The JFK Assassination: The human narratives behind one of history's most scrutinised events (454)

0:00Welcome to Cold War Conversations, the home of real stories of the Cold War. Honey, did you invite the Minions over? Well, you know how we talked about getting Wi-Fi from Xfinity? Yeah. I ordered it this morning. It was online in minutes. Then, they showed up. So they just came over to use the Wi-Fi? For what?

0:21Better not to know. Get online in minutes with same-day Wi-Fi from Xfinity. Plus, lock in your price for five years. And see Minions and Monsters only in theaters. Xfinity. Imagine that. Restrictions apply. Not available in all areas. Learn more at Xfinity.com slash same-day Wi-Fi. Did you know with the Sam's Club app, you're technically in the club, no matter where you are? Like, this is a club. This is also a club. And this is a club. My bad. Come join us. Sam's Club. I see Dealey Plaza like a kind of Lowry painting. There's all these individual characters. But what really interested me was that these people have chosen to avoid the main event.

1:02of Kennedy and Main Street. But then what happens if you opt out of that main event, but you then become part of the most studied six seconds in the 20th century? Dallas, 22nd of November 1963. The main event is supposed to be on the appropriately named Main Street. News footage shows office workers leaning out of windows, peering at a motorcade through a blizzard of ticker tape. On the sidewalks the crowds are 50 deep. A wall of noise and celebration. Everybody thinks this is the place to be. Well nearly everyone. A few blocks away in Dealey Plaza the scene is different. There is no ticker tape here and the crowds are thin.

1:46A dressmaker with vertigo films the action balanced on a concrete plinth. A man is opening an umbrella even though it isn't raining. A construction worker will claim he was sent here by God and three mysterious tramps will shortly be arrested. I speak with Martin Fitzgerald who has written a new book The Umbrella Man and Other Stories. This is a book about memory, how we construct our shared history and what happens when your life is defined by a single fleeting moment. It's a celebration of human nature, the joy of research and the freedom of an open mind. Above all, it reveals the stories of a group of real people who thought that they had opted out of the main event only to find themselves at the centre of the most scrutinised six seconds of the 20th century.

2:35I'm delighted to welcome Martin Fitzgerald to our Cold War conversation. It dates back to a history lesson when I was at school in South East London, age 14, and up to that point history lessons involved the teacher reading out facts and the pupils writing them down to learn them until one day the teacher came in and said right we're going to do a class on the JFK assassination. I don't really know if anyone in the class even knew who JFK was but the teacher explained the basic facts that he was the president of the United States, He got shot on November 22nd, 1963. There's a man called Lee Harvey Oswald who was arrested approximately 90 minutes later.

3:28And then Lee Harvey Oswald was killed live on TV in police custody two days later. The subsequent investigation into these events concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and that there was no conspiracy in the assassination of the president. But then there was a subsequent investigation in 1978 called the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which concluded that in all likelihood there probably was a conspiracy. So the teacher laid out those facts, and then he went through a few of the theories relating to the CIA, the mafia, the FBI. And then he handed out a map. And I remember seeing this map like it was yesterday.

4:18One of the things I love about this subject is it has its own lexicon. Okay, so there was a grassy knoll, which were two words I've never seen put together before. There was a triple underpass, which to this day I only know in the context of the JFK assassination. Then, of course, there was the Texas School Book Depository. and you know a funny thing in is if you google the minnesota school book depository or the california school book depository do you know what comes up first the texas school book depository because it's the only school book depository so it had its own language and oh and by the way i've never met anyone called zapruder either so so it wasn't just the geography it was the it was the witnesses had had these and i was sort of fascinated by it and then as a class we we you know we kicked around some theories for you know 20 minutes and then the teacher came back and he said right what do you think what do you think happened and i immediately looked to a pupil called juliet fuller she was always top of the class she always knew everything and she put her hand up and she said it may have been the CIA and the teacher looked at her and he said anyone else now Juliet Fuller had never heard anyone else Juliet Fuller had only ever heard correct answer so a bunch of other kids felt licensed to just put their hands up as well and and and for a you know classroom that never heard of Kennedy an hour ago we were suddenly implicating everyone in his murder Cubans Russians uh the the FBI the CIA and then at the end we looked at the teacher and said well what's the answer and he said well I don't really know either and I thought okay that's interesting that's cool I like that it was uh more interesting than the uh dissolution of the monasteries which is a which I'm not saying that's not an interesting subject but I like the fact it was open-ended and then after that it was just a series of coincidences that that in 1988 so a few years later it was the 25th anniversary of the assassination which was a big a big anniversary first big anniversary of the assassination there was lots of documentaries on the telly the men who killed kennedy aired for the first time another key factor in which is strange for jfk researcher is that some of my favorite bands were writing songs about the assassination so bands like the wedding present and the fall uh who are two english bands and i thought okay this this subject may be cool because these i love these bands and they're writing songs about the assassination and then of course in 1991 oliver stone released jfk which is a uh it's a somewhat flawed film but it's an incredible piece of cinema and i remember going to see it and i mean people talk about how many shots there were in Dee Dee Plaza.

