Aletho News

An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | March 21, 2022

My new book An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story has now gone live on Amazon. I am confident that you all will enjoy reading this book. I have been working on it since last summer. I consider it the best work I’ve done in the 32-year history of The Future of Freedom Foundation.

People sometimes ask me what relevance the Kennedy assassination has to our lives today. My new book answers that question completely. It shows how the assassination bears a direct relationship to the foreign-policy crises that confront our nation today and, equally important, what we need to do to extricate ourselves from these crises.

My book revolves around a book entitled Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film, which was written in 2016 by Alexandra Zapruder, the granddaughter of Abraham Zapruder, the man who filmed the assassination of President Kennedy on his personal home movie camera. 

As I state in the Introduction to my book, which you can read here, I figured that Alexandra’s book would be an interesting personal account of how Abraham Zapruder and his family dealt with the film. I quickly learned that her book was much more than that. 

When I read that there was a 50-year-long taboo within the Zapruder family against discussing the film, I was hooked. That’s because I knew that almost always there are dark secrets behind family taboos. Violating such a taboo is not an easy thing to do, which is what Alexandra was doing by deciding to write her book. As I point out in my Introduction, in her book she herself acknowledged the danger that she might encounter things that she might not want to write about. 

After embarking on her quest to discover the reasons for the family taboo, Alexandra came up with two explanations. The first one is that her grandfather was conflicted over having received so much money for his film, which in today’s dollars was about $1.3 million. The other one is that he was extremely grief-stricken over having witnessed and filmed the president’s assassination.

Neither of those two explanations involves a dark secret and, with all due respect, they are both nonsensical justifications for a decades-long family taboo. After all, throughout the weekend of the assassination, Abraham Zapruder was doing everything he could to get top-dollar for his film, something he would be unlikely to do if he was feeling so guilty about it. Moreover, if the guilt feelings arose after he struck the financial deal for the sale of his film, he could have waived the installments of money from the sale of his film, which were being sent to him annually, which he did not do.

Moreover, any trauma that Zapruder may have suffered from witnessing the assassination obviously did not interfere with his spending the entire weekend of the assassination doing everything he could to get as much money as he could for his film. 

Zapruder died in 1970. If the two justifications for the family taboo (which Alexandra denies was a “taboo” but instead was what she calls a “code” or “culture” within the family) were valid, why would the family taboo against discussing the film extend for decades after Zapruder’s death? 

After reading Alexandra Zapruder’s book, I decided to figure out the Zapruder film mystery. I spent last summer doing precisely that. Once I figured it out, I began writing my book. Since then, I’ve been working days, nights, and weekends to complete it. I even took a week-long vacation on a farm in southwestern Virginia over Labor Day to write the first eight chapters (the book ended up with 23 chapters).

Like I say, I believe you’re going to like this book and that you’re going to find that it is an important contribution toward understanding not just the Kennedy assassination but, more important, toward seeing where we are as a country today and what we need to do to get things back on the right track — toward restoring a society based on liberty, peace, prosperity, and harmony with the people of the world.

Again, the book is An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story. It’s $9.95 for the Kindle version and $14.95 for the print version. You can buy it here.

March 21, 2022 - Posted by aletho | Book Review, Deception, Timeless or most popular | JFK Assassination