have thought anything other than what the government said was true and then he died in 1970 so really he didnt live long enough to have any reason to really revisit that. My father was not a person who tended to believe in conspiracies. We used to tease him because he used to he used to say that he thought this whole thing with the ozone layer was ridiculous and he wasnt really serious but it was a little bit his attitude he wasnt someone who sort of he wasnt he wasnt cynical. He was a deeply humanist optimist kind of person and i think he also he believed he took that at face value and again whether he would have ever changed his views i dont know but i will just say one other thing is that i always laugh a little bit when people ask what we think because you really you might as well pluck somebody off the street and ask them what they think happened because we have no special knowledge our relationship to this is through the film but it isnt as in fact, i would say for most of our lives weve known less than most people about the film and about what happened, really. Its just not something that weve ever been students of until now. I just think it would be interesting to see how many people in the room were either here that day in dallas or actually went down to pray or something if you want to raise your hand. Who were in dallas at the time. Yeah. Thats great. Thank you for asking that. Did your father have any commentary about jack ruby afterwards . Can you say it again, sorry. Did your father have any comments about jack ruby shooting oswald afterwards . I dont think i dont recall anything about that our grandfather said or that my father said about jack ruby, although what i will say about that is that one of the things i learned in the course of this work is that the fact that jack ruby shot and killed oswald was a huge game changer in the life of the film, because if oswald had been alive and there had been a trial, it would have been very different, but the zapruder film took on the role of the socalled unimpeachable witness which was very problematic and so that was an event that had many repercussions but certainly one of them was that it elevated the significance of the film and some might say elevated it in ways that were not particularly helpful because it doesnt definitively show something that we can consider a consensus about what happened. I just i arrived a little bit late so i apologize if i missed your comments but did the Kennedy Family ever reach out to you to the zapruder family after or during all of this . Not really. So Jackie Kennedys office requested that our grandfather be interviewed by William Manchester and that he, you know, cooperate with his his efforts to write the book which he did. That is the only contact that i know of. [ inaudible ]. I dont think so. But one of the things that i think at least for our generation is that we we wouldve tried very hard to avoid, you know, being forcing a confrontation with the Kennedy Family. I think we always felt, you know, very uncomfortable in that we knew that i said this in the book that that our film was their familys tragedy, you know, and we were never really able to forget that nor did we want to forget that and so like one incredibly weird thing happened when my twin brother and i graduated from High School Ted kennedy gave the speech and i remember my brother saying, you know, 20 years later, i assume he left before they got to the zs and i hope he did because the last thing any of us would want was for Teddy Kennedy to be sitting there thinking, seeing like Alexander Zapruder so it was just sort of that feeling of yeah. I assume he left by the time he got to the zs. Yes, i have a question that maybe you know some spoken to but actually to the gentleman whos dad was the doctor, one of the doctors in the room, since jfk was catholic and he they had called a priest for last rites because it came from our parish, but do you know if they let the priest in the operating room to do that . Did either your father or his friend mention that he had the last rites there because i was told that they kind of kept him alive until he could receive last rites . And i dont know if you spoke to anything like that in your book but nope. Im off the hook for this one. Thats my question. I know that he really didnt leave the emergency room and he pretty much was dead when he got there but he was still his lungs were still breathing but the gun shot wound had pretty much got his brain stem. He passed away fairly quickly after he was there. I know that the priest did give the last rites. It wasnt in the operating room because he never went to the operating room. Oh, okay. We have time for one more question. Great presentation. Really enjoyed it. Thank you. You seem like your familys kind of private. Did your grandfather tell your father that he regrets having shot the film or bringing the camera that day when he had left it and then i know isnt that ironic. I dont know that he ever said anything specifically about the camera but he definitely he definitely said many times that he wished that he had not taken the film and he was very my understanding is that he was really traumatized by what he had seen. He had nightmares for years. He not only was very concerned about the exploitation of the film but just the mere fact of having seen the murder at such close range i think stayed with him. He tended to, you know, dread the anniversary of the assassination. He took very few home movies after that. I mean he just i think i wouldnt say that by any means that it, you know, ruined his life. He had lots of grandchildren were born, obviously. That was great for him, but but i think it was i think it was i think it was very, very painful and i think he did i would say i think its safe to say he regretted it and wished it had been no one or anybody but him. Yeah. I want to steal the prerogative of one last question. I cant believe are you going to ask about the files . I loved that nobody asked about the files. What do you think of the files . I dont think anything about the files. So, i asked this one historian to another, it is it is hard to avoid noting that a person such as yourself who grew up surrounded by what is essentially a primary document witness to history chose to make your career working in primary document witnesses to history, both tragedies. I know. My first book being about the holocaust, i know. I just have to say that my daughter says the next one has to be rainbows and unicorns after this. She really did say that. Shes 12. I think the thing for me is that and this was it was relevant both for salvaged pages for my first book and also for this one that some where along the way i had this idea its not my own idea or a new idea but this sense that people in the past and people other than ourselves live in the fullness of their time exactly the way that we do so like in the past the complexity, the nuance, the dilemmas, all of that is real for people and that we have this tendency when we look back and tell the stories of the past to flatten things and simplify them and that the work that i do as a writer is to try to reanmalt that past and inhabit and see it from all the different sides and that was something that i did with these diaries that are collected in my first book and that was the tremendous challenge of this book was to try to get past the headlines and past the simplification and past the judgements of what was right and what was wrong and who did what to think, you know, what was what were the dilemmas . How did the executives at life magazine live in their time with this object . How did my father live in his time with this object . How did, you know, even the people who were critical of our family who condemned our family for all of these things that they felt were wrong and its true that that work is done around primary sources but ultimately its about people, that is what is most interesting to me so thank you for the question. Thank you. Thank you. [ applause ] let me thank you all for coming but also remind you of course that there are copies of the book that you can take home and take home with a signature as well. So thank you for coming. [ applause ] this weekend on American History tv on cspan3. Saturday at 8 00 p. M. Eastern on lectures in history. American University Professor aaron bell talks about privacy laws and federal surveillance of civil rights leaders. Heres the head of the cointel operations William Sullivan shortly after the march on washington in writing Martin Luther kings jr. s i have a dream speech, we must mark king now if we have not before as the most dangerous negro in the history of this nation, from the national security. Sunday at 4 30 p. M. , former members of congress and vietnam war veterans reflect on Lessons Learned and ignored during the war. We learned the limits of military power during the vietnam war. We learned that as a society, as a culture that you cant kill an idea with a bullet. American history tv. This weekend only on cspan3. American