Zapruder with us. He has written an extraordinary book. 26 seconds, a personal history of the zapruder film. It is a book you really have to read you to really appreciate it. Even deeper than that it is a memoir of the extraordinary experience burden, destiny of family, a family that has his own extraordinary story and essentially refugees of jewish and he claims that find their way ultimately to dallas texas. And alexanders grandfather was Abraham Zapruder. The dressmaker who had the extraordinary occasion to find himself in that position on that day to capture these 26 seconds of faithful witness of history. And how many of you have seen the zapruder film . How many people have seen gone with the wind . [laughter] it is right up there. With american our relationship, a complex american relationship to media that this document, this artifact of our history is simultaneously an artifact of media and in some respects as one colleague of mine once described, it was the initiation of america had into reality tv. Into reality media. It has an extraordinary complex phenomenal logical profile. This piece of film, of home movie of celluloid. One day shot in one place in dallas texas. And alexander has an extraordinary job of weeding together the story of her family and the incredible impact on their lives. And in fact, also the best discussion have seen and i am a bit of a have to confess i feel deeply into the literature and the war around it. But when xander has synthesized it in a way that i think youll find it moving and illuminating all at once. Because it is such a profound place. Alexandros career as a writer is quite extraordinary. She was instrumental in some of the Early Development of the Holocaust Memorial museum. And space to be very profound motive in her familys story with their relationship to judaism as well and part of the testimonial in the book is a graduate of Smith College and she served as the museums exhibition director for young visitors. She did an amazing book called remember the children, gayles story. It has some of the experiences of the museum and she and her masters degree in harvard in 1995 in education. First book was salvation pages. Young writers diaries of the holocaust. It was published and won the National Jewish book award. This is a significant achievement. There was a destiny to come to this story undoubtedly as a writer. But i want to introduce alexandra and then well have a little chat. Thank you [applause] thank you for that, a lovely introduction. Im glad it is being recorded because i will listen to it over and over again. [laughter] is interesting that you say this or ask me was there a destiny . I think about this a lot with this post because any way this was a very unlikely thing actually for me to decide to do. To write this book. I grew up in a family in which and i wrote about this in some length in the introduction of the book. We very rarely talked about the zapruder film. It is something we all knew, we knew because we had this odd name and people would you know ask about it but it was not something that my parents like to talk about at all. My father in particular, my grandfather died was nine was an infant. And i was very very sad for my father and my own father died rather young and so now i felt like with that outlet for him. So the film is always offcenter. I would not say it was quite taboo it was not forbidden but it was really not a defining, we were not encouraged to think it was in a defining aspect of our identity at all. And so i came to this topic in the aftermath of my fathers death. Finding myself with questions as people often do. Wanting to pull together the threads of the story and coming to it fresh in a way. Unlike you and unlike a lot of the people that i meet, i never read anything about this i had no idea what a big deal it was. So when i began to read about it and try to get some handle on what it represented, i was not only completely stunned by the scope and significance of it but also i began to see the ways in which kind of the public understanding of the film was missing our families story and the impact of our families relationship on the film. And so that is what sort of justify to work. I asked myself a lot of questions about whether this was you know, was this historically meaningful . Was it worthwhile . Do you have something to contribute other than the claim to fame of having this last name. And i would not have done the book had i come out but in the end i really believe there was something about our family story that was going to feel intimately important missing pieces. How did you first come to know the significance of it . How do you have that take shape . I was trying to think about working on the book. My only memory of this as a child was that i remember looking at my s grandfathers name and index of william dan chesters book. So i must have known somehow he was in the book and reading about him in the. When i think about it now i think i must have known on some level not to ask my parents about it. But rather to kind of go this alternate route. And i also remember feeling like sort of like any 10 or 11yearold girl probably would. Just like i was so famous. This was like the greatest thing that ever happened to me. And this was exactly what my parents were so afraid of. And now having an 11yearold daughter and an eightyearold son i understand. They also have my last name and i understand how important it is to impress upon them that this is a