7:18There's 1 ,600 shots in that film. That film is edited. It's incredibly well. It moves so quickly. I remember walking out of the cinema, you know, just sort of mouth open, going to the nearest Wimpy, getting some food and just going back to the cinema. And then since then, I've just always had an interest in it. I started to read books um I eventually went to Dallas um and it's never it's never left me and despite the fact that I think now it is you know sometimes you mention this subject and people roll their eyes and I understand that because the subject has been somewhat hijacked by by extremists and people on message boards that only communicate with caps on.

8:13But I like the, I think it's such a rich story. I think it's comparable to the history of the Beatles in terms of its richness. And to just argue about who did it would be like, in the case of the Beatles, just talking about who was the best, Paul or John. So as I learned more about the subject and as I traveled to Dallas more, I started to find stories that were underappreciated and often not told, which is why I thought I'd write a bookie. Well, that was going to be my question as to why you thought that another JFK book is needed when there must be tens of thousands hundreds of thousands out there 40 000 uh there's 40 000 books on the assassination um and uh there's an entire library in washington dc which just has jfk assassination books and you're not alone asking this question in fact it was the first question my publisher asked um so so i told them what i'm now going to tell your listeners which is i believe i have a different angle to this story and my angle is this on the 22nd of November 1963 the main event that day was supposed to happen in Main Street in Dallas so Kennedy was coming to Dallas to shore up the uh Democrat vote um but also to to kind of unite the warring factions in the the Texas Democratic Party and the central part of his day as far as the public were concerned was going to be him in his motorcade driving down Main Street and if you look at the footage and the photographs of Kennedy in Main Street it's you can you can you really get a sense that this was the place to be so the sidewalks are 60 70 deep there's people hanging out of windows looking through a blizzard of ticker tape all of the professional news broadcasters are in Main Street all of the best photographers are in Main Street so if Main Street is the party then Dealey Plaza is the kitchen and Ian we all know what sort of people end up in the kitchen at parties the most interesting I would say so I started to look at Dealey Plaza and I thought and it's just a few blocks away from Main Street.

10:54And when you look at Dealey Plaza, well, the sidewalks aren't 50, 60 deep. They're in places one deep, but in other places you can just walk up to the curb. There aren't any professional broadcasters there. There's a dressmaker with vertigo called Abraham Zapruder, and he's standing on a four-foot plinth being held by his secretary so that he doesn't fall over. and he's going to become our documentarian for this event. To his left, there's a man on the curb and he's going to open up an umbrella on an otherwise sunny day. He's the only man in Dealey Plaza with an open umbrella. And as soon as he opens it, Kennedy gets shot.

