A film depicting a desperate attempt to save JFK Kennedy has surfaced.
The president’s limousine is seen speeding to a Dallas hospital in the 1963 video, which was captured by a Texas businessman and only a small number of people saw. This month, it’s going up for auction.
Dale Carpenter Sr. arrived on Dallas’s Lemmon Avenue almost sixty-one years ago with the intention of filming John F. Kennedy’s motorcade as it passed.
However, the president’s vehicle had already passed, so he only captured a portion of the procession, which included the side of the White House press bus and the rear of a vehicle transporting Lyndon Johnson.
Thus, in an attempt to try again, Mr. Carpenter, a Texas businessman, hurried to Stemmons Freeway, which was a few miles further along the motorcade route. He caught an anxious and chaotic scene there, minutes after Kennedy was shot.
The president’s convertible drove quickly. Spread out on the back was a Secret Service agent dressed in a dark suit. Jacqueline Kennedy was barely seen in her pink Chanel dress.
No glimpse of Kennedy himself was possible. He was nearly dead after collapsing.
Mr. Carpenter’s 8-millimeter recordings of the events of Nov. 22, 1963 in Dallas have been a family heirloom for decades.
The reel, which had video of his twin boys’ birthday celebration, was given to his wife Mabel, daughter Diana, and grandson James Gates after he passed away in 1991 at the age of 77.
The Kennedy footage, the most recent in a string of assassination-related photos to come to light after decades of relative obscurity, will be up for auction in Boston later this month by RR Auction.
The president’s car is shown speeding on the interstate in the only footage that the auction house claims to have of it, traveling from Dealey Plaza, the scene of the shooting, to Parkland Memorial Hospital, where Kennedy was declared dead at 1 p.m.
One of the most horrific and extensively studied events in American history, the assassination, has long been depicted in unsettling ways in footage taken by bystander Abraham Zapruder. The film by Mr. Carpenter depicts events that took place shortly before and after the Zapruder film was shot. The president is seen in a mundane motorcade in the first part of the story, and in the second, there is a desperate attempt to get help amid all the uncertainty that followed the gunshots.
Even while Mr. Carpenter’s film, which lasts just over a minute, doesn’t really add much to the discussion surrounding Kennedy’s killing, a number of experts agreed that it is nevertheless a significant contribution to the collection of photos taken in Dallas on that day.
Author of “Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of J.F.K.” Gerald Posner observed, “It almost is a little bit of a coda or addendum to the Zapruder film.”
The movie “captures the heartbreak of what just happened in Dealey Plaza and what we know we’re about to find out at Parkland hospital,” according to Mr. Posner and Mr. Carpenter.
According to the auction company, the video is estimated to be worth over $100,000, and bidding will start on September 28 at $5,000.
According to the auction house, very few people outside of Mr. Carpenter’s family have viewed the video. Among them are Mr. Posner; attorney Mark S. Zaid, who has written and spoken extensively on the assassination; and Secret Service agent Clint Hill, who, upon hearing the first gunshot, dashed from a car behind Kennedy’s and clambered atop the president’s Lincoln Continental’s trunk. According to all three, they think the video is real.
According to Mr. Hill, the president was lying across the back seat with his head in his wife’s lap for the parts of the footage that Mr. Carpenter captured on the interstate. Mr. Hill is seen driving quickly to the hospital, spending several minutes there, with one foot outside and one inside the car in a protective stance.
In a phone interview, Mr. Hill remarked, “It felt like a lifetime.” “Every moment mattered.”
The photographs taken on that day by reporters and common people, according to Stephen Fagin, director of the Sixth Floor Museum in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, are “the window through which we understand the moment of the assassination and the aftermath.”
A map of the motorcade route, drawn by the museum, includes photos taken by both professional photographers and by the numerous onlookers who brought still and motion picture cameras.
Over the years, more and more photographs have come to light. Mr. Fagin stated, for example, that in 2002, a man by the name of Jay Skaggs entered the museum with pictures he had taken in 1963, among them the only color images known to exist of Lee Harvey Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano rifle being hauled out of the Texas School Book Depository structure. The images had only been viewed by Mr. Skaggs’s family up until that point.
“I see these pictures and videos as pieces of a puzzle that fit together to create this memory tapestry of November 22,” Mr. Fagin remarked. “A visual documentation of the experience as it was lived.”
Living around 12 miles northwest of Dallas in Irving, Texas, Mr. Carpenter was an executive of a concrete company. Two of his children claimed that although he wasn’t known to have a special fondness for Kennedy, he was pulled in by the grandeur of the president’s visit and took the camera, which he frequently used to record family gatherings. “Daddy was always behind that camera,” remarked David Carpenter, 63, one of his kids, whose birthday celebration was seen on the same reel as the Kennedy footage.
The footage that Mr. Carpenter had shot was preserved in a circular metal canister bearing the name “JFK Assassination.” Maybe, as David Carpenter proposed, the reason for the infrequent screenings was that the video displayed “something that was dramatic and terrible.” Family members stated they had no idea if their father had ever discussed the movie with authorities.
According to Mr. Gates, he got the film in 2009 or 2010 when his mother gave him a milk carton containing about thirty film reels that had been her father’s. He claimed that because President Kennedy was not shown in the video, he had felt a little let down when he had first watched it. He did, however, express his admiration for Mr. Hill’s boldness.
2012 saw correspondence between Mr. Gates and Lisa McCubbin, who collaborated with Mr. Hill on a book concerning his tenure as Jacqueline Kennedy’s bodyguard. He sent a copy of the movie to her and Mr. Hill shortly after that.
Following their acquisition of the rights to use Mr. Carpenter’s material in their upcoming film “Agent Number 9,” which is a documentary about Mr. Hill’s life, there has been renewed interest in the footage.
Simultaneously, Mr. Gates was contacted by RR Auction through Ms. McCubbin, who had recently tied the knot with Mr. Hill.
The tape was deemed powerful by the leaders of the auction company, which has sold other objects connected to the Kennedy and assassination, such as Oswald’s wedding ring.
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“We’ve seen this iconic American sequence of events over and over,” executive vice president Bobby Livingston of the corporation stated. “And then, suddenly, sixty years later, you see it from a different angle.”
The author of “Six Seconds in Dallas,” Josiah Thompson, has referred to the video and images taken by witnesses at Dealey Plaza that day as “a great source of evidence.”
However, he stated that he did not believe the Carpenter film had “particular significance,” primarily because it does not provide an answer to any unanswered concerns regarding the killing. It’s unclear whether Mr.
Carpenter was aware that the president had been shot at the time he took the pictures on the interstate. When he got back to Irving, he was undoubtedly aware of what had transpired.
Deborah Thornton, his 12-year-old daughter in 1963, remembered her father looking “very solemn” when he arrived home that day. “Dallas has changed forever,” she recalled him telling her mother.