national tragedy, a tragedy for the family, file grandfather and that is exactly what you do not want to do. Sort of brag about it. But i felt like you had to go through that sense of our family is famous in order to come out the other side. And then i did not think about this again for years and years until really after my dad died. You discussed in the book not just the uncanny fate of your grandfathers place on that day and the fact that he was moving his busiest and for those of us that know he had also forgotten the camera that day and had to go back and get the camera. You give us the baxter that he was urged to go get the camera. He was not going to go do it. So it will be possible to imagine a parallel universe where this does not exist. But you mention the fact that they were zapruders instead of just smith. Right. You sort of faded into history but the fact that you are zapruder, if you notice when i was texting you earlier that if you just click zapr, siri puts zapruder. What does that mean for you in terms of growing up . Was the conspiracy cultist seek you out . Certainly not when i was growing up. When i was growing up being a zapruder meant being from washington, being from a liberal family, it meant being jewish, it meant that the children of my incredibly interesting and engaging parents, lots of social it meant we all had these identities that are formed by what we grow up with. And then there are the are the entities that you dont realize you inherited. And that is what the story of the zapruder film is for me. I do not understand for most of my life that when i met someone, they might come to the meeting of me with a whole set of assumptions or ideas are an understanding about this past that i did not know about. They have washed it thousands of times. Right and i have never watched it until decided to work on this book. So again, in some ways it was a very strange gift for the work because coming to it with no background in a way, coming to it completely clean meant that i could mind my own memories in a way and then layer in this information that i was learning. It wasnt like one of the things that often said about this work was that i didnt come to this book with a story to tell. I didnt come to it saying i have this whole story the need to impart to you. I came to the work with questions. And with suspicions. And with ideas. And the book is the inquiry. The book is the attempt to sort of put together the pieces. And one of the things i think is the most important thing about the work is that i realized when i began reading about the film, sort of with it in mind that i might want to write something about it, after my father died. I realize that no one really talked about it as a movie so its interesting that you brought that up. People talk about it as evidence, as an artifact that ended up being worth a lot of money. People talk about it as a cultural stone, people look at it as a lens through which you can look at media ethics and changing but for our family and for my grandfather most of all the home movie quality of it. The fact that he had been making home movies for 35 years at that point. For 30 years and that he, it was his camera and his point of view and it was his responsibility shape everything that followed. And i think not knowing that and not sort of putting the home movie back at the center of the story it just meant that there were so many distortions in the way that the story was told in the other public records. You mentioned something that had never occurred to me before to even wonder about. What else is on that reel. And the phone that we know is preceded by ordinary backyard scenes. My adorable cousin david who lives in san antonio who was with my children at the zoo right now is in the first frames of the film. Because that is what my grandfather did. He was filming all the time just like everyone else did. And it is so interesting because if you ever see the film with those frames, it looks totally different. Then seeing it without those frames. Because it is so easy to see it and to think this can be by a professional photographer or a news manner anybody. But when you see those frames of you know the little kids playing outside you realize that he was really there as a person who loves president kennedy who loves this country that had this personal experience and was so tied up in the fate of american america represented so much for him about the possibility and destiny. For him, the whole, you see this in a very different way i think. I have a copy of a reel, i was traveling around with the fascination of the zapruder film. You will have these have you seen this . Its assemblage of home movies from the time that the kennedys arrived at the airport. Into which the zapruder film. You only get the zapruder film after the kennedys. So you get the witness that your grandfather had experienced. The fact that he continued to shoot during the shooting. He didnt take the camera away and what was happening. He stayed on camera. So the cameraman in the room might appreciate the audacity of that. But i wonder whether that trauma which he described so powerfully throughout the book, the trauma that your grandfather experience in that moment. Whether that was in part transmitted from the family to your father and your other zapruder uncles and exactly. One of the things i think that is so important to say about this and again, this goes to not so much the story that was told in the book with this is