11:38Following him round, there's a construction worker with an aluminium helmet on and he's sitting outside a building called the Texas School Book Depository. And he's going to look up just before the assassination and he's going to see something. And what he sees is going to become the official story. But he's going to tell everyone for the rest of his life that he was sent there by God in order to see this. And so on and so on. So I see Dealey Plaza like a kind of Lowry painting of there's all these individual characters. And some of them have had a huge impact on the assassination. some of them has have you know have been hugely affected by the assassination but what really interested me was when you read their testimonies the fact that they were in Deedee Plaza is not just not just situational they often made that decision because they didn't they didn't want to go to the main event and I'm that sort of person Ian right so that if I'm at a festival and everyone's going to you know the pyramid stage at glastonbury sometimes there's a trickle of people going in a different direction going somewhere else sometimes you might go to the you know louvre in uh in paris but you might not be there to see the mona lisa where everyone else is so i i started to think well hang on a sec this is a personality trait that these people have chosen to avoid the main event so then what happens if you opt out of that main event but you then become part of the most studied six seconds in the 20th century and that was my angle really was that these people in a kind of world obviously without mobile phones and anything like that it was it was it was these people which shaped our understanding of the assassination and I was fascinated by that and I was fascinated by their stories and I wanted to give these witnesses more than just those six seconds I wanted to tell their their almost their whole lives but really focus on what what impact this event had on them that's one of the many things that I've really enjoyed about this book is is you're you know you're looking at these ordinary citizens and how they come to be there for this incredible event and how it changes their lives forever because they're on on the scene yeah and and and i should also say the other thing that i i wanted to do i mean having read lots and lots of books on this subject um i have i've sometimes been left with the feeling that i've been cornered you know by a by a you know lunatic in a pub and i wanted to write something which um gave the reader the sense that they were in the company of a friend so i was trying to give some air to this subject so i'm completely agnostic on the topic of who did it this if you want to read a book about jfk assassination and find out whether it was leah v oswald or whether it was a conspiracy this is not the book for you um i do touch on some of that stuff but i but but i i i have seen myself people become um and and also this subject has been sort of lumped in with things like 9-11 conspiracy theories moon landings q and on and it's to me it's not like that at all this is just a cold case that never went to trial and so I wanted to give the subject some air by focusing not on those thorny topics that become so argumentative and focus instead on these on these stories and in some cases these puzzles why did a man open on and up an umbrella on a sunny day just as Kennedy got shot a 10 year old would want to solve that and you don't need to have any prior knowledge of the assassination you don't need to know about kennedy's foreign policy you just really it's such a tantalizing puzzle that that i wanted to to focus on things like that and i also wanted the book to be there is some there is some emotion in the book obviously this is a tragic event but the book is also fun um and i and i sort of wanted to to to make it accessible to people that i mean i almost called it everything you wanted to know about the jfk assassination but but we're but we're afraid to ask um and it but it but it is that it's a it's a book that is is accessible and it's fun to read as i say i don't think at the end of it you will feel like you've been cornered by a lunatic in a pub although you might maybe you will i i doubt it very much i mean i think what one of the the reasons i really enjoy is it's very much sort of in the frame of how i like to record my cold conversations interviews is it's about not who done it but the what that experience was like being there how they felt and as i said before how it's impacted them in in in future life and the book is titled the umbrella man and other stories so can we start with the umbrella man because he's if if anybody's familiar with the jfk assassination he's probably the most famous person of interest that people have focused in on yes so the umbrella man's story is is very very simple as i say that that as kennedy's uh motorcade goes past the book depository uh comes towards elm street he's got the triple under he's a hundred yards away from the triple underpass and then he's going to be on the freeway heading to the trademark to do his speech so this really is the end of the motorcade it's the the exit is almost marked out in front of him and on the north curb of elm street a man opens up an umbrella and as he does that kennedy gets shot and as i say it's not raining to where the umbrella man becomes interesting and and you often find us in a lot of these stories Ian is these stories tell us more about us than they do about the individual involved so when the Warren Commission um concluded its investigation into the assassination in 1964 which ran for 16 ,000 pages and interviewed hundreds of witnesses there was no mention of this man with an umbrella even though he's visible in a Supruda film even though there were photographs of him that were published in the papers on the day.

18:53There was no mention of the young Bella man. And of course, this led to, you know, people wondering why. People looking at that photo and thinking, well, this doesn't make sense. It looks on the one hand like a very benign image but surely it can't be a coincidence that this man has opened up an umbrella at the time when Kennedy got shot so of course people naturally started to come up with their own theories um and those theories if you're listening to this you may have already developed the most obvious that people always say to me when I tell this story is that well surely he was providing a signal that he was part of the ground team on the assassination and he was providing a signal for multiple assassins to start shooting.

19:56And then another theory was that the umbrella itself contained a poison dart, which the idea was to immobilize. I mean, you laugh at it, but this dart was designed to immobilize Kennedy so that the shooters could then kill him. When you analyze both of those theories, which, I mean, the first one in particular, the signal one is perfectly understandable. But when you analyze them, they really do fall apart just under the mere scrutiny because if the umbrella was a signal, well, how effective would that signal have been if it was raining that day as it was on the morning of the 22nd of November 1963?

