‘ TWENTY- SIX SECONDS’: AN ETERNITY FOR A FAMILY
Abraham Zapruder’s granddaughter tells of a haunting legacy
As artifacts of the 1960s go, one of them towers, tragically, above all others — above Andy Warhol’s silk- screen masterworks, above The Beatles’ first recordings, above the high and low iconography of the decade.
A 26- second home movie of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, filmed by a Dallas dress manufacturer named Abraham Zapruder, who found the perfect vantage point along the presidential motorcade route of Nov. 22, 1963, is more than historical document.
It’s a singular window on what, arguably, ended America’s overextended, postwar innocence.
JFK’s murder was a national trauma that still haunts modernity; the Zapruder film is its real- time ghost.
Relied upon by the government for investigative purposes, its ownership controversially acquired by Life magazine, even parodied in a famous episode of Seinfeld, Zapruder’s chance creation took on mythic status and, inevitably, burdened the family whose name it bears.
The morbid fascination it sparked, and still sparks, make it impossible for the children and relatives of Zapruder to take public pride in his legacy, and so it’s fitting that his granddaughter, Alexandra Zapruder, has chosen to tell the story of the film through a familial lens.
The result, Twenty- Six Seconds ( Twelve, 421 pp., eeee out of four), is a firstrate work of biography and history, addressing the film and the family in all their complexity and character.
Alexandra Zapruder was born in 1969 and became aware of what made her last name famous, as children often will, through a kind of osmosis.
“I have no memory of learning this fact,” she confides. “It seems to me that I always knew it.”
Zapruder ( author of Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust) writes elegantly and with keen sensitivity about the toll the film took on her late father, Henry, a lawyer who became the film’s guardian after Abraham’s death. Henry Zapruder bore the brunt as the family and federal government fought over the film’s ownership, copyright and monetary value, and as the press weighed in, fairly or not, on the family’s morality, at times accusing it of profiteering on the death of a president. Zapruder knows well the fraught cultural issues at play here, given that her parents descend from Jewish immigrants who built a comfortably middle- class existence in the Dallas suburbs. But the family’s quiet instinct — to compartmentalize the 26 seconds as an aspect of Zapruder identity rather than as an object that defined them — was dwarfed by the film’s outsized fame. Studied frame by frame by the Warren Commission to conclude that the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, acted alone, the 8mm Kodachrome print became a totem for conspiracy theory, including Oliver Stone’s 1991 film, JFK.
Twenty- Six Seconds also arrives just before Jackie, starring Natalie Portman as first lady Jacqueline Kennedy in the days after the assassination, hits theaters Dec. 2.
“It was not just my grandfather’s story, or even that of our family,” Zapruder concludes, “but the centrality of the film’s place in the Kennedy assassination debates, how it had challenged norms about the public representation of violence … influencing some of the century’s greatest and most provocative filmmakers, artists, and writers.”
This absorbing book will only extend that influence.