Abe Zapruder had no idea when he took his 8-millimeter camera down to Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963 that he would record President Kennedy's assassination. The footage he captured, less than half a minute long, continues to be studied (and to fuel conspiracy theories) to this very day. The following excerpt from by Zapruder's granddaughter Alexandra details how he captured history, and what happened next.

Camera in hand, my grandfather Abe Zapruder went down to Dealey Plaza to scout out a location. He tried a few places, walking all along the curb on Elm Street, but could not find solid footing there. Another spot was blocked by a tree. After a while, his receptionist, Marilyn Sitzman came walking up the hill. All the banks had been closed because of the president's visit, so she gave up and walked back to the plaza, where she encountered Abe taking some test shots of his payroll clerk Beatrice Hester and her husband, Charles, sitting on the pergola at the back of the plaza.

As Abe continued to look for a place to stand, Marilyn suggested a four foot-high concrete abutment. It was a perfect location— high above the street, giving him a clear view of the length of Elm; the president and Mrs. Kennedy would ride right past him in the open-top limousine. There was a risk, however: He would need to set the telephoto lens on full zoom in order to get a clear view of them, and he worried that he would get dizzy standing up on the ledge while following them through the lens as they passed by. Since he suffered from vertigo, this was a real possibility. So, as Abe climbed up on the ledge and found his bearings, he asked Marilyn to stand behind him and steady him if he started to lose his balance.

Abe Zapruder wasn't the only photographer on the scene. In fact, there were no fewer than 22 photographers on Dealey Plaza, most of them amateurs, positioned along the last part of the motorcade route. Some were shooting black-and-white or color stills, Polaroids, or 35mm slides, while several others had movie cameras loaded with color film. It seemed everyone had the same idea.

Part of the motorcade route through Dallas. ourtesy of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

Mary Moorman and James Altgens, their cameras loaded with black-and-white film, were positioned near the curb across the street from where Abe was standing. Farther up the street, near the hairpin turn from Houston to Elm, Phillip Willis stood ready with color film in his camera. Marie Muchmore was standing on the opposite side of Elm from Abe, on a grassy area set back from the street, her movie camera loaded with color film. Over on Main, Orville Nix was waiting with a movie camera and color film, as well.

Up on the concrete ledge, Abe looked out for the motorcade. When the lead motorcycles rounded Houston to Elm Street, he started filming, only to stop when he realized that it was not the president's car yet. He re-cranked the mechanism of the camera to "full wind" so that it would run for the maximum amount of time. He didn't start filming again until he could see the president and the first lady coming toward him in the car.

Years later, in an interview she gave with my mother, Marilyn remembered, "When they started to make their first turn, turning into the street, he said, 'OK, here we go.' "

Those first few seconds of the film are perfect: The sun is shining and you can clearly see the unmistakable, handsome face of the president as he brushes his hair from his face, lowering his arm as he turns toward the crowds on his right, smiling, and raising his hand again to wave briefly.

Those first few seconds of the film are perfect: The sun is shining and you can clearly see the unmistakable, handsome face of the president as he brushes his hair from his face, lowering his arm as he turns toward the crowds on his right, smiling, and raising his hand again to wave briefly.

For an instant, the back of a freeway sign obscures the limousine, and then the Kennedys reappear. "As it came in line with my camera, I heard a shot," Abe later recalled. The president's elbows fly up, his face distorted in pain, and he suddenly hunches forward as his wife looks at Governor Connally, sitting in the jump seat across from them, before turning back to her husband with visible confusion on her face. "I saw the president lean over to Jacqueline. I didn't realize what had happened," Abe remembered.

The President and Mrs. Kennedy shared a limousine with Texas Governor John Connally and his wife Nellie. Governor Connally was also shot, though he made a full recovery. Getty Images

The next part of the sequence always feels agonizingly long to me, even though it took place in seconds. The car dips into the lower part of the camera frame, and as the president's body sinks down in the car toward his wife, the fatal shot strikes him. "And then I realized," Abe said. "I saw his head open up and I started yelling, 'They killed him! They killed him!' " Jackie recoils, her mouth open in horror, and suddenly she is climbing out of the open- top car, scrambling on the back hood of the limousine, met by Secret Service agent Clint Hill, who pushes her back down into the seat.