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22:14Introducing Meta Glasses. Hey Meta, any last minute tables for two tonight? Sure, there's a great Italian restaurant 15 minutes away. Hey Meta, where's the nearest flower shop? Five minutes away, straight down Broadway, past the bodega. Their lilies are trending on Instagram. Just saying. Hey Meta, am I forgetting anything else? How about setting a calendar reminder for next year? Meta Glasses, available in more than 20 styles. and also I just can't imagine the recruitment of that man where the man says so let me get this straight you want me to stand near a limousine open up an umbrella and then as I do that everyone's going to start shooting from multiple directions no thank you but in the absence of any other theory it was a theory and then this speculation reached its peak in 1967 where john updike the uh pulitzer prize winning author started to write about the unveil man in the new yorker in his in his column the talk of the town and i'm going to read out what john up what uh what john uh um updike says because this this this quote is so perfect in terms of what i'm trying to do with this book updike says we wonder whether a genuine mystery is being concealed here, or whether any similar scrutiny of a minute section of time and space would yield similar strangeness, gaps, inconsistencies, warps, and bubbles in the surface of circumstance.

23:56It's a beautiful quote, and the sense of, if you put anything under the microscope, then perhaps you might see these strange things. The story then took a twist in the mid-70s during a church committee where a former head of the CIA, I forget his name temporarily, testified to the church committee, which was a committee about really overreach by the intelligence services and he admitted that in 1963 the cia were developing poison darts and they were they were using umbrellas as a form of delivering that dart i still think as a theory it's it's like i would never understand why trained assassins looking through telescopic scopes would ever give the first shot to a man with an umbrella and a dog.

25:04And also, frankly, if you want to immobilize someone, that's what the high-powered rifles are for. But this testimony to the church committee really did give this theory some credence. In 1975, the American public saw this approve the film for the first time. They saw Kennedy's head go back into the left. There was a general unease amongst the American public that they had been lied to, that things had been covered up. So a new investigation was put together, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, and its aim was to fill in all of the gaps from the original investigation. And of course, one of those gaps was the umbrella man.

25:50And it was through that investigation that the umbrella man finally came forward 15 years after the event and he told his story. If you want to hear his story, you're going to have to buy the book. I can guarantee your listeners one thing. they will never guess it they will never guess what he has to say but students of the Cold War I would say Ian are going to have more chance of believing him than other people I believe his story but the fascinating thing about him is is that you know what it tells about you know as i said earlier you know what it says about us our desire to make sense of things um there's a similar incident recently where there was a heist at the louvre i don't know if you remember that i think it was the end of last year and there was a there was a there was a young french guy dressed as a victorian detective that was in some of the photos do you remember that yeah yeah i do there was a day or so of people saying well hang on a minute what's going on here and i think they located him and it turned out he's just a teenager who just enjoyed dressing like that um the umbrella man is is has a much more interesting ending and it was 15 years uh that that people had to that that you know had to sort of wait for it but the fascinating thing about the umbrella man is that in those 15 years between 63 and 78 he had no idea he was a person of interest right so he just went back to work that day with his umbrella he never read any books on the assassination he never studied the Warren Commission he didn't know that he was the talk of the town in the New Yorker.

