Several years ago I gave my broadcasting students an assignment to interview someone who was alive during the Kennedy Assassination. I had gotten the idea from a CNN program hosted by Larry King. During the show King interviewed celebrities asking them what they were doing when they first heard the news of the shooting. There were many interesting and unique accounts.
Off with tape recorders went my students to interview parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles. They were to find one person and interview them about that fateful day in November 1963. As the tapes came in many stories were just as interesting and unique as any celebrity's account. But one thing occurred over and over again. The accounts were WRONG. Not factual! Inaccurate!
How do I know? Because things that people say they remember never happened. They "mis-remembered". Chiefly is the description of what they recall on television. I will return to this is a moment.
It is said that the TV networks coverage of the Kennedy Assassination was it's finest hour, the coming of age of the relatively new medium. It was certainly historic. There had been Presidential assassinations before but none had ever taken place in the TV era.
Imagine what it must have been like in 1963. There were only three major networks; CBS, NBC and ABC. No cable. TV news was broadcast in black-and-white, mobile tape equipment didn't exist, most signals were sent by what is known as "hard wire" or microwave relays. There were not mobile satellite trucks that permit instant images like we have today.
And TV news used film. It is difficult to imagine today, when nearly every human over the age of 12 has a mobile device with a camera, that only two people were recording when the President of the United States was murdered in public, in broad daylight!
It was all because of film. TV stations could not afford to roll through reel after reel of film. Film was and is expensive. It had to be developed in a lab. A news cameraman would have been eaten alive by his news director if he had returned with hours of spent film of a routine motorcade. Why shoot that much footage when you were only going to use a small amount on the news anyway? Once the film was exposed or developed it could not be reused; as with video tape or digital video today. It is for this reason I have banned the word "film" in my classroom. We have never filmed anything in my 22 years of broadcast teaching. We have taped, videoed, recorded and captured...but we have never filmed. The "F" word is forbidden in my class.
Film is the reason we only have one account of the actual shooting. You see, no one expected it to happen! As a result, call it bad luck or poor timing, not one TV station or network had its cameras rolling at the precise moment the shots were fired. They didn't want to waste film! The only useable footage was shot on a Bell and Howell home movie camera by an amateur, Abraham Zapruder.(There was another amateur's film from much farther away with far less clarity.)
Zapruder's film would be copied for the FBI and the rights to it were sold to Life Magazine. This is where my student's interviewees have foggy memories. I listened time and again to people describing how they watched the film of the assassination over and over again. But they couldn't have. No TV station or network had access to it. They didn't have the legal rights to it. It belonged to a print magazine!
John Kennedy was killed on November 22, 1963. The first public viewing of the Zapruder film was not until February 13, 1969 at the trial of Clay Shaw in New Orleans. This trial was the basis for the Oliver Stone movie "JFK". It would be six years later that the first TV airing would take place. News reporter and talk show host, Geraldo Rivera gave America it's first televised viewing on March 6, 1975.
So you see? They couldn't have watched it over and over and over again. Not in 1963. Since that airing on Rivera's show the Zapruder film is considered to be the most exam piece of video in history! Since it's release it has been shown so much that people who lived through those dark days actually believe they saw it at the time.
Although there is only one true video account of the assassination there are dozens of conspiracy theories that linger 50 years later. The delay in the public's viewing of the actual footage for so long helped spawn many of them. Despite the freedom to watch and examine and study there are still questions about what happened and how.
Because of one man, Abraham Zapruder, this event, the most blatant, and public murder of the 20th Century, has been frozen in time. What if the networks and the local TV stations had been rolling their cameras? Would it help put to rest some of the conspiracy theories? We will never know. History tells us that there were at least two shooters that day. One, we are told, was Lee Harvey Oswald. The other was Zapruder with his home movie camera.
If only someone else had been shooting too!
Thanks for reading!
Jeff
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