the whole frame of the book. Before you even get to the content of it. My father, i discover this in the course of the book i didnt know before. My father wrote two letters to john f. Kennedy. When when he was a senator and when when he was a resident. My father describes from harvard law school. He wrote a beautiful letter by my father who is 20 years younger than i am now. Wanting to work with the new frontier and run into any part of the administration. And then got a job and and my mother married on october 31, 1963. They had their honeymoon and then came to washington. So he was to ease into his new job in the Justice Department working for Bobby Kennedy when the assassination happened. As i was saying earlier at lunch, my aunt had volunteered in a Kennedy Campaign and had in dallas. She was at leftfield when jackie and john kennedy arrived. My uncle was watching the motorcade from the praetorian building on main street. My grandfather was at the plaza. So they were i mean, there kennedy ness was not they were deep kennedy people. As a set at lunch today, my parents stayed up all night in washington to walk by the president s body lying at the capitol building. So the intimacy in which our family along with millions of other people were kind of woven into the story again, makes the film so much more powerful. And i think that is where the i would not describe it as trauma for myself but where there are reverberations. You know my father who, the disappointment of the assassination, the pain and sadness, the loss, the trail. If stayed with him for his whole life. And for all of them. For my grandfather and my father to then be responsible for this object. To be the one who had to decide who uses it, how, under what circumstances, for how much money and at what cost morally and ethically. What is the cost to society of sharing it too widely. What is the cost to society of not sharing it widely enough . Who should make that decision . And then all of the against the back drop of changing times. The 70s, 80s and the 90s. I think that the burden of that wouldve been difficult for anyone but the irony of it landing on the shoulders of the very people who you know so loved the president i think is remarkable. There 70 irony is that run through very literary tellings of the story. The fact that your grandfather was a dressmaker who essentially not doctors. Grandmother would go get dresses from neiman marcus. She would put them on her credit card. Mr. Zapruder had a shop and they will basically make copies of those dresses. No, no and then she would return the dressers at neiman marcus. Of course. [laughter] amazing. Then the issue of copies of the film would become such a hard thing in his life. I never thought about that, brilliant the intimacy, the storytelling in these moments we describe for instance an extraordinary description alexander gives us of the night of the assassination. Theyre getting this done immediately to bring the film home and they watch the movie in the family dining room. Yes. As a profound moment in history being lived in the intimate space. And i think that moment, i began the book with that is a sort of prolonged because i think that sort of encapsulates the whole home of the quality of it. I mean he came home after this traumatic terrible day and did the same thing that he had done with the home movies for 30 years before that. He showed it in my fathers room which was the den. And my grandmother and my uncle were there and they watched it. And my aunt refused to watch her because she was hysterical and she was in the living room crying and upset. The sort of, the twisted nature you know this is something so familiar and is such a familiar pattern and being that the family would do together within it has this you know this cast to it that is so different. And not knowing in that moment, having no way of knowing what this was going to become. And having a sense perhaps of the broad outlines of the problems that were going to attend the film. But not really be able to even conceive of the world that it would go on. I mean that was the great he has done such an amazing job. The intimate voice that runs this book and then there is an extraordinary chronicle of the forensics around the film and as a journalist, he took that i think you know with some peril. Semi people had written about it. It is in such an interesting way. How did that challenge, how did you decide to undertake that challenge and map out the generations of copies and additions and replications and i may never recover from that. You know it is interesting. What i wanted to do with this book was to tell the whole history of the life of the film. Meaning both the interrelated family story, the public and private story. But also life of the film and the cultural touchstone. The artifacts. Its role in the media, its role as a valuable object. And there is no way to do that without also tackling its use as a piece of evidence in the assassination debate. And so, i taught myself that history. I mean that is not a history that i knew. My main goal was to stay always focused on the film. What role did the film play in the House Select Committee . Not to get into the photos and ballistics report but always look at how the film was used. One of the things so fascinating for me that i learned and of course in doing this was that i knew this on some level but i dont think i quite understood it to this degree. The film complicates everything. The existence of