27:56He had no idea. And actually when he saw the advert in the papers asking him to come forward, he just put it in the bin. It was only because one of his work colleagues phoned up the number and said, I know this guy, this is what his name is. And this is where he works. And within an hour, there was a bunch of journalists. at his work and they all said the same thing are you the umbrella man so he's he's like the guy on uh the cover of that of abbey road by the beatles i don't know if you know but there's a there is a there's a tourist from florida who's in the background of the cover of abbey road he had no idea he was on the cover of abbey road until his wife who was a piano teacher bought the album so she could she could teach her students some of the souls and he looked at me and he said hang me that's me that's me so yeah people think that that these these these you know witnesses um and look in in many cases it did it did define their lives and there were suddenly a lot of potential authors in dd plaza you know yeah just by being there's a lot of books written by this by this fairly sparse crowd um a lot of these people have got wikipedia pages um but there are some people like the umbrella man that just went back to work uh and he and he was not he was not a student of the assassination at all so for 15 years he he was he was completely oblivious to everything it's it's incredible you know being involved in an event like that and not wanting to to know more about it but then i guess on my level of curiosity is somewhat different to uh most other most other people's yeah and look i mean every facet of human nature is in deedy plaza which is one of the one of the points of the book really which is that you can't treat all of these people the same there are people in deedy plaza that themselves became amateur detectives on this case but there are some people and when you when you get to know the umbrella man's story it makes sense because he wasn't particularly into politics he didn't even like kennedy right so he was just there at an event and he did something something that he was he was probably embarrassed about and then he and then he and then he got on with his life and this was not this is you know this is the days before the internet obviously so he just didn't read the books that that that all of the people that weren't at the event did and it's those people that can't understand his actions because they're fascinated by the subject and they can't understand why someone who was there doesn't have that fascination at all and and just almost compartmentalized it in his mind for 15 years i mean probably the most famous witness who's there and we've mentioned him already in this um chat is abraham sapruda who filmed the color cine film which is now iconic as far as the documenting exactly what happened there but i found it fascinating that he'd actually left his camera at home that day and his secretary i think encouraged him to go back and and get it so so so he's a classic example of this personality trait which i'm talking about which is that the people that can't be bothered with the main event and the crowds so he was a really enthusiastic you know sort of amateur filmmaker everyone knew that about him and he also owned a dress manufacturer called Jennifer Juniors and his office was in Dealey Plaza in a building called the Dal Tex building short for Dallas Textiles and that's right next door to the Texas School Book Depository so Abraham Zapruder knew that Kennedy was going to be passing by his office that day but as he woke up in the morning he just thought I'll have to jostle for position I'll have to and he just thought I can't be bothered I can't be bothered so he goes to work and join a coffee break at around 10 o 'clock I think maybe two and a half hours before Kennedy's due he gets um he gets he gets you know harangued by a bunch of his own employees and they all say Abe go and get your camera we know how much you love taking films going and he keeps on demuring and saying no and they're like hey just do it go and get your camera and then about an hour later they can't find him um because he has gone to get his camera and he's now you know driving back to to uh you know downtown dallas on the passenger seat of his car is the bell and hell zoomatic camera it has no electricity it has no batteries the only power it gets is from the user winding it up and there are 26 seconds of film left on this camera and that's on the passenger seat meanwhile in his office his assistant Lillian Rogers gets on the loudspeaker and says to the entire workforce at Jennifer Juniors the president is due in an hour I don't care what your politics are whether you like him or not um you you are going to take an extended lunch break and you are going to go out and you're going to go and see the president.

33:45Now, one of the employees that takes advantage of this is a receptionist called Marilyn Sitzman. Not because she wants to see Kennedy, though. She has this idea. She thinks, great, I'm going to use this opportunity to go and open a bank account. Because Marilyn Sitzman didn't have a bank account, they got paid in cash back then. And she was not a fan of Kennedy, like a lot of Dallas. I mean, Dallas was the city that Kennedy lost by the biggest margin in the 1960 election. So Marilyn Sitzman thinks, I'm going to go and open a bank account. Meanwhile, Supruda comes back to his office with his camera.

34:22And the only person there is his assistant, Lillian Rogers, because she sent everyone off. And the first thing Supruda says is, OK, well, I'd better mind the place. Because he was the boss. He said, I'd better look after this. and he gives the camera to Lillian Rogers and he says I tell you what you go and film it and Lillian is is she's like I don't know how it works Abe you go and do it and they'd pervarrate for a bit and in the end Lillian Rogers basically pushes him out the door and says you go and film the mate of Kate I'll look after the offices and then Abraham Zapruder is on the north curb of Elm Street.

35:08He's very near the umbrella man, actually. He's between the grassy knoll and the Texas School Book Depository. And he takes a couple of test shots of some of his employees, but he's looking for a vantage point. He's looking for somewhere to take this film. Meanwhile, who walks up? Marilyn Sitzman, the receptionist that had gone to open a bank account. What happened? All the banks in Dallas are closed. and she says to Abraham Zapruder, what are you doing? And he says, I'm trying to find a place to film this motorcade. Marilyn Sitchman looks around, and on a raised bit of grass behind her, on the north curb of Elm Street, there is a white four-foot concrete plinth, which is still there today.

35:58And she points at it, and she says to Abraham Zapruder, what about there? and he says well i've got vertigo she says it's fine i'll stand behind you and i'll hold you she would never get away with these days i mean you know hr would be would be all over that um but but back in 63 it was it was fine so the two of them climb up um onto this four foot plinth which is very difficult to, you know, get onto. I mean, I've tried to do it as a much younger man than Abraham Sapruda, not wearing a suit. It's not easy. But they get up there, and of course, now he has a view, you know, over the small crowd, and then he sees a motorcycle, and he starts his camera, and he quickly realises that the motorcycle is just an outrider.

