Note: The text that follows was written seven years ago as a section of a narrative memoir that I wrote for my daughter. It was written to be given as a gift on her 16th birthday. She’s 14 now. Throughout the book overviews and general thoughts are set to a wide measure. The first person retelling of past events are set throughout in a narrow measure. There is actually a longer lead into this particular piece but because, standing alone it makes little sense, I’ve left it out.
Ed’s in good shape for man-to-man sessions. He knows more about computers and the technical aspects of film making than anyone I’ve talked with and he’s a conspiracy reader. He’s read insider plot books that are usually seen only by Scientologists, and he loves to talk. I’ve heard him explain the connections between the Bilderberg group and the Carlyle Group and the World Trade Organization, all the while keeping an unblinking eye on his five and three year old daughters in a kid’s pool.
He was having a cup of coffee and reading when I walked into Einstein’s Bagels. He closed the book and put it down onto the table. “How is it?” I asked.
“First rate,” he said. “It’s almost a how-to about how to be a private eye. The guy, Josiah Thompson, really is a ‘gumshoe,’ has an agency in LA. And he has a Ph.D. in Philosophy.”
“I used to know him,” I said. “He did a great book, the best, about Kennedy’s assassination and the Zapruder film.” Ed let my oblique invitation for him to ask me how I knew Thompson drift into space.
“Hey, did you see the story about the guy arrested at the Acme for squeezing bread” he said. “Dozens of loaves.”
Within moments of President John Kennedy’s murder people were beginning to say, “You’ll never forget where you were.” I’d just finished having lunch with Blake Byrne, a friend from school. He’d begun working for a TV station in Fort Worth and was in New York for a few days to call on potential advertisers. We had talked about how it was strange and disappointing that Kennedy had allowed an independent film crew, the Maysles Brothers, into the White House to film the action during the Bay of Pigs crisis a year earlier—it seemed unnecessary to play out moments directly affecting our lives in front of cameras. We talked about how Blake’s wife was happy not working and instead just serving as a good listener to friends in their neighborhood; how terrific my September trip, my first to Italy, had been and how much my wife loved her work at the Metropolitan Museum. It was an unseasonably warm afternoon for late November. On my way back to the office I stopped to watch the skaters on the Rockefeller Center ice rink Traffic seemed light. The city noise level felt softer than usual. A few minutes later I walked into the lobby of the Time LIFE building. Dave Mayer, a marketing manager for Look Magazine was standing near the revolving door, looking dazed. I stepped over to him, “Dave, how are you doing? Is something wrong?”
“Kennedy was shot!”
“Come on, you’re kidding.” I was confused, not certain that I’d heard him correctly.
“No I’m not,” he muttered. “He was shot in Dallas.”
I’d worked for LIFE magazine for four years and it had gone well. An entry level job and then two promotions within the Marketing department. I put in long hours, went into the office on week-ends, volunteered for anything that came up, and for a year traveled heavily. It wasn’t free of personal tension. Lonely, calling home on a Sunday afternoon from Phoenix, Arizona where I was waiting to go to an early Monday morning meeting, my wife, with an anger that surprised me at the time, said, “Just tell yourself that if you weren’t in Arizona on this particular day the whole goddamn company would collapse.” Then six months as Promotion Manager for Time-LIFE International followed by an offer, that I accepted in a New York second, to be assistant to LIFE magazine’s Executive Editor. I’d made the leap from the business side to editorial and, although my main job was as the Editorial Business Manager, I’d been given an assignment to put a small press service together, selling pictures and foreign rights to stories published in the magazine.
There was barely controlled chaos on the edit floor. Phones ringing, people scrambling from ring to ring, trying to make sense out of what had happened. A procession, convention hall, Kennedy speech, shots hitting him in the throat, Jackie’s okay, Parkland hospital, emergency teams, and then abruptly, he was dead. The President had been shot dead.
Reporters, editors, researchers, secretaries, everyone was grabbing phones. I picked one up in the photography department. I didn’t catch the caller’s name, “Dallas. Just got a picture of a guy being arrested in the State Theater.”
“Jesus Christ,” I said. “Don’t you know the President just got shot? We need the phones!” I slammed the phone down and grabbed one on an adjacent desk. I heard Dick Billings, the Assistant Photography Director close out a phone call. “Just put your stuff in a packet and send it. I’ll call you when I’ve seen it!”
