Newly released footage shows President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade speeding down a Dallas highway toward a hospital after he was fatally injured will be auctioned later this month.
Experts say the discovery is not necessarily surprising, even more than 60 years after the assassination.
“These images, these films and these photographs are often still there. They are still being discovered or rediscovered in attics or garages,” says Stephen Fagin, curator of the Sixth Floor Museum in Dealey Plaza, which tells the story of the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination.
On September 28, RR Auction will offer the 8mm film in Boston. The film opens with Dale Carpenter Sr. narrowly missing the limousine carrying the president and first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, but capturing other vehicles in the motorcade as it travels down Lemmon Avenue toward downtown. The film then resumes after Kennedy is shot, with Carpenter driving as the motorcade pulls onto Interstate 35.
/ AP
“It’s remarkable, in color, and you can feel the 80 mph,” said Bobby Livingston, the auction house’s executive vice president.
The footage from I-35 – which lasts about 10 seconds – shows Secret Service Agent Clint Hillwho jumped into the back of the limousine as the shots rang out, hovering in a standing position above the president and Jacqueline Kennedy, whose pink suit can be seen.
“I didn’t know there wouldn’t be more gunfire,” Hill said. “I had a vision that, yeah, there probably would be more gunfire when I was up there like I was.”
The shots were fired as the motorcade passed through Dealey Plaza, in front of the Texas School Book Depository, where the killer was later discovered Lee Harvey Oswald He had positioned himself as a sniper on the sixth floor. The assassination itself was immortalized in Abraham Zapruder’s famous film.
After the gunfire, the motorcade turned onto I-35 and sped toward Parkland Memorial Hospitalwhere Kennedy would be pronounced dead. It was the same route the motorcade would take to take Kennedy to his next stop, a speech at the Trade Mart.
Carpenter’s grandson, James Gates, said that while his family knew his grandfather had film from that era, it wasn’t often talked about. So Gates said that when the film, stored with other family films in a milk crate, was finally passed down to him, he wasn’t sure what his grandfather, who died in 1991 at age 77, had captured.
Projecting the images onto his bedroom wall around 2010, he was initially disappointed by the images of Lemmon Avenue. But then the images of I-35 flashed before his eyes. “It was shocking,” he said.
He was particularly struck by Hill’s precarious position in the back of the limousine.
Shortly after arriving at the hospital, Hill was on the phone with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, CBS Bay Area reported.
“He asked me, ‘How bad is it?’ and I didn’t want to tell him his brother was dead,” Hill told the station. “So I said, ‘This is as bad as it gets,’ and with that, he just hung up the phone.”
James W. Ike Altgens/AP
Around the time Hill’s book, “Mrs. Kennedy and Me,” was published in 2012, Gates reached out to Hill and her co-author, Lisa McCubbin, who became Lisa McCubbin Hill when she and Hill married in 2021.
McCubbin Hill said it was admirable that Gates was sensitive enough to want Hill to see the footage before he did anything else with it. She said that while she knew the description of Hill perched on the limousine as it sped down the highway, “seeing the footage of what’s really happening … makes your heart stop.”
The auction house has released stills from the film footage, but is not publicly releasing the portion showing the motorcade driving on the highway.
Farris Rookstool III, a historian, documentary filmmaker and former FBI analyst who has seen the film, said it shows the rush to Parkland in a more complete way than other, more fragmented footage he has seen. He said the footage provides “a fresh look at the rush to Parkland” and hopes that after the auction, it will end up somewhere where it can be used by filmmakers.
Fagin said the assassination was such a shocking event that it was instinctive for people to keep documents relating to it, so there is always the possibility that new documents will surface.
He said historians have wondered for years about a man who can be seen taking pictures in one of the photos from that day.
“For years we had no idea who this photographer was, where his camera was, where these images were,” Fagin said.
In 2002, Jay Skaggs walked into the museum with a shoebox under his arm. He was the photographer in the photo, and in that shoebox were 20 images of Dealey Plaza before and after the assassination, including the only known color photos of the rifle removed from the Texas School Book Depository building, Fagin said.
“He just handed us this box,” Fagin said.
In December 2022, the National Archives and Records Administration released a trove of 13,173 documents related to the JFK assassination, shortly after President Biden issued an executive order authorizing their release while keeping thousands of other sensitive documents secret.
At that time, the The archives stated Ninety-seven percent of its nearly 5 million pages of assassination-related material have been released. But some experts say the government continues to censor or conceal important information that could reflect poorly on the CIA or other agencies.