36:55so he presses stop and then he sees two more motorcycles coming through and he sees a car and he says to himself okay let's go and then he then he presses play start shooting and he's the only person that captured the assassination from start to finish and if you look at the film and i'm sure everyone listening to this has seen it but it's always worth going back and looking at it again what you're struck by is how steady he was how he never flinched how he caught everything and he was asked in later life how did you do that because he's watching all of this through a zoom lens and he would say himself that he didn't know how he did that um but he was the first person to really the first witness to really you know really appreciate that Kennedy had died and he got down from that plinth and he told anyone that would listen that that Kennedy's head exploded it was horrific um and his story again is is there's so much kind of breadth to his story this wasn't the first murder he'd ever seen um he was an immigrant from Ukraine and when the Subruda family fled the camps in Eastern Europe, I think when they got to Poland, they took his brother off the train and killed him in front of him.

38:31And then his story after the assassination is a story of such sort of dedication to his family and to trying to do the right thing but also just just how haunted he was by by by what he saw and what he captured and on the night of the assassination he has a terrible nightmare where he's walking down broadway in new york and there's a kind of huckster on the street saying roll up roll up come and see the president's head uh you know get you know blown up and he wakes up the next morning he becomes resigned to to you know selling this film so that he has no responsibility for anymore as you know through doing these doing these podcasts here and you know history doesn't choose its uh you know witnesses or its or its documentarians but in abraham zapruder you couldn't have chosen someone better in terms of the way he preserved that film the way he was sensitive towards the family um the first bit of money he got for the film um he gave it to to the widow of jd tippet who was the policeman that got killed in uh oak cliff just after the assassination and and it's it's become it i mean it is the kind of bayern tapestry of the assassination and it's it's it's symbolic of the time it was shot and you look at it and it's got the sprocket holes.

40:02I mean, nowadays there'd be thousands of images, but he was the only one that did it and he was the most reluctant witness you can imagine. He's the embodiment of, you know, psychology trait that I'm talking about, of someone that didn't want to insert himself in the story, that didn't want to compete with other people. So he left his camera at home and then, you know, five hours later i think what we forget is this isn't video as well this is film so he he has to go and get that developed well that's the amazing thing so so it's quickly the word spreads around dd plaza that that there's a guy that might have filmed it all and he gets approached by the secret service and what actually first he gets approached by a journalist uh who is offered him money and Zapruder says no no no I'm not interested in that I just needs to go to the proper authorities which again you have to give them credit for um so he talks to a secret service guy secret service guy phones up phones up the Kodak lab at Love Field the airport and the guys at Kodak are like look we're just we're just wrapping up we're thinking of going home secret service guy says you're not going anywhere right you'll need to stay there keep the doors open it'll be there in an hour we have a film you need to develop so they all drive to love field and as they approach the kodak lab again it's one of just remarkable coincidences as they approach the kodak lab air force one is taken off with kennedy's body in a coffin and a new president being sworn in it happens almost simultaneously and then they go into kodak and they give them this film and i don't know if you remember and i'm sure a lot of i'm sure a lot of your listeners will remember the days where when you went on holiday and you took films that you then came back and you had to get them developed and you were never quite sure whether they were any good or not and you thought i really hope that picture i got you know outside you know whatever really was really good but you never know and you're slightly anxious well this is like that but times a thousand because they don't really know what he's got and they run it through the projector and the first thing on the film is just a couple of kids in a garden playing there is their subruder's grandchildren and he says oh sorry i've completely forgot about that and then they they show the film um and there's complete silence as you could imagine this is an hour or two after the assassination and at the end of it one of the secret service guys just says oh my god now the remarkable thing is that the u.s government then don't take ownership of the film so there's there's three copies created um one for the fbi i think one for the secret service a copy for abraham sapruder and he also gets to keep the in-camera original so they've got what they that what you know what they wanted and abraham sapruder drives home again the bell and hail camera is on the passenger seat with a copy of the of the film and he gets home and his wife greets him at the door and she just says oh Abe because she knows what's happened and Abraham Zapruder walks past her and he goes into his basement and he sets up his projector and he just spends all evening watching it and it's incredible when you think about it it's incredible and then the story of how that film was commercialized is again incredible the story is that everyone tried to rip him off everyone thought he's just this immigrant guy he's a dressmaker you know so these people at life magazine or and in you know later years the american government they've all tried to rip off the sapruda family but they had no idea who they were dealing with as i say it wasn't the first murder he'd ever witnessed

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44:57So I thought it would be fun if we made$15 bills. But it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of$45 for three months,$90 for six months, or$180 for 12-month plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. See terms. He's the great, he's the great American immigrant story. You know, he came from, from, from Eastern Europe, um, worked in the, you know, garment district in Brooklyn. He has this fantastic phrase about dressmaking, which I love, which is a dress is easy.

