Menand on Zapruder Film

Regarding Abraham Zapruder’s film of the Kennedy assassination (Opinion, July 26), Louis Menand wrote that its “whole 26 seconds were finally broadcast on ABC in 1975.” The Zapruder film has never been shown in its entirety anywhere, any time. Four frames depicting the Stemmons Freeway sign as the presidential limousine passes behind it have been missing ever since Zapruder turned over his film to authorities. When confronted with the discovery of the frames’ absence, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover tersely explained that they had been lost during the editing process. No one has ever reproduced the film with those frames intact.

Menand’s notion that the film itself is somehow responsible for most of the “paranoia” concerning the assassination of John F. Kennedy is ludicrous. Any suspicions--and they are certainly justified--surrounding the official story of the event stem from the Warren Commission’s tawdry efforts to squeeze its lone gunman theory into the film’s reality.

Zapruder’s home movie didn’t make it easier to distort the truth, it made it more difficult to hide it.

BRIAN HAYES

Northridge

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Menand writes: “The Zapruder film is the Rosetta Stone of the Kennedy assassination theory. No one knows how to translate it. It is as dark and indeterminate as a modernist poem.”

Say what? The essence of the Rosetta Stone is that it does permit translation. To quote from the nearest encyclopedia at hand, Microsoft Encarta:

“(The) Rosetta Stone (is a) black basalt slab bearing an inscription that was the key to the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphics and thus to the foundation of modern Egyptology. . . . Because the inscription appears in three scripts, hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek, scholars were able to decipher the hieroglyphic and demotic versions by comparing them with the Greek version.”

As far as I can tell, the Rosetta Stone’s qualities are exactly the opposite of the qualities Menand attributes to the Zapruder film.

ARTHUR METZ

Irvine