After passing a few phone calls on to reporters I walked into my boss’s large, walnut-paneled office. He was holding court with two senior editors, speaking much faster and pitched higher than usual. “Check that those Johnson layouts are scrapped. And get me all the numbered text drafts. All of them!” On a 16-inch television screen (there were two sets in his office) a CBS reporter standing in front of Parkland Hospital was explaining that Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who had been two cars behind Kennedy in the caravan had assumed the responsibilities of the office and was already on his way to the Presidential plane, Air Force One, at Love Field, the Dallas-Fort Worth airport.
A story that would have forced Johnson off the Democrats 1964 presidential election ticket had been slated to publish in the first December issue of the magazine. For weeks the Kennedy Justice Department had been a rich source of confidential information concerning money allegedly funneled to Johnson from lobbyists and contractors during his years as Senate Majority Leader, through his senior aide, Bobby Baker. Tension between the President and the Vice President had been widely reported since the early days of the administration. Exposure would mean that Johnson would have effectively taken himself off the ticket and likely out of politics sparing President Kennedy the controversy that might arise if he announced that simply wanted a different Vice-President. Two articles, the first a general bad guy picture essay detailed the opening of Baker’s Carousel Hotel on Maryland’s eastern shore and showed Baker in a glaringly negative light. My boss headed the reporting team and the material, kept under wraps for weeks, now being readied to be shredded, would if published tie Lyndon Johnson directly to illegal compromises and graft
It didn’t matter anymore.
Now the story was the violent death of a President. And a smooth transition.
I grabbed another unattended phone shortly after retreating from my boss’s office; there was urgency in the caller’s voice.
“Your phones are crazy. I got cut off. I took pictures of a guy being arrested; he had a gun, in the Texas Theater!” This time, trying to remember Billing’s words I said, “Just put your stuff in a packet and send it up here. Someone will be in touch as soon as we have it. Mark it rush!”
I was in my own office a little later when Yvonne Spiegelberg, U.S. bureau chief for Germany’s STERN Magazine called. She was speaking rapidly. “I just talked to a man in the Dallas courthouse. He’s got a home movie. It’s 8-millimeter, of the President being hit at Dealey Plaza. I’ll put him in touch with LIFE and share cost as long as I get German rights.”
“Hang on,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”
I hurried back to the photography department and broke in on Dick Pollard, the Photography Director. “There’s a woman from Stern on the phone. She’s onto some film, a home movie of the shooting. She’s holding on my line.” He rushed to my office, picked up the phone and went to work.
By the end of the day the “Zapruder” film, TK seconds, TK frames of the President being shot down like a moving duck in a shooting gallery, was being rushed from Dallas to Chicago where the magazine was printed each week. Abraham Zapruder, the accidental photographer, his small camera loaded with 100 feet of film, (50 feet of the film already filled with pictures taken of workers in his dress company) had been on the knoll overlooking the parade route, to “take pictures” for the workers at is dress company, instead of giving them time-off to see the President. His price for world rights--the man at the courthouse was his lawyer--$87,500 and 50% of any money received by LIFE beyond the $87,500. It fell to me to divide the cost for magazine and newspaper use among Paris Match in France, Epoca in Italy, the London Times and STERN. Our original purchase price was covered by noon on Saturday. In Chicago the film had been processed, two full print duplicates had been made and 31 selected individual frames were prepared for layout and printing. Copies of the stills would be ready to be picked up by the European publications two days later. The original film had been couriered with copies of the stills to New York. I saw the movie for the first time late Saturday evening. I was one of a dozen people sitting in black leather and chrome swivel chairs at a table in a small nubby-fabric-walled, interior conference room. There was no banter or restless movement. The small film reel was handed to a young man wearing a work shirt with Central Services embroidered over the left pocket. He fed the film through the projector, turned off the room lights and switched the projector on. A white rectangle of light settled onto the wall-hung screen. The long, chrome-detailed Presidential limousine curved in from the left, moved at a comfortable pace into the moment. Blue skies, green grass, bright sunlight, the fringes of waving crowds are on the borders of the picture. A parade, the car moving, a traffic sign momentarily takes the President from view, the sign slides to the left, he looks surprised. He turns his head slightly, towards his wife who is sitting on his left, as his right arm, bent at the elbow, his palm facing his throat rises like a lever on a toy mechanical bank, moving, moving. His head explodes, so much blood, his body slams backward, rocks forward, the limousine gathers speed, he slumps. His wife, in a pink suit with a matching pillbox hat pinned to her hair, scrambles from the seat onto the roof of the large trunk, reaching her hand out. A man struggles, clambers onto the back of the car as it speeds up. They connect and he shields her with his body, moving, moving. The white rectangle reclaims the screen.
