Twenty-six seconds A personal history of the Zapruder film

EVERYBODY HAS A THEORY about the plot to kill John F. Kennedy. It's about time somebody looked into the conspiracy to keep him alive. More than half a century after that fatal shooting on Nov. 22, 1963, television specials, conferences, movies and books related to Camelot - or its seamier underside - keep feeding the eternal flame of nostalgia and fascination. Natalie Portman is the latest Hollywood star to play Jacqueline Kennedy in "Jackie," a movie that comes out this month and imagines the former first lady in the immediate aftermath of the assassination - from bloodied pink suit to widow's veil on the steps of the Capitol. "Jackie" follows two new books, "Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film," by Alexandra Zapruder, and "JFK and the Masculine Mystique: Sex and Power on the New Frontier," by Steven Watts. These works are only tangentially about Kennedy's presidency or his assassination, and in that way, they are probably more instructive about our own era than Kennedy's - shared history told through a self-preoccupied lens. One is a first-person family narrative, the other a cultural essay on masculine malaise, but both are footnotes inflated to full-length meditations. And either one could seem almost comically small bore. The granddaughter of Abraham Zapruder, the Dallas dressmaker who recorded the shooting in all its horror with his 8-millimeter camera, presents a kind of "Zapruder Agonistes," delineating the personal trials of the filmmaker and his descendants. The examination of Kennedy's masculine mystique is essentially "Profiles in Swagger," a pop culture look at the manly sex appeal of Jack Kennedy as well as contemporaries like Hugh Hefner, Ben Bradlee, Ian Fleming and Frank Sinatra. Yet both works are surprisingly engaging, for entirely different reasons. Zapruder is a gifted writer and storyteller who delicately unravels a minor mystery few people know or care about, but that she makes human, complex and quite interesting. Watts, who has written biographies of Henry Ford, Walt Disney and Hugh Hefner, focuses on the touch football, booze and babes side of the Cold War, positioning Kennedy as the avatar of "the assertively manly ethos of the New Frontier." In places, Watts's book reads almost like "The Wise Men," Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas's portrait of the Cold War establishment, only the Kennedy men are a hipper early 1960s version - "The Cool Guys." Watts isn't exploring new ground or even a very novel theory as he cherry-picks material that supports his thesis. But it's a measure of the Kennedy magic that the familiar still seems exotic. POSSIBLY THANKS to plentiful pop cultural allusions, even millennials recognize the name Zapruder. But many Americans who were alive and watching live television in 1963 have no real idea who Zapruder was or what happened to him; they certainly wouldn't be aware that he, his children and grandchildren felt burdened by their name - and the suspicion and second-guessing that followed it for decades. Zapruder was a home-movie buff who almost didn't record the infamous gunshot that blew the president's head open; Zapruder didn't bring his camera to his dressmaking factory that morning. After being goaded by his employees, he went back to fetch it in time to position himself on a concrete abutment with an unobstructed view of Elm Street where the presidential motorcade was due to pass. Alexandra Zapruder was an infant when her grandfather died in 1970, but she paints an intimate portrait of a humble Jewish immigrant from Russia who loved the United States with a convert's passion. She feelingly conveys the shock, horror and grief he felt as he filmed what was supposed to be a happy home movie. And she then painstakingly explores what exactly happened to him and his film, step by step, frame by frame. Basically, Zapruder gave a copy to the Secret Service but sold the in-camera original to Life magazine for $150,000; years later, the rights returned to the family and ownership became a subject of controversy, lawsuits and countless conspiracy theories. In the author's more nuanced telling, however, there was nothing mercenary or ordinary about the transaction. Zapruder, and later his son and other heirs, were torn about taking money and responsibility for the film's distribution, but did so with a sense of obligation to Kennedy's memory that was sometimes misunderstood and trampled by the United States government and media organizations. (They are a sensitive bunch: Zapruder felt wounded when William Manchester described him as "stubby" in "Death of a President.") The Zapruders were an ordinary American family, but they inherited something special that defined them forever. It's hard to feel too much pity - the Zapruders ended up with a lot of money - but they suffered pangs of guilt and uncertainty that are totally understandable. Male inadequacy is the élan vital of "JFK and the Masculine Mystique." Watts posits that Kennedy's unique stature, then and even now, stems from what he describes as his leadership in a "cultural crusade to regenerate masculinity." In the 1950s, men felt weakened and demoralized by the women who grew empowered while they were away fighting World War II. He cites many articles from the period, including a 1958 essay in Esquire that Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote called "The Crisis of American Masculinity." Those expressions of alarm now seem quaintly amusing, given how far the male species has evolved - or devolved - in the era of metrosexuals and transgender rights. But postwar castration anxiety wasn't unique to the 1950s. Whenever fighting ends, be it the Battle of Actium or the Battle of Amiens, men start to worriedly measure their machismo. That was true both before and after World War I, and some felt anxiety even at the height of the slaughter. (In March 1917, three months after the Battle of Verdun, the American ambassador to Britain argued that the United States should enter the war, to "break up our feminized education" and "revive our real manhood.") Kennedy became the antidote to the male identity crisis of his time by embodying, according to Watts, "physical vigor, decisive action, personal heroism, individual initiative, tough-mindedness and abundant sex appeal." But manly panache alone does not quite do justice to Kennedy or men like Frank Sinatra, Edward Lonsdale or Alan Shepard. Ben Bradlee, in this telling, was a rakish Kennedy confidant who tempered his Newsweek coverage of the president to preserve their bond. Bradlee was certainly a courtier in Camelot, but that era didn't define him. He became more interesting a decade later when he was at The Washington Post leading the coverage of Watergate. Similarly, Watts gives great importance to the masculine messaging embedded in the movie "Spartacus." The film is more notable today because Kirk Douglas, who co-produced and starred in it, put the blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo in the credits under his real name. When Kennedy sneaked out of the White House in February 1961 to see "Spartacus" at a theater, that endorsement signaled the end of the blacklist. Watts prefers to focus on the revival of virility, arguing that Kennedy saw in the movie "a Hollywood vision of manly insurrection and stylish revolt that mirrored his own endeavors." (On the other hand, Kennedy screened "Roman Holiday" in the middle of the Cuban missile crisis. A runaway fantasy?) Both books are good reading, but the mere fact of their publication points to a clandestine mythmaking machine so potent that Kennedy could live up to his own legend only by dying young. If he had survived to seek re-election, challengers would no doubt have said something like Lloyd Bentsen's words to Dan Quayle in their 1988 debate, "Jack Kennedy, you are no Jack Kennedy." ? alessandra Stanley is a domestic correspondent for business at The Times.

This well-written exploration of conspiracy, propriety, copyright, and public good versus private gain is seen through the prism of the world's most famous home movie. Sometimes "personal history" is code for lazy research, but Zapruder (Salvaged Pages: Young Writers' Diaries of the Holocaust) has doggedly followed the tortured life of her grandfather's short 8 mm film, which captured the moment of President Kennedy's assassination, through the shock of witness, media frenzy, FBI fumbling, conspiracy theorists, lawsuits, artists, and Oliver Stone. At the center of the story is Abe Zapruder, who died when the author was an infant. An immigrant from Ukraine, Abe eventually found modest success as a dressmaker in Dallas. For him, J.F.K. was the symbol of American promise, so when he sold his film to Life, it was with the understanding that the magazine would safeguard J.F.K.'s dignity-and give Zapruder $150,000 for it. The movie was sold back to the family for $1, 12 years later, when it became too much of a burden for the magazine. And there it stayed until 1993 when the government seized the film, even though it was on loan to the National Archives. What follows is a dispassionate discussion of how much the film is worth. Zapruder doesn't shy away from the fact that her family made money from the film, but it was the government that decided the "small, depressing, inconclusive, limited spool of celluloid" was worth $16 million, reaffirming its position as a true relic, one of the few in a secular world. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Abraham Zapruder's short home movie of President John F. Kennedy's 1963 assassination became the centerpiece for conspiracy theorists and an iconic component of American culture. Here, Abraham's granddaughter Alexandra (Salvaged Pages: Young Writers' Diaries of the Holocaust) tells the complex story of the film's history, originally sold to Life magazine for $150,000 and now housed in the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, property of the U.S. National Archives. The author shines as a memoirist, offering compelling accounts about her grandfather and how the film affected generations of Zapruders. The narrative gets bogged down with descriptions of legal battles over copyright ownership vs. public fair use. However, included are enlightening passages on the film's role in books that express growing public mistrust of the government and its part in such media events as Oliver Stone's controversial 1991 motion picture JFK. VERDICT This work offers fresh insight into Abraham Zapruder, family man, and provides new perspectives of the film's role in assassination debates. See David Wrone's The Zapruder Film and David Lubin's Shooting Kennedy for accounts that place the -Zapruder film in historical and cultural context.-Karl Helicher, formerly Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.