“These photos and films are still out there, often discovered or rediscovered in attics or garages,” CBS quoted Stephen Fagin, curator of the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, which tells the story of Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963, as saying.
RR Auction will screen the 8mm home movie in Boston on September 28. The film begins with Carpenter Sr. missing the limousine carrying the president and first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, but filming the rest of the vehicles in the motorcade as they travel down Lemon Street toward downtown. The footage then shows Kennedy after he was shot, with Carpenter continuing to film as the motorcade speeds down I-35.
“This is amazing, with the colors, and you can feel the speed at 80 miles per hour,” said Bobby Livingston, executive vice president of the auction house.
The footage from I-35, which lasts about 10 seconds, shows Secret Service agent Clint Hill, who jumped on the back of the limousine as the shots rang out, standing in a standing position over the president and Jacqueline Kennedy, whose pink uniform can be seen.
“I didn’t know if there were more shots coming or not,” Hill said. “I had a perception that there might be more shots coming when I got up there.”
The shots were fired as the motorcade passed through Dealey Plaza in front of the Texas School Book Depository, where assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was later found to have taken up position on the sixth floor.
The assassination itself was captured in a famous film by Abraham Zapruder.
After the shots were fired, the motorcade turned onto I-35 and sped toward Parkland Memorial Hospital, where Kennedy was pronounced dead. This was the same route the motorcade was scheduled to take to take Kennedy to his next stop, a speech at the Trade Center.
James Gates, Carpenter’s grandson, said that although his family knew his grandfather had a film from that day, it wasn’t talked about much. So Gates said that when the film was passed to him, along with other family films stored in a milk crate, he wasn’t entirely sure what his grandfather, who died in 1991 at age 77, had filmed.
Shocking footage
Gates said he projected the film onto his bedroom wall around 2010, and was initially unimpressed by the footage from Lemon Street. But then he saw the footage from I-35 unfold before his eyes. “It was shocking,” he said.
He was particularly struck by Hill’s dangerous position on 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. So I said, ‘It’s as bad as it can be,’ and he still hung up,” Hill said.
Around the time Hill’s book “Mrs. Kennedy and Me” was published in 2012, Gates reached out to Hill and the book’s co-author, Lisa McCubbin, who would become his wife in 2021.
McCubbin Hill said Gates was sensitive enough to want Hill to see the footage before he did anything else with it. “Even though I was familiar with Hill’s description of himself in the limo speeding down the highway, seeing the actual footage of it happening… makes your heart stop a little bit,” she said.
The auction house has released stills from the film footage but has not publicly released the portion that shows the motorcade speeding down the highway.
Faris Ruckstoll III, a historian, documentary filmmaker and former FBI profiler who has seen the film, said it shows the rush to Parkland in a more complete way than other fragmented film footage he has seen.
He added that the footage provides “a new look at the procession to Parkland,” and he hopes the film will be used by filmmakers after it is auctioned.
Fagen explained that the assassination was such a traumatic event that it was natural for people to preserve material related to it, so there was always the opportunity for new material to emerge.
He added that historians have wondered for years about a man seen in one of the photos taking pictures.
“For years we didn’t know who this photographer was, where his camera was, or where these pictures were,” he said.
Then in 2002, Jay Scakges walked into the museum with a small box under his arm. He was the photographer being photographed that day, and inside that box were 20 photos of Dealey Plaza before and after the assassination, including the only known color photos of a gun being removed from the Texas School Book Depository.
“We just handed over this box,” Fagen said.
In December 2022, the National Archives and the U.S. government released a catalog of 13,173 documents related to the Kennedy assassination, after President Biden issued an executive order allowing their release while preserving thousands of other sensitive documents.
At the time, the archive said 97 percent of the roughly 5 million pages in its collection related to the assassination had been released to the public. But some experts said the government was still withholding or withholding important information that could cast a negative shadow on the CIA or other agencies.
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