Only an hour earlier Abraham Zapruder’s lawyer had completed another negotiation. The electronic media rights hadn’t been spelled out in the hurried letter agreement that had confirmed LIFE’s purchase of the film. In a hastily put together “auction” among the three networks and LIFE, thirty-five and a half thousand more dollars were directed to Zapruder’s account by the magazine. This added nothing to the magazine’s use; it was for exclusivity, to keep the film off television. The total was now $125,000. It’s almost incredible but the film, the most famous piece of amateur newsfilm in the world wouldn’t be shown on television until twelve years later when Geraldo Rivera would put a bootleg copy on the air.
There was nothing to say after watching the film. It was numbing. The events and actions of the preceding thirty-six hours had, until then, lacked a harsh reality. Now it couldn’t be more awful. I had seen it, an unspeakable piece of pornography. He was dead; the assassin was in custody at the Dallas police station. I was a salesman. An avalanche of images was already rolling in on the Time-LIFE building. Oswald standing next to a clapboard house holding a rifle, a folded newspaper in his right hand. Kennedy greeted at Love Field on his arrival. Pictures of Oswald’s Russian wife, Marina, were in transit. The magazines’ entertainment Editor Tommy Thompson had rushed to Fort Worth, located her and put her up in a motel the night of the assassination.
On Sunday morning I was standing outside my boss’s office, waiting for him to get off the phone. Instead of helping to put the finishing touches to Lyndon Johnson’s career he’d just been put in charge of producing a special memorial issue of the magazine. I wanted to talk. I needed to get a focus on what I was supposed to be selling. A man in a gray suit, tie askew, collar unbuttoned, pushed through the glass door that opened from the elevator bank. He handed me a lumpy manila envelope. “This is Oswald material,” he said. I opened the envelope and took out a small blue plastic reel holding what appeared to be a short 16mm film. “I think you want Phil Wooton,” I said, looking towards the open office door.
“You work here, right?” he said He turned and walked back in the direction of the elevators. I watched him push the button. “Shouldn’t I sign something?” He shook his head and entered the elevator. The unsolicited film piece was the footage, shot months earlier by New Orleans television news cameraman, of Oswald handing out pro-Castro flyers on Canal Street near the World Trade Center in New Orleans.
An hour later the Fat Lady sang an encore. Jack Ruby shot Oswald. The envelope with the Trade Center film was on Wooton’s desk. His office TV was still on without sound, as I talked about the “selling”. I didn’t think that we, the magazine, needed to make money on the materials, just get enough back to cover editorial costs and then put the pictures away. It was my media version of the kind of mid-western ethical compromise that I’d grown up with: “Just a little, not too much, and not enough to be obvious.” He wasn’t buying. He stood up quickly, rushed across the room to the TV set and turned up the volume. Jesus, it didn’t make any sense. A TV reporter shouting, “Oswald has been shot! Oswald has been shot!” Turmoil, policemen wrestling with a stocky man in a two piece suit, a gurney, an ambulance backing up the ramp to the street, on to Parkland Hospital. With this shooting it was as though a yard sale had kicked off. Within twenty-four hours a set of seven 8x10 inch black and white glossy pictures of jack Ruby in his cluttered office interviewing flaccid-thigh “wannabee” strippers for work at his Dallas nightclub arrived at the picture desk. Copies of Oswald’s badly forged identification cards, badly framed amateur snapshots of anyplace Oswald had lived or was thought to have lived, pictures of the Mainlicher Carano rifle found behind cardboard cartons on the sixth floor of the Texas book Depository, “exclusive” pictures of Jack Ruby sitting in his cell in the Dallas County Jail taken by LIFE photographer Don Uhrbrock after a generous payment to the Warden. Images that would become dark memories.
On the third day Abraham Zapruder had second thoughts. I was standing at the door to Dick Pollards office when the call came in. Pollard put the phone down and shook his head. “He’s been driven crazy, people bitching about him making money off Kennedy. I told him—give Tippet’s widow $25,000 and announce that that’s what we paid and now it’s gone.”
Zapruder took the suggestion. Tippet was Officer J.D.Tippet. The story as reported throughout all media was that he was the Dallas policeman who stopped Oswald and without leaving the squad car spoke with him after he fled the murder scene. Oswald shot and killed Ronald Tippet with a 22mm pistol, then walked a few blocks to the Texas Theater where he was wrestled down and arrested by a Dallas detective. The picture of a “guy being arrested”in the theater, the one that I had first hung up on, had arrived by packet in time to be included in the first issue focused on the assassination. I sold its publication rights to eleven magazines.
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