45:39You just need a front and a back and a couple of sleeves, you know, and that's the kind of guy we're talking with. It's the kind of guy we're talking about and and so yeah life magazine tried to rip him off and he got double the amount of money that they were authorized to offer him at first in the end in the early 90s obviously abraham sabruda has been has been a long since dead the american government end up end up paying the Zapruder family, I think it's$16 million, to own the film because they wanted to own it as an assassination record. And that went to arbitration. So I think he's a real hero, Abraham Zapruder.

46:32Some people have criticized the family for making money off it. but actually there's another way of looking at that story which is as i've said people tried to rip him off and he was too smart for them he's a to me he's a great american hero and you know what would our understanding of that event be without his film and and and and and even if that film you know wasn't as good as what it was it's it's such a clear view of that assassination that it shaped our understanding of it yeah yeah if he hadn't shot that film there's probably be a hundred thousand books on the uh assassination yeah and when you look at the film again you can see the um you can see the umbrella you can see the umbrella at the stemmons um you know freeway sign in a distance you can see the construction worker with a shiny aluminium helmet sitting opposite the texas school book depository the only person who's not in his film of course is lee harvey oswald but he captures everything it was it was it was the bedrock of the investigation whilst his is the only cinematic record of the assassination there are loads of uh still pictures and there are characters in those which do create various theories out there but i think one of the things that I found really interesting in the book is there's a number of black people who are on Dealey Plaza and they never come in to give a witness statement or anything like that.

48:08And I think what I found fascinating and which I already knew was about the situation for black people in the south of the US at that point around racial prejudice in the Jim Crow system. So, you know, one of the things that happens with the assassination a lot is that people look at photographs or they look at the Subruda film and people say, well, I wouldn't have acted like that.

48:40Therefore, something strange is going on. and in the case of some of the black witnesses the most famous one uh is a guy with a black cap who was sitting next to umbrella man after the assassination and he had his hand in the air at the time that the umbrella man opened his umbrella and people have thought that these two are together because they sit next to each other after the assassination and again they think his hand in the air as a signal and in some photos they think that he is he is talking into a sort of portable radio and this guy has never come forward we do not know who this guy is and of course people find that suspicious um and the JFK research community is overwhelmingly male and overwhelmingly white so when they say things like well he looks pretty calm you know sitting on the curb afterwards sitting next to umbrella man he looks pretty calm um and it's kind of weird that he never came forward well put yourself in the shoes of a black man in dallas in 1963 this was a city that at the turn of the century a third of all eligible men a third were members of the clan and the district attorney in 1963 a guy called henry wade who was the famous wade in you know roe versus wade the famous abortion case he was the guy that would have prosecuted he was the guy that would have prosecuted lee harvey Oswald he said in 1963 that he didn't want any blacks Mexicans Jews Hispanics or Irish on any jury in Dulles right so and of course you've got the whole Jim Crow system of segregation there so there were actually lots of examples and I go through them in the book of other black witnesses that never came forward there was a young couple on the who were on the grassy knoll who were 16, 17.

50:52They were seen by Marilyn Sitzman, the woman holding Abraham Sabruda. She was very near them. And as soon as the shots happened, they just ran. They're probably still alive, Ian. They were only 16, 17 at the time. But if you were black in Dallas and there were shots being fired and there were police, you got out of there. And when you look at some of the black witnesses that were questioned, particularly the guys in the Texas School Book Depository that were identified in the photos as employees so they had no choice but to come forward when you look at the way that they were questioned they were all asked the same thing have you been in trouble with the law before?

51:36now none of the white witnesses were asked that so again to understand the assassination and to understand some of the people involved in it you have to understand the geography of Dallas and the politics of Dallas and it's no good people like me saying well I wouldn't have acted like that because I'm not a black man in Dallas in 1963 and what you often get is people looking at photographs it's a constant theme in the book of whether it's the babushka lady whether it's the black guy with a cap on whether it's umbrella man people say these people look suspiciously calm and they forget that there's someone on the other side of that camera a photographer who is also calm because they're taking a photograph in the middle of an assassination but it's this thing about zooming in too much and the final thing about the guy with the black cap is i always call him the black cap man but people listening to this may know him as another name so he's been called in assassination research for years he's been called the dark complected man which is still to this day still to this day this man is called the dark complected man so the only thing that you used to identify was the colour of his skin and people wonder why he never came forward i would venture it could be because he's a black man in dallas and the way that we've identified him is to draw attention to the color of his skin i could be wrong he could be part of the ground team i'm just like everyone else you know thinking out loud but i think what i offer in the book is some corroboration with other um african-american witnesses that also didn't come forward just to But just to try and say, look, I think there is a theme here.

