Recently resurfaced film footage of President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade racing down a Dallas freeway toward a hospital, moments after he was fatally shot, is set to go up for auction later this month. Experts assert that such discoveries, even over six decades later, are not entirely surprising.
“These images, these films and photographs, a lot of times they are still out there. They are still being discovered or rediscovered in attics or garages,” remarked Stephen Fagin, curator at The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, which recounts the events of Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963.
RR Auction will offer the 8 mm home film in Boston on September 28. The footage begins with Dale Carpenter Sr. narrowly missing the limousine carrying the president and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy but capturing other vehicles in the motorcade as they coursed down Lemmon Avenue toward downtown. The film then resumes after Kennedy is shot, capturing the motorcade speeding down Interstate 35.
“This is remarkable, in color, and you can feel the 80 mph,” stated Bobby Livingston, executive vice president of the auction house.
The 10-second footage from I-35 shows Secret Service Agent Clint Hill standing on the back of the limousine, shielding the president and Jacqueline Kennedy, whose pink suit is visible. Hill, who famously leapt onto the back of the limousine when shots rang out, recalled, “I did not know that there were not any more shots coming. I had a vision that, yes, there probably were going to be more shots when I got up there as I did.”
As the motorcade passed through Dealey Plaza in front of the Texas School Book Depository, Lee Harvey Oswald fired the fatal shots from a sniper’s perch on the sixth floor. The assassination itself was famously captured on film by Abraham Zapruder. Following the shots, the motorcade turned onto I-35, rushing toward Parkland Memorial Hospital, where Kennedy was later pronounced dead. This was the same route intended to deliver Kennedy to his next stop for a speech at the Trade Mart.
Carpenter’s grandson, James Gates, mentioned that while his family knew of the film from that day, it was not a frequent topic of conversation. When the milk crate containing the film was passed down to him, he was uncertain of what his grandfather, who died in 1991 at age 77, had captured. Projecting it onto his bedroom wall around 2010, he was initially underwhelmed by the Lemmon Avenue footage. However, the footage from I-35 left him in shock. “That was shocking,” he admitted.
Especially striking to Gates was Hill’s precarious position on the limousine’s back. When Hill’s book, “Mrs. Kennedy and Me,” was published in 2012, Gates contacted Hill and his co-author, Lisa McCubbin. McCubbin later married Hill in 2021, becoming Lisa McCubbin Hill. She praised Gates for his sensitivity in wanting Hill to view the footage first, describing the experience of watching it as “just kind of makes your heart stop.”
Although still photos from the film depicting the race down I-35 have been released by the auction house, the corresponding video remains under wraps. Farris Rookstool III, a historian, documentary filmmaker, and former FBI analyst who has seen the film, noted that it shows the rush to Parkland more comprehensively than other fragmented footage and provides “a fresh look at the race to Parkland.” He hopes the film, post-auction, will be accessible for use by filmmakers.
Fagin suggested that the assassination’s shocking nature compels people to preserve related material, indicating the potential for new discoveries. He recalled a scenario where historians speculated for years about an unidentified man seen taking photos on that fateful day. In 2002, Jay Skaggs arrived at the museum carrying a shoebox that contained 20 previously unseen images from Dealey Plaza, including rare color photographs of the rifle being removed from the Texas School Book Depository.
“He just handed that box to us,” Fagin recalled.