For an instant, Abe and Marilyn stood stunned on the concrete stump, paralyzed by what had just happened. Then someone behind them dropped a soda bottle, which made a loud crack and shattered on the concrete. Marilyn recalled that the noise woke them out of their shocked trance. "Some people were screaming," she said. "I mean, it was utter chaos by that time. But the first thing I remember is after that bottle hit and I looked down . . . everybody was laying flat on the ground almost. There might have been one or two people still standing but I would say that ninety-eight percent of the people were still laying flat on the side of the hill."

Abe never remembered getting down from the ledge or anything that happened in the immediate aftermath of the shooting except for his own anguished screams. A still photo taken by James Altgens of the Associated Press shows Marilyn and Abe in his hat and bow tie, holding the camera; they are faintly visible in the far background, having just gotten down from their perch.

Zapruder Film © 1967 (Renewed 1995) The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza

They moved toward the pergola where the Hesters had been standing during the motorcade, but in the panic and chaos, Abe soon got separated from the rest of them. He was by himself on the plaza, distraught and in a daze, with the camera still in his hand and the case slung over his shoulder, when he encountered Harry McCormick, a reporter from the Dallas Morning News. McCormick had been at the Trade Mart waiting for the president to arrive when he heard of the shooting. He rushed over to Dealey Plaza, where he spotted Abe holding his camera and immediately approached him to find out if he had caught the shooting on film.

Abe answered that he would not speak about the film with anyone but the federal authorities. In Harry's account, it was he who told Abe that the Secret Service would want to see the film, and he offered to get Dallas Secret Service chief Forrest Sorrels and bring him to Jennifer Juniors [the business which Abe owned].

Somehow Abe got back to the office. [His secretary] Lillian remembered that "Everybody was going nuts, turning on the television. There was nothing and you couldn't get anything on television . . . So anyway, he walked in, and he handed me the camera. He says, 'I've got it all on there.'" Abe later tried to piece together his memory of the traumatic first moments after the assassination. "Well, I was in a state of shock when I got back," he said, "and I was kicking and banging the desk. I couldn't understand how a thing like this could happen. I personally have never seen anybody killed in my life, and to see something like this, shooting a man down like a dog, I just couldn't believe."

His first instinct was to call his son, Henry. In his confusion, he dialed the home phone number and reached his daughter-in-law, Margie, instead, who had been home waiting for a furniture delivery and listening to the radio when the news broke. She knew that the president had been shot, but like everyone else in the nation, she did not know yet that he was dead.

This was one of the few stories I remember hearing from my childhood, perhaps because the innate awfulness of it impressed me. When I asked her to tell me the story, my mother recalled, "Papa called the house and said, 'Is Henry there?' and I said, 'He's at his office.' . . . He said the president had been killed. And I said, 'Well, he's been shot. He's been taken to Parkland Hospital.'"

He was distracted and rushing, she said, very anxious to reach Henry, never stopping to explain what he knew or that he had a film of the shooting. Like many others during that long hour between the shooting and the announcement that the president was dead, she tried to reassure him that the president was being treated at Parkland and might yet survive. But Abe insisted that the president was dead. "He knew," she said, and even fifty years later, I hear the sadness and resignation in her voice.

Back at his office, Abe was still in shock. Another reporter, Darwin Payne, learned of the film and tried to convince Abe to share it, and to give an interview. Abe insisted he would only turn the film over to the secret service or the FBI, who eventually arrived with Harry McCormick. Together, the reporters, the agents, and Abe went to find someone who could develop the film.