the film which should in theory clarify everything complicates everything. And everyone who sees the film sees something different. Depending on what youre looking for. And what you already believe. And there is no consensus on what happened to the president. Even though there is this extraordinary visual record. And so there is an inherent conflict. It then becomes a kind of, it is sort of almost is like a predictor for the future. That we now live in a time and this has evolved over time. But we now live in a time when you know simple pieces of documents or photographs or whatever are not necessarily an act to preserve that one thing or another happens. And it is interesting how it started to go in this direction and ended up now where we are. I was wondering also and just getting ready to close here so alexandra can lead us a little bit. And then we will have time for your questions. I am interested as someone who wrote memoirs and my family, i am wondering how the zapruder family has received this book. Im struck by the fact that one brother is ive seen the name and in their sections where the New York Times magazine and your twin brother is an artist. Have they dealt with this material in their works . And then they have not. They have not dealt with this work and they probably would not. I would say there were mixed reactions in the family. I mean it is hard for me to overstate just how destructive this was as a proposed project. I mean i think some in the family sort of always fear that this day would come here that somebody finally decide to write like obviously, write a book about the zapruder film. But i think there was resistance because there is a deep, there are a deep set of very difficult moral and ethical questions that are at the heart of this book. Can you profit financially from a record like this without making a fundamental moral compromise . What are the mitigating factors . How did we as a family grapple with these private and publicly . That was a good enough reason for me not to want to write this book for a long time. Because i adored my father and he died. And i did not grandfather and i wish i had. And what if i stumble on something that i dont want to write about . So i think everybody had a little bit of that. In there but had a little bit of we are a private family, we have always had discretion. Out of respect for the kennedy family. So it really was kind of upsetting not necessarily in a negative sense but literally upsetting. But i would say that my aunt who was the daughter of my grandfather, was very much behind it from the beginning. I would not have been able to do this without her. I interviewed her. Every time i went to her house she would hand me another stack of things. And i would say why these things still here . Im trying to collect everything and my brothers for sure were very supportive. Because i think you know they are artists. And if both of these are questions, if this is your work and this is what you need to do then this is, we want you to do it. And now that it is out everybody is fine. But it was hard. It was very hard and it took me a long time to come to embrace the personal nature of it and find my own voice and this was definitely an involved process. When i had family remembers rays issue i told them to write your own book. Exactly. Would you be for us . Yes i will be one short part from the epilogue because i think it is a good way to end. In the epilogue i do my best to bring together the personal legacy of the film for our family and sort of do a little bit of the Unanswered Questions from my childhood and one from the public point to together everything. As of the very last few pages of the book. What is the public legacy of the zapruder film . What is a compelling lord that makes the fascination researchers the film art and cultural historians the writers and journalists, the academics and students and hobbyists and kennedy bus returned to it time and again . Ive come to think that it is because the zapruder film is in every way a conundrum. It contains his own irreconcilable contradictions. It is visual evidence that refuses to consult mr. Who murder the president. Why and how. As 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 millimeters film on a plastic real that turned out to be worth 16 million. It is the most private and public of records. It is gruesome and terrible but we cannot stop looking at it. But more than that, the deepest most come from conundrum of the film is an existential one. It lies in the arc of the film itself. The fall from grace, the unforgiving inevitability of it. It is a sunny day, handsome husband and his beautiful wife are writing down the street. Smiling and waving with their lives stretched out before them. And within less than half a minute, his head explodes and he is dead. And she is covered in his brains and blood trying to recover his skull from the trunk of the limousine. He is alive and then he is dead. She is a wife and then she is a widow. She is grace itself and then she 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 were not confronted with this vulnerability. The inexplicable capriciousness of fate. The permanence 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 wish desperately it would end every time. Maybe it is the same impulse that caused us to watch the challenge explode in the bright blue florida sky. Other twin towers crashed down into Lower Manhattan on a quest all morning. It is because they resist