Read Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination for Free Online

author to judge whether such suspicions are justified. What is clear, however, is that the best evidence, the President’s wounded body, was squandered. The deficiencies of the autopsy, and the mismanagement of the record, added fuel to the lasting controversy. 7
    Aside from the evidence of body and bullets, there is one further invaluable aid to any analysis of the assassination. This is the short but infinitely shocking film made by an amateur cameraman in the crowd, Abraham Zapruder. Having initially left his camera at home, Zapruder had hurried home to fetch it at the last moment. So it was that he came to make the eighteen seconds of truly apocalyptic film that has remained the subject of diverse interpretation. The most famous amateur movie in the world was shot from a vantage point on a low concrete wall to theright front of the approaching President. For all its fame, and although no description can replace actual viewing of the Zapruder film, its contents must be summarized here.
    As the motorcade turns to come straight toward his lens, Zapruder catches the last uneventful seconds, with the President and his wife smiling and waving in the sun. Then the limousine vanishes for a moment behind a street sign. When it emerges, the President is clearly reacting to a shot—his hands clenched and coming up to his throat. Governor Connally turns around to his right, peering into the backseat. He begins to turn back, goes rigid, and shows signs that he, too, has been hit. Jacqueline Kennedy looks toward her husband, who is leaning forward and to his left. There is an almost imperceptible forward movement of the President’s head, and then, abruptly, his skull visibly explodes in a spray of blood and brain matter. He is propelled violently back into the rear seat of the car, then bounces forward and slides to the left into Mrs. Kennedy’s arms. The savage backward lurch by the President occurs, to the eye, at the instant of the fatal wound to the head. Then, as Mrs. Kennedy apparently reaches for a fragment of her husband’s skull on the back of the car, a Secret Service agent jumps aboard from behind, and the limousine finally accelerates away.
    Abraham Zapruder sold his film to Life magazine for a quarter of a million dollars. The magazine later published still frames from the material, but the moving footage was not shown on television until March 1975. The film was a key tool for both official investigations, not least because it provides a near-precise time frame for the assassination.
    In 1978, however, it took on new importance, for its use in conjunction with a hitherto neglected item of evidence, one that was greeted as the most momentous single breakthrough in thecase since 1964. It followed news that the sounds in Dealey Plaza had apparently been recorded—and included identifiable gunshots.
    This evidence, if evidence it is, had been ignored for sixteen years. It was a battered blue “Dictabelt,” a routine recording of police radio traffic that had been made, just as on any ordinary day, on the day of the President’s murder. To the layman it is a mishmash of barely comprehensible conversation between policemen in the field and their dispatch office at headquarters. The gaps between speech seem a meaningless blur of distorted sound and static. That certainly is what was assumed by the Dallas police and the Warren Commission, who used the recording only to establish police movement and messages. The Dictabelt long lay abandoned in a filing cabinet at Dallas police headquarters, until a director of the police Intelligence Division took it home. There it might have stayed, were it not for the keen archival mind of a private researcher named Mary Ferrell. Long aware of the recording, she drew the attention of the Assassinations Committee to its possible significance.
    Recovered in 1978, the Dictabelt was submitted to Dr. James Barger, chief acoustical scientist for the firm of Bolt, Beranek and Newman. The