Getting the film developed was not as easy as one might think. At some point, Harry McCormick had suggested that they might have luck at the Dallas Morning News. So the group decided to go over there to try. They retrieved the camera from the company safe and left with the two police officers who had been waiting in the vestibule. The officers escorted Abe, [his business partner] Erwin, [Dallas Secret Service chief] Forrest Sorrels, and Harry McCormick in a squad car with its siren blaring, while Darwin Payne [a young reporter for the Dallas Times Herald] resumed his investigation by heading over to the Texas School Book Depository.

They arrived at the Dallas Morning News and inquired about processing the film, but, as Forrest Sorrels later put it in his Warren Commission testimony, "There was no one there that would tackle the job." Perhaps unwilling to let the film out of his sight, McCormick suggested they try the ABC affiliate WFAA‑TV, which was located right next door.

When they arrived, program director Jay Watson was already on the air, having interrupted the station's regular programming to cover the shooting. He was interviewing eyewitnesses from the scene and trying to report the news as it came in. It wasn't long before the producers nabbed Abe and put him on the air while Erwin stood off to the side, holding the camera inside its leather case. In retrospect, it's another strange twist in a story of coincidences that the man who caught the moment on film was himself caught on film almost immediately afterward, preserving his first, fresh impressions of the event that changed his life.

Abe Zapruder, in his office at Jennifer Juniors in the late 1960s. Used with permission of the Zapruder Family.

In the grainy black-and-white image, Abe is neatly dressed in a dark suit, with a white shirt, a small dark bow tie, and just the hint of a white pocket square. He is wearing glasses, the classic 1960s browline style framed in dark plastic along the top and rimless on the bottom. He is obviously agitated and upset, moving around uncomfortably in his chair and repeatedly clearing his throat as he speaks. Meanwhile, Watson is smoking and looks slightly bored, holding an on‑set phone to his ear and distractedly adjusting the microphone as Abe describes finding a place to shoot the pictures and what happened until the motorcade came into view.

"As the president was coming down . . . I heard a shot, and he slumped to the side like this," he said, slumping over. Still no reaction from Watson, who has the phone to his ear, looking off camera. "Then I heard another shot or two, I couldn't say whether it was one or two, and I saw his head practically open up"— Watson suddenly swivels around, leaning in and locking on as Abe raises his hand to his head, gesturing to show the explosion of the president's skull— "all blood and everything, and I just kept on shooting."

Watson is staring at him now, completely motionless. "That's about all," he says, deflated, and then there is a momentary pause, just the slightest shake of the head and exhale of breath as he struggles for composure. He looks down, shaking his head again, and I can almost see the adrenaline coursing through him, his disbelief and revulsion. Still shaking his head, he pushes himself to speak. "I'm just sick, I can't . . . terrible, terrible."

"I'm just sick, I can't . . . terrible, terrible."

It is one of the very few interviews that exist of my grandfather. I remember the first time I saw it. I was watching TV and I happened to pass by it as I was changing channels. I never knew the interview existed, and I remember the moment of shock and confusion as I realized I was seeing my own grandfather on TV, and I tried to absorb the fact, searching for a trace of familiarity that would connect me to him. I noticed his slight accent—not a pronounced Russian one but a kind of thickness or weight in his voice and a clipped way of speaking—as well as his breathlessness and agitation.

The full interview is longer than the bit I first saw. There's a second part where Abe speaks very little, referring first to the "sickening scene" and trying to make sense of his position relative to the shooting. I can see the wheels turning in his head. Then Watson interrupts him to start talking about himself and carry on with the business of broadcasting. There is a minute or two when Abe is not "on"; he is just sitting at the desk next to Jay Watson, biting his lips, shifting around, twitching his shoulder slightly.

The first part of the interview has been dissected and examined ad infinitum for clues about what Abe Zapruder, the quintessential eyewitness, recalled seeing. But I am mining the second part, too. I'm looking for gestures, facial expressions, his voice and accent, the emotions and thoughts going on inside his head and heart. I'm looking for my father, my brothers and cousins, looking for the bloodline that links us to this missing member of our family.

