Excuses

I put this site together after flipping through some assassination literature and coming across published remarks by Richard Stolley.

Stolley is the LIFE editor who brokered the deal between the magazine and Abraham Zapruder in 1963. “There have been charges that LIFE tampered with the film, removed or reversed frames, diddled with it to confound the truth,” he wrote in 1992. “Nothing like that ever happened.”

Semantics. Methinks he doth protest too much.

It’s quite possible that a lot of people have heard about LIFE’s three versions, but have never actually seen them. Hence this site.

Ideally, interested readers would have a copy of each version in hand. That’s the best way to get the full impact.

LIFE has a version of its October 2, 1964 issue online. But, surprise! The WR article is incomplete. Frame #6 is omitted. A few other things are out of whack, too, but I shan’t detail them here.

Presenting this stuff on a web site has posed several problems. In its heyday, LIFE was an oversized publication, and I have a rather ordinary-sized flatbed scanner. I’ve done the best I could. I don’t have a large, clean copy of the issue’s cover. You can see the thumbnail in the upper-right portion of this page. What I show on this site’s home page is not the actual cover.

Jerry Policoff’s article, “The Second Dallas Casualty: The Media and the Assassination of Truth,” describes LIFE’s three versions. It can be found in the anthology Government by Gunplay. The topic is also detailed in an article Policoff co-wrote with Robert Hennelly, first published in The Village Voice and included in JFK: The Book Of The Film; The Documented Screenplay (see pp. 489-90).

Vince Salandria discussed it in “A Philadelphia Lawyer Analyzes the Shots, Trajectories, and Wounds,” published in Liberation magazine in January 1965, and reprinted in History Will Not Absolve Us, by E. Martin Schotz. It’s also in False Mystery, a collection of Salandria’s assassination writings.

You can also find the article here.

Salandria described the matter in his 1998 COPA speech. (Search the keywords Life magazine.)

Finally, I describe it in Praise from a Future Generation, pp. 396-8.
[See John Kelin, “Conspiracy Theory? Why No One Believes the Warren Report,” Kennedys and King and Hardback —editor]