Zapruder Film Revealed: JFK's Death Exposed

For twelve years after the assassination of President Kennedy, only a handful of people had seen the Zapruder film in motion. Millions had viewed individual frames published in Life magazine, but the 26-second home movie that captured the murder from start to finish had been locked in a vault. On March 6, 1975, Robert Groden and Dick Gregory showed the film to a national television audience on ABC's Good Night America, and the public reaction helped reopen the investigation into Kennedy's death. Abraham Zapruder, a Dallas dressmaker, had filmed the presidential motorcade from a concrete pergola in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963, using a Bell and Howell 8mm camera. His footage captured the sequence of shots, including the fatal head wound, in gruesome detail. Life magazine purchased the film for $150,000 the weekend of the assassination and published selected frames in its November 29 issue. The magazine retained exclusive rights and, aside from a brief screening for the Warren Commission, kept the moving images from public view. Groden, a photographic technician who had worked with the film as part of his research into the assassination, obtained a copy and enhanced it using optical printing techniques. He spent years studying individual frames and became convinced that the film contradicted the Warren Commission's single-bullet theory. When he appeared with Dick Gregory on Geraldo Rivera's show, the broadcast reached millions of viewers who were seeing the actual shooting for the first time. The public reaction was visceral. Viewers who had accepted the Warren Commission's conclusions were confronted with footage that appeared to show Kennedy's head snapping backward and to the left after the fatal shot — a motion that many interpreted as evidence of a second gunman firing from the front. Medical experts would later explain the movement as a neuromuscular reaction, but in 1975, the visual impact was devastating to official credibility. The broadcast contributed to political pressure that led Congress to establish the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1976, which concluded in 1979 that Kennedy was "probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy." The Zapruder film remains the most analyzed piece of amateur footage in history and the defining visual document of the Kennedy assassination.