I remember excitedly calling my father to tell him that Papa Abe was on TV and asking him if he knew about this interview. I wish I could remember the entire exchange, but I only recall realizing that this information was not a revelation to my father. I might have been momentarily surprised that he didn't seem particularly impressed, but thinking of it now, I understand that this little clip would never have the importance for him that it did for me. After all, he had a lifetime of experiences with his father to recall. I had only snippets and fragments.

More than that, for me there was no clean way to untangle the memories that came from our family from those that came from his public identity. This was one of those times— like digging around in [William Manchester's definitive 1967 account of the assassination] when I was 11—when it occurred to me that there was an access route to my grandfather through the Zapruder film and the assassination. I understood, if vaguely, that his experience held not only information about the assassination but also clues about Abe Zapruder, clues that no one else would notice or look for but that were substance for the mental picture I wanted to create of him.

Abe Zapruder's camera, as seen in an exhibit at The Newseum in Washington, D.C. Getty Images

My periodic ache for my grandfather is hard to explain. I don't know if it's because of the film— because I felt somehow that he was public property and it didn't seem fair, in that most basic and elemental childhood way, to have to share him with strangers. Or if it was because my three living grandparents were such a big part of my life and his absence [Abe died when Alexandra was a baby] made the picture feel especially incomplete. Or because his death so clearly pained my father, which in turn pained me enough that I wanted to try to undo it. Or maybe it wasn't about him at all, but the way I first grappled with the finality of death, railed against it as all children must, and wanted to cheat it by cobbling together a picture that would bring him back to life.

"Don't you let anybody but an expert process this 8mm film."

While Abe shifted under the hot studio lights and breathed in Jay Watson's secondhand smoke, business was being conducted offscreen. McCormick and Sorrels were consulting with Bert Shipp, the assistant news director at WFAA‑TV, about what could be done with the film. They told him they might have something showing the assassination of the president taken by "some clothing manufacturer over here."

When Shipp asked them what kind of film it was, they told him, "Just film." But it wasn't just film. It was double 8mm color film, which was complicated and laborious to process. WFAA could process black- and-white film, and they could process 16mm, but this was way out of their league. Bert told them in no uncertain terms, "Let me tell you something. If you think you have in here what I think you have, don't you be running around to any Bert Shipps or anybody else trying to get them to develop this film. You call Kodak. You get them to open that lab. Don't you let anybody but an expert process this 8mm film."

Sorrels was convinced. Shipp called the Eastman Kodak lab near Love Field to see if they might be able to process the film that afternoon, but he couldn't get anyone on the line. As was the case everywhere, the staff at Kodak were in a state of shock over the president's murder. Phil Chamberlain, who was the production supervisor at Kodak, recalled: "When the news came that the president indeed had died, I cried, and had the receptionist announce it over the PA system. And then we planned to shut down the operations the rest of the afternoon. So we shut down the processing machines and people just . . . people just stood around in little groups crying and talking and commiserating."

With Jackie as a witness, Vice President Lyndon Johnson took the oath of office immediately aboard Air Force One, before the plane made its way back to Washington, D.C. from Texas. Getty Images

When Shipp couldn't get through via the regular channels, he called the emergency number instead and reached Jack Harrison, the staff supervisor on duty that day. Shipp put Agent Sorrels on the phone, who conveyed the urgency of the situation, saying, "We want to have you to process our film. We want you to shut your machines down and process the film we have here. How long will it take you to do it?" When he learned it would be about an hour and fifteen minutes, he told Harrison that they would be right over. "There'll be a lot of us so just leave it open for us, and no other film to be run."

The group piled into a police car to ride the five miles to the Eastman Kodak processing lab at 3131 Manor Way. It was just blocks from Love Field. At around the same time, Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as the thirty- sixth president of the United States. At the very moment the police car approached the Kodak plant, Air Force One could be seen taking off from Love Field, ascending steeply into the blue for the terrible trip home to Washington with the casketed body of President Kennedy and his widow on board.

From the book

Copyright (c) 2016 by Alexandra Zapruder. Reprinted by permission of Twelve/Hachette Book Group, New York, NY. All rights reserved.