53:41And we need to think about this sort of stuff because it's not as easy as just looking at there's a, there's a, another chapter in the book about the three tramps. So people may be aware that there were three tramps arrested in Deedee Plaza just after the assassination. And they were paraded through the plaza by some policemen. and again people looked at these photos and they thought well they don't look like tramps you know particularly two of them they've got they've got crisp collars they've got new shoes they got they're freshly shaved so then they become suspects as well and if you watch the oliver stone film jfk he basically pins the assassination on these tramps and and and to give the researchers some sort of benefit of the doubt here what makes the tramp story interesting is well okay they they they got arrested so we must know who they are but actually when people went to the dallas police to to you know find their arrest records they'd vanished so again it creates suspicion you've got tramps who don't look like tramps you've got arrest records that have gone that have been banished and again that mystery wasn't solved until the early 90s that dragged on and on and on and it's the same thing people looking at people people looking at things and thinking that's strange and sometimes that's a good thing to do if you look at you look at the boston marathon where there was you know where there was the uh bomb um the reason why they call the Boston Marathon bombers was because they looked at CCTV and when the bomb went off everyone in the crowd was looking in one direction apart from one guy that was looking in another direction and the FBI followed this guy through CCTV and he turned out to be one of the bombers so I'm not I'm not saying it's not a legitimate thing to do I'm just saying it's not it's not always conclusive particularly from a still photo you know how how do you know what the intentions of that person are i mean if i've just seen somebody shot in front of me i'd be sitting down in shock trying to take in what was going on what had just happened yeah we we would all be doing different things and one of my favorite photos of the assassination which is on the on the cover of the book actually is it's taken 90 seconds after the assassination there's a policeman on a motorcycle speeding down elm street heading to the triple underpass on the north curb of elm street there's um a young couple called bill and gail newman and they are shielding their their children who are four years old and two years old they are covering them on the bank of grass terrified but next to them are three photographers it almost looks stage deal right because you've got two people covering their children terrified but you have three photographers who've got the wherewithal to think i need to capture this and then next to them sitting on the curb is the umbrella man and the black cat man and that's why i chose that photo for the cover of the book because I think it covers everything.

57:13If you only look at the photo of the Newmans that those photographers took, it looks like a terrifying situation. It's a mum and a dad laying on top of young children. But if you zoom out, you see three men in their 20s and 30s who are just calmly taking photographs. and and people react differently because people have different jobs to do so you know the journalist that came up with the name the grass you know a guy called merriman smith who who christened it i think at 12 32 two minutes after the assassination he was he was in a car behind kennedy but he was on the phone to his to his you know central office you know describing what happened people do different things because they've got different responsibilities and people react differently to events you've just said that if you saw someone shot you would you would sit on the curb in a in a complete state of shock that's what the umbrella man said he did but other people that weren't there look at that and they say well he looks suspiciously calm shock and calm can look the same yeah i know it's the problem with with One of the phrases I use a lot in the book is this idea of zooming in.

58:38And it goes back to that John Updike quote that if you zoom in on any event, you will see things that the observer may think is strange. You've been to Dallas a number of times and you've met some of the people that have been there. Now, they must have been questioned hundreds and hundreds of times about their experiences. What new did you find from them? Or how did you approach speaking to them that wasn't something that had been asked a hundred times before? So there's a witness in the book called Dr. Tony Glover. She was 11 years old, joined the assassination. So she's one of the last few surviving witnesses.

59:29And she's done over a thousand interviews. When I first got in touch with her to be interviewed for the book, I was very clear. I said, look, I promise you one thing. I'll never ask you how many shots there were, from what direction, over what time span. And I'll never ask you who you think did it. And she replied within 10 minutes and said, what time do you want to talk? and I got a lovely story out of Tony about what she was doing in Deedee Plaza that day, what she was hoping to achieve. Again, she's part of this personality trait that I'm talking about, of not wanting to go to Main Street. She wanted to achieve something in Deedee Plaza.