the knowledge that hope sometimes turns to despair in an instance. An tragedy comes out of nowhere on a beautiful day. And paradoxically because sometimes we need to confront that very truth. Simply to see the thing that we feel cannot happen. In order to touch for a moment the very limits of what we know about life and to remind ourselves about the fragility of it all. [applause] truly beautiful. Thank you. Questions . Otherwise i will continue to ask on. But i know people must have questions. Yes. [inaudible] we need to get you on the microphone. Hello. Can you please touch on the connection to life magazine at that time . Sure. The questions about life magazine and the connection with it. Richard a reporter and journalist with life magazine purchased on behalf of them the still rights to the film the day after the assassination and then moving footage rights a few days later. Life magazine onto the film for 12 years after the assassination. The reason my grandfather sold the film to life, first he knew he would not be able to keep it. He was being hounded by reporters instantly and aggressively. So i think he felt the need to get it out of his own hands. But he trusted richard and richard really on behalf of life promised to treat the film with dignity and with restraint which was extremely important to my grandfather. His biggest fear was that it was going to be exploited and sensationalized. And it would be all over the newspapers and the television and particularly at Jackie Kennedy would see it. So life magazine then had it for 12 years. One of the Amazing Things that happened for me when i decided to do this work was that i went back to life magazine. I asked if i could see the archives. And they just handed over the entire written record of the life of the film. At life which were documents that had never been made public with anyone. So there are only these letters and memoirs that really for the whole middle part of the book really goes through what was happening inside of life magazine, how they handled the film, the very controversies and of course, life magazine held the film very tightly and never showed it as a film to the American People. But during those years there was the rise of bootleg copies. Through various sources and of course the rise of the conspiracy theories partly fed by the fact that people could not see the film. And it wasnt an unintended consequence. And the relationship between life and the film ended in 1975 when they returned the film to our family for one dollar. And there was a story behind that which is told in the book. But essentially they were under tremendous pressure from the public, from other news outlets and others to make it available and they could not do that and treat it gracefully. And that was their conflict. So they decided to get rid of it and they were prepared to donate it to the National Archives but my grandmother intervened. And i will leave it at that. The story is told in the book. Many of us remember seeing first the still images in life and then later the first moving images on the Geraldo Rivera show. Yes, good night america. That was a bootleg copy of this film that was shown to the American People for the first time in 1975. April 1975. Just as negotiations were going on. That was more or less the final straw for life magazine. Because part of their sort of terms of their contract where they had to defendant a copyright of the film and prevented from being used in ways that were not sanctioned. And here it was with geraldo and nothing could be done about it. At that point they just were ready to be rid of it. And i cannot say i blame them. A question . Anyone else . You know, one of the can you talk a little about maybe how your grandfathers immigrant experience played a role in his reaction to what happened the. Yes, thank you. You know my grandfather came to the country in 1920 as a 15yearold boy. Having endured horrendous persecution and suffering as a jew in russia. He had two sisters and a brother. His brother was either killed or died, it is not exactly clear what happened to him. And they came here in 1920. My grandfather went to night school to learn english and then almost all of the other jews in the situation went into the needle trade. And became a dressmaker. Then he and my grandmother went to dallas in 1941. By the time this assassination happen he was running a successful dress manufacturing business. But i think his whole life was shaped by this traumatic early years. The sense that he did not have an education and he was somewhat insecure. As a result of that but i think that in particular when the, in the aftermath of the assassination, his values and Jewish Values in particular, i think largely shaped his sense of what was and was not appropriate and decent to do with the film during which were immediately in conflict with american norms already. Even in 1953. And i think he was very much afraid that profiting from the film, selling it to life magazine both would be perceived in a negative light and that would be potentially spark antisemitic reactions. But that it was actually wrong. Not that it was seem wrong but that it would actually be wrong. And i think it was torn by that. I think his whole perspective and his decision to sell to life magazine and vent to give away, he gave away 25,000 to the widow of the Police Officer who was shot by oswald. Again, his way of sort of taking of the money cundiff reflected his own Financial Insecurity and it