Never-before-seen footage of President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade racing to the hospital after he was fatally shot in Dallas will go to auction later this month.
The 8mm home footage recorded by Dale Carpenter Sr. shows the most complete view of the chaotic moments immediately after Kennedy was assassinated while sitting next to First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, according to a former FBI analyst.
Online bidding on the film footage has already opened. As of Wednesday evening, the leading bid stood at $12,100.
“This is remarkable, in color, and you can feel the 80 mph,” said Bobby Livingston, executive vice president of RR Auction in Boston, where the film will go on sale during a live auction on Sept. 28.
Farris Rookstool III, a historian, documentary filmmaker and former FBI analyst who has reviewed the film, said it shows the rush to Parkland Hospital in a more complete way than other, more fragmented film footage he’s seen.
The video, he said, gives “a fresh look” at the moments immediately after the president was shot and hopes that after the auction, it ends up somewhere where it can be used by filmmakers.
Carpenter’s footage from I-35, which only lasts about 10 seconds, begins with video of accessory vehicles in the president’s motorcade traveling down Lemmon Avenue toward downtown Dallas.
It then picks up moments after Kennedy has been fatally shot, with Carpenter rolling as the motorcade speeds down Interstate 35.
The clip also shows Secret Service Agent Clint Hill standing over Jackie Kennedy in her iconic pink suit.
Hill famously jumped onto the back of the Kennedys’ limo when gunfire erupted as the motorcade drove past the Texas School Book Depository in Dealey Plaza — as captured in Abraham Zapruder’s famous film on the shooting.
“I did not know that there were not any more shots coming,” Hill, 92, said. “I had a vision that, yes, there probably were going to be more shots when I got up there as I did.”
Assassin Lee Harvey Oswald had perched himself on the sixth floor of the Depository with a sniper rifle and fired a single, fatal shot at the president.
After Kennedy was struck in the head, the motorcade turned onto I-35 and sped toward Parkland Memorial Hospital, where he would be pronounced dead about half an hour later.
It was the same route the motorcade would have taken to deliver Kennedy to his next stop, a speech at the Trade Mart.
Carpenter’s grandson, James Gates, said the family had known that his grandfather, who died in 1991, had footage from JFK’s assassination for years but it wasn’t often talked about.
Gates found the video stored alongside family films in a milk crate and projected it onto his bedroom wall for the first time in 2010.
He was initially underwhelmed by the footage from Lemmon Avenue but found the 1-35 footage “shocking” — particularly Hill’s precarious position in the back of the limousine.
Before going public with the footage, Gates reached out to Hill at around the time that his book, “Mrs. Kennedy and Me,” was published in 2012.
Hill’s co-author and later wife, Lisa McCubbin Hill, said that while she was familiar with Hill’s description of being perched on the limousine as it sped down the interstate, “to see the footage of it actually happen … just kind of makes your heart stop.”
The auction house has only released some still photos from the film footage and has not released any images showing the motorcade plowing down the highway.
Although Kennedy was assassinated more than 60 years ago, experts say that the emergence of new footage isn’t particularly surprising.
“These images, these films and photographs, a lot of times they are still out there,” said Stephen Fagin, curator at The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, which tells the story of JFK’s assassination.
“They are still being discovered or rediscovered in attics or garages.”
He said people recognized the assassination as a historical event, leading many to keep material related to it — meaning new artifacts are always surfacing.
Fagin said historians had wondered for years about a man who can be seen taking photos in one of the photos from that day.
“For years we had no idea who that photographer was, where his camera was, where these images were,” Fagin said.
With Post Wires
