DALLAS — Newly surfaced film footage of President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade racing down a Dallas freeway to a hospital after he was fatally wounded will be auctioned later this month.
According to experts, the discovery is not necessarily surprising, even more than 60 years after the murder.
“These images, these films and photographs, they are often still out there. They are still being discovered or rediscovered in attics or garages,” said Stephen Fagin, curator at The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, which tells the story of the murder of November 22, 1963.
RR Auction will offer the 8mm home film in Boston on September 28. It begins with Dale Carpenter Sr. narrowly missing the limousine carrying the President and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, but capturing other vehicles in the procession as it heads downtown down Lemmon Avenue. The film continues after Kennedy has been shot, with Carpenter joining in the background as the procession raced down Interstate 35.
“This is remarkable, color-wise, and you can feel the 80 mph speed,” 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 Hill — who famously jumped into the back of the limousine as shots rang out — standing and hovering above the president and Jacqueline Kennedy, whose pink suit can be seen.
“I didn’t know there weren’t going to be any more shots,” Hill said. “I had a vision that if I got there the way I did, there would probably be more shots.”
The shots were fired as the procession passed through Dealey Plaza, in front of the Texas School Book Depot, where it was later discovered that the murderer Lee Harvey Oswald had positioned himself from a sniper position on the sixth floor. The assassination itself was famously captured on film by Abraham Zapruder.
After the shots, the motorcade turned onto I-35 and sped toward Parkland Memorial Hospital, where Kennedy would be pronounced dead. It was the same route the motorcade would have taken to take Kennedy to its next stop, a speech at the Trade Mart.
Carpenter’s grandson, James Gates, said that while it was known in his family that his grandfather had film from that day, it wasn’t often discussed. So Gates said that when the film, along with other family movies in a milk crate, was eventually passed down to him, he didn’t know exactly what his grandfather, who died in 1991 at age 77, had captured.
When he projected it on his bedroom wall around 2010, he was initially unimpressed by the Lemmon Avenue imagery. But then the imagery of I-35 played out before his eyes. “It was shocking,” he said.
He was particularly impressed with Hill’s precarious position in the backseat of the limousine, so around the time Hill’s book, “Mrs. Kennedy and Me,” was published in 2012, Gates reached out to Hill and his 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 show Hill the footage before he did anything else with it. She said that while she was familiar with Hill’s description of sitting in the limo as it sped down the freeway, “when you see the footage of what’s actually happening … your heart just stops for a moment.”
The auction house has released photos of the portion of the film that shows the race on I-35, but has not released any video of that portion.
Farris Rookstool III, a historian, documentary filmmaker and former FBI analyst who has seen the film, said it shows the rush to Parkland more completely than other, more fragmented footage he’s seen. He said the footage offers “a fresh look at the race to Parkland,” and he hopes it ends up somewhere after the auction where it can be used by filmmakers.
Fagin said the murder was such a shocking event that people instinctively saved material about it, so there is always a chance that new material will emerge.
He said historians have wondered for years who the man is in one of the photos taken that day.
“For years we had no idea who the photographer was, where his camera was, where these images were,” Fagin said.
Then, in 2002, Jay Skaggs walked into the museum with a shoebox under his arm. He was the photographer in the picture, and inside that shoebox were 20 images of Dealey Plaza before and after the assassination, including the only known color photos of the gun recovered from the Texas School Book Depository, Fagin said.
“He just gave us that box,” Fagin said.