Frame 312

Forty-five years ago today, President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed by assassins while riding in his motorcade through downtown Dallas, Texas.

Say what you want about Kennedy – and trust us, we’ve read the good (William Manchester) and the bad (Seymour M. Hersh) – but his assassination was a transcendent event that forever changed the course of American history.

It was also captured on film by a Dallas clothing manufacturer named Abraham Zapruder, who took his Model 414 PD Bell & Howell Zoomatic Director Series Camera to Dealey Plaza that day hoping to capture a memory, but instead ended up documenting the world’s most famous murder.

Comprised of 486 individual 8 mm frames moving at 18.3 frames per second, this silent, half-minute film has been analyzed hundreds of times by thousands of experts – most of whom have reached vastly different conclusions about what it tells us.

As such, the Zapruder film forms the basis for conspiracy theories as well as official government accounts of the assassination.

First shown to the public in 1969 – and first broadcast on network television six years later – the film has probably raised more questions than it has answered, which makes it not unlike most of the evidence surrounding the JFK assassination.

What we do know is that on Frame 312, Kennedy is wounded but still very much alive … and on Frame 313 (below) his head has been literally blown to pieces.

Within that fraction of a second, consider everything that changed in America … and we don’t mean all that Life magazine Camelot crap, we’re talking about how an economic program built around tax cuts somehow morphed into the Great Society, and how Vietnam went from a remote foreign conflict to a full-blown American war.

Wherever you come down on who fired what shot from which location at what time, there’s no denying that U.S. policy on multiple fronts “did a 180″ after Kennedy’s assassination.

And there’s no denying that the truth about the assassination – which no doubt lies somewhere between Oliver Stone’s fantasies and the government fiction of the Warren Commission – will probably never be discovered.

Personally, we think the JFK assassination was an “inside job,” and that the fatal head shot seen in frame 313 came from an underground drainage ditch in Dealey Plaza.

Having said that, we’re not going to sit around in our PJ’s until 4:00 am like a lot of conspiracy theorists trying to prove it … nor do we particularly care if we’re right or not.

We’ll just ask our friend who actually solved the mystery … wait, nevermind.

Anyway here’s a stabilized view of Zapruder’s famous film … and yes, forty-five years later, decorum still requires us to warn you of its graphic content.

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