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In the afternoon of November 25, 1963, the day of Kennedy’s funeral, Hughes Rudd and Richard C. Hotelett were speaking on CBS Radio when Rudd suddenly exclaimed, “Dick, ah, Dan Rather just came into the studio.” Rudd went on to ask Rather, “What do you have that’s new—anything?” Struggling to find the proper words, Rather began to explain that he had just attended a projection of the Zapruder film. “I . . . have just returned from seeing a . . . a movie . . . which clearly shows in some great detail the exact moments preceding , the exact moments of, the president’s assassination,” he hesitantly said, uncertain of what Rudd and Hotelett had been talking about before he entered the studio. “I think it fits right into the context of what we’ve been saying,” Hotelett suggested, and invited Rather to share his experience, upon which the young reporter said: “Well, let me tell you, then, give you a word picture of the motion picture that we have just seen.”1 In a sense, the “word picture” that followed represents the first public projection of the Zapruder film. When Rather went on the air with his description , the film had not been broadcast and individual frames were yet to be printed. His narrative reached thousands of Americans listening in their homes; several of these and many more would turn on the television later that same day to see Rather appear there too, giving a similar depiction after These memories, like those of every previous national tragedy, would eventually fade into the dry pages of history, were it not for the camera’s eye that recorded with immediacy and color the event of those 72 hours. And with this record, future generations shall also become privileged witnesses to the actual event, to be present and shaken and reawakened as we were. // John F. Kennedy Memorial Edition of Life magazine, December 6, 1963 O N E Owning, Showing, Telling O W N I N G , S H O W I N G , T E L L I N G // 2 5 a lead-in from news anchor Walter Cronkite. By that Monday, Rather had already become a familiar sight to the national television audience, since he had been reporting from Dallas throughout the weekend following the assassination . This chapter addresses how Zapruder’s images were described in Rather’s on-air narratives and how they were then displayed in a series of magazine photo-essays and on a late-night talk show. All these modes of display are treated as forms of what Mieke Bal calls “expository acts” or “gestures of showing.”2 The mass media began to shape the cultural memory of the assassination almost as soon as it happened; the news of Kennedy’s death spread to most Americans within half an hour.3 Stores were closed, classes were interrupted and cancelled, and workers left their jobs and went home, where they would listen to and watch Cronkite, Rather, and a small group of other anchors and reporters excessively. Many viewers devoted a full four days to following the coverage of the assassination and the surrounding events.4 The media thus inevitably came to shape how an event felt collectively to be traumatic was experienced and continues to be remembered as such.5 The particular circumstances that surrounded the early projections of the images are addressed in this chapter. Zapruder’s original film as well as the print and motion-picture copyrights became owned by a leading magazine publisher, and this is of great significance for how they were to be projected in the years that followed. The narratives I analyze established the composite cultural status of Zapruder’s images in the first years as they appeared as verbal images, in image-texts, and eventually as moving images. The fact that the images were projected, then taken out of public view, then projected again in a new and different way is important, since this oscillating movement between acts of concealing and revealing produces a way of looking that ultimately helped transform the images from forensic data to aesthetic representations. Furthermore, I argue, the earliest Zapruder narratives sought to render their own acts of projection “invisible” and, in effect, to produce what I propose to call a transfer of witnessing , whereas later projections increasingly directed attention toward the Zapruder film, contributing to a mythologization of it. Exposition is “always also an argument,” Bal insists, since it entails an act of showing, which implies seeing...

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