JFK’s final hours seen like never before: Color footage of President Kennedy leading up to his assassination is revealed in a new documentary that brings to life one of America’s most historic moments

A new documentary produced by National Geographic aims to take viewers back to Dallas, Texas, in November 1963 and witness the final hours of President John F. Kennedy’s life in color for the first time ever.

Airing on Disney Plus, JFK: One Day in America tells the story of the 20th century’s most famous murder with the help of the few remaining witnesses who were there on the fateful day.

Despite only having 53 minutes of footage of JFK’s last day, it took the team behind the film 12 weeks to colorize it and get it ready for production. Coloring just one minute took the team two days.

The documentary was produced without a narrator, allowing the viewer to experience these moments without any editing, through the eyes of the witnesses.

Among those who contributed to the film is JFK’s bodyguard, Clint Hill, 91, who discusses the guilt he still lives with that he couldn’t have done more to protect the president.

Also included is Jackie Kennedy’s bodyguard, Paul Landis, 88, who has never been interviewed before, and one of killer Lee Harvey Oswald’s work friends.

In 1961, JFK became the youngest elected American president at the age of 43. In November 1963, he traveled to Texas to gain support from the state’s Democratic party for his re-election bid.

Despite warnings about his safety in the Lone Star State, the president was adamant about driving through Dallas in an open car. At 12:30 p.m. he was shot several times and around 1 p.m. he succumbed to a fatal wound to his brain.

“We wanted to be able to present the theories and the subject matter to a younger audience and bring it to life in a different way that hadn’t been seen before,” said one of the producers, Alex Nicholson. The hill.

Nicholson told the website that it took their team twelve weeks to colorize the 53 minutes of footage they had.

“It was such a pivotal moment in American history, but also a global event,” said another producer, Charlotte Rodrigues. the Boston Herald.

‘We wanted to do something different from previous documentaries, in the sense that we wanted to capture the emotion of those key witnesses. These ordinary people were caught up in this tragedy.”

‘We didn’t want to have a narrator. We wanted it to feel very pure, just first-person testimonies alongside the archive of that day. So you experience it moment by moment through the eyes of these incredible interviews that are given,” she added.

Rodrigues also said that one of the most surprising things she discovered while filmmaking was how popular the First Lady was at the time.

Another person in the film was reporter Peggy Simpson, 84, the only female Associated Press journalist working in Dallas at the time.

Simpson said she was accused of finding someone to take her as a date to the dinner Kennedy was scheduled to attend with Gov. John Connally the night of the shooting.

Simpson said that after getting her hair cut before dinner, she had a few hours to kill and was sent to JFK’s motorcade. After seeing it, she returned to her office where she was told about the tragedy.

From there, Simpson was told to enlist in police custody to the extent that she was an eyewitness to the shooting of Oswald by gangster Jack Ruby two days later while in police custody.

Simpson said, “I was on the phone with bureau chiefs and I heard the police say this is Jack Ruby and they say the police know this guy, they say it’s Jack Ruby.

‘And he said, “What? I drink at his bar, how is that possible?” He was a well-known person, he was not someone they expected to do any harm.”

“When I saw that Jack had shot Ruby Oswald, I was shocked. I was sorry that he had messed up so much, he had made a serious mistake, a mistake that cannot be eradicated. It will go down in history.

“Jack did what he did. He wanted to be someone, everyone loved the president, so everyone hated the man who killed the president, so now this would make Jack a hero,” added fellow reporter and witness Bill Mercer.

In an interview with The Hill, Rodrigues explained the importance of getting the witnesses’ stories on camera before it’s too late.

“We felt like this would probably be the last time we would capture their testimony and we felt it was really important to do that before that was no longer possible,” she said.

While Stephen Fagin, curator of the Sixth Floor Museum, located in the Texas School Book Depository building, told The Hill that the film takes no position on whether or not there was an elaborate conspiracy involved in JFK’s death.

There are also moments of levity, such as White House correspondent Sid Davis recalling an official telling him not to describe Jackie Kennedy’s outfit for the day as “pink.”

‘Mrs. Kennedy would not be caught dead in the pink,” one official told him. Davis said he chose to describe it as “raspberry.”

However, the story is ultimately tragic as Clint discusses Hill with Jackie in JFK’s hearse. “There we were in the back of that hearse. It was a lonely crowd,” he said.

“On that flight between Dallas and DC, there was no time for sadness – for anything – except to keep doing your best and that’s what I tried to do. Mrs. Kennedy was in shock. She cried terribly, of course she was a new widow with two children. Now that’s all that was left of that family.’

“Bobby Kennedy came running all the way up the steps at the front of the plane and all the way through the plane to where Mrs. Kennedy and the coffin were in the back, and he was in tears. It was shocking, it was emotional, but I couldn’t break down,” he says of the journey back to the capital after the shooting.

“I think I just cried all the way home. I helped unload the box. We were tired, we had had a long day with a lot happening and I hadn’t handled much of it well. I know now that I was in shock,” Landis added.

The first episode of the series focuses on the murder, the second on the hunt for Oswald, and the third follows the investigators’ attempts to formulate a motive for the shooting.

The viewer is reminded that hours after shooting Kennedy, Oswald also shot and killed a Dallas police officer, J.D. Tippit.