Success Quote by Abraham Zapruder

A sentence this plain only becomes legible when you remember what it’s attached to. “I was on the abutment” is Zapruder’s attempt to pin his body to a coordinate on history’s map: not an opinion, not a feeling, just a fixed point. The word choice is telling. He doesn’t say “I was on the hill” or “by the fence.” He reaches for engineering language, a term you’d expect in a blueprint, not a trauma narrative. That’s the subtext: when the world fractures, some people grab the most structural noun available.

As a businessman who unexpectedly became the accidental archivist of a national calamity, Zapruder is doing two things at once. He’s establishing credibility in the strictest eyewitness sense (where exactly were you?), and he’s trying to shrink the event back down to something measurable. The abutment is support, the thing that braces a bridge. In Dealey Plaza, it becomes a grim metaphor: the spot where an ordinary citizen steadied himself to film, and where the country’s story pivots from postwar confidence into televised vulnerability.

The intent is procedural, almost defensive. Place me here; let the record show. But the emotional freight leaks through in that very restraint. It’s the language of someone who doesn’t yet have a cultural script for what he’s seen, so he speaks like a man filling out a form while history is still ringing in his ears.