was important to take this windfall even though the taking of it was complicated but also to give away a portion of the money and ported to his own guilt and responsibility to it. And to define the terms of the deal with life magazine to try and mitigate the damage that the film would cause. And i think those basic elements remained 100 percent from my father he inherited a much much more complicated set of decisions in 1975. And through the 70s, 80s and 90s when he was dealing with the film. He i think always went back to my grandfathers values as a guidepost for figuring out how to deal with this even though times had changed and were much more complicated. Questions . Yes. You probably do not address is in your book and it may be far removed from the story there but to me, i can remember in 1953 and it seemed to me our family didnt have one but a lot of people had movie cameras. Did you spend a lot of time thinking about, and there were a lot of people down that route right there. Did you think about why was it just your grandfather that happened to get the only film that we know of . I find that incredible yes, there were 21 other photographers at the end of the parade route. Those films are incredibly valuable. And important. I think the thing about my grandfathers phone that is different is that it encapsulates the whole story. And it is so clear and it has this, there is an arc to it which is sort of what i alluded to in the epilogue. That you know, the whole story, not only of the kennedys and their fall from grace in this tragic event for the whole story of human life and what we strive for and what our faith is. It is all there and that makes it different from others. And i also think there are those that said and i think this is true. The composition of it. If you just look at this image, this bright green glass in the case of the first ladies suit and the black limousine. There is something visually that you know now. We have this nostalgic relationship to it. But even at the time i think it was, there was really no accounting for just that is the way it looked but it grabs people. And it never let go. Have other films of Abraham Zapruder been preserved . Yes. They have been preserved. If you consider them being in my closet being preserved actually. My aunt undertook them. We have three more minutes. Have you actually held the object . The original film. No, the original film is in the National Archives. The film was taken from our family in the 1990s by the federal government. Precipitating a long struggle to determine ownership and value and in fact it is funny because i asked, i wrote to the National Archives after writing the book to ask if i could see the original film and there was a lot of backandforth and hemming and hawing and they said no. And i said well it really is not ours anymore. The second part of the question is, this is just touching the rabbit hole. There is a lot of discussion about two frames of the film being flipped and the artifact be manipulated. Yes, i got into the alteration of the film. The theory that rose up sort of more in the 1990s about altering the film. The two frames that youre referring to i think we are, the way this film was presented in exhibit frames 313 and 314 were shown, 313 is the critical frame that show the head wound to the president. They were printed in reverse order. Which was either just the most unbelievable thunderhead thing that somebody did or it was something worse than that. But it was very dubious that it happened. There were also frames that were damaged by life magazines people and the weekend of the assassination when they were rushing to go to print with the first issue. Images of the film and six frames were damaged and spliced out. But life magazine made the mistake of not coming public with that until much later. Which led to an enormous amount of speculation that the film had been altered. And then there is a larger alteration theory which i will not get into now because of the time but that i went into great length in the book. Possibly not very nicely. [laughter] and ending this great visit with alexandra want to end with this. Alexander will be signing books after our chat. The zapruder film is not reality we can live with every minute of every day. But it holds 26 seconds, a painful fundamental human truth that will never grow old. At every generation must grapple with. Thank you. Thank you so much [applause] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] here is a look at some books being published this week. Nebraska senator argues that americas youth are not prepared for adulthood. In the vanishing american self. Former Senior Advisor to president bill Clinton Blumenthal releases the second volume of his biography of abraham lincoln. Wrestling with his angel. New york times bestselling author lee explains of mohammed alis refusal to join the military and the and sting like a bee. Also being published this week Mark Pendergrass read the history of atlanta and weighs in on the Current Development and infrastructure programs in city on the verge. Time magazine Jeffrey Kluger reports on massive attempt to reach the moon in apollo 8. And in the flight former air force pilot dan hampton recalls the 1927 transatlantic flight. Look for these this coming week and watch for many of the authors in the near future on booktv cspan2. [inaudible conversations] [applause] thank you. I always feel better when we get applause at the front end. I am very honore