Footage of JFK’s motorcycle motorcade ride to hospital after being shot to go up for auction

An undated image posted by RR Auction shows home video of President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade racing down a Dallas freeway to the hospital after he was fatally wounded on Nov. 22, 1963. The image comes from a home movie shot by Dale Carpenter Sr. that will be auctioned later this month. (RR Auction via AP)

DALLAS — New footage of President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade racing down a Dallas freeway toward a hospital after he was fatally wounded will go up for auction later this month.

Experts say the discovery is not at all surprising, even 60 years after the attack.

“These images, these films and photographs, are often still available. They are still being discovered or rediscovered in attics and garages,” said Stephen Fagin, curator at The Sixth Floor Museum in Dealey Plaza, which tells the story of the Nov. 22, 1963, attack.

RR Auction will auction the 8mm home movie in Boston on September 28. It begins with Dale Carpenter Sr. just ahead of the limousine carrying the president and first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, but captures other vehicles in the motorcade driving down Lemmon Avenue toward downtown. The film then picks up after Kennedy is shot, with Carpenter racing as the motorcade races down Interstate 35.

“It’s extraordinary in terms of color, you can feel it going 80 miles an hour,” said Bobby Livingston, executive vice president of the auction house.

The I-35 footage — about 10 seconds long — shows Secret Service agent Clint Hill — who jumped into the back of the limousine as the shots rang out — hovering in a standing position over the president and Jacqueline Kennedy, whose pink suit is visible.

“I didn’t know there wouldn’t be any more shots,” Hill said. “I had a vision that yes, there probably would be more shots when I went in there like I did.”

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 discovered to have positioned himself as a sniper 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 took to deliver Kennedy to his 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 talked about much. So Gates said that when the film, stored with other family films in a milk crate, was finally passed down to him, he wasn’t sure exactly what his grandfather, who died in 1991 at age 77, had captured.

Projecting it onto his bedroom wall around 2010, he was initially disappointed by the Lemmon Avenue footage. But then the I-35 footage played before his eyes. “It was shocking,” he said.

He was particularly struck by Hill’s precarious position in the backseat of the limo, so around the time Hill’s 2012 book “Mrs. Kennedy and Me” was released, Gates reached out to Hill and his co-author, Lisa McCubbin, who became Lisa McCubbin Hill when she married Hill in 2021.

McCubbin Hill said she admires that Gates was sensitive enough to want Hill to see the footage before he did anything else with it. She said that although she was familiar with Hill’s description of him sitting on top of the limo as it sped down the interstate, “seeing the footage of that happening just makes your heart skip a beat.”

The auction house released photos from the video, but did not release the clip showing a convoy of cars racing down the interstate.

Farris Rookstool III, a historian, documentarian and former FBI analyst who has seen the film, said it shows the rush to Parkland in a more complete way than other, more fragmented footage he’s seen. He said the footage provides “a fresh perspective on the rush to Parkland” and hopes that after the auction it will go somewhere where filmmakers can use it.

Fagin said the attack was such a shocking event that people instinctively tried to gather material about it, so there was always the possibility that new material would emerge.

He added that historians have wondered for years about the fate of the man seen taking pictures in one of the photos taken that day.

“For years we had no idea who this photographer was, where his camera was, where these photos were,” Fagin said.

Then, in 2002, Jay Skaggs walked into the museum with a shoebox under his arm. He was the photographer in the photo, and in that shoebox were 20 photos of Dealey Plaza before and after the attack, including the only known color photos of a rifle being carried out of the Texas School Book Depository building, Fagin said.

“He just handed us the box,” Fagin said.

An undated image posted by RR Auction shows home video of President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade racing down a Dallas freeway to the hospital after he was fatally wounded on Nov. 22, 1963. The image comes from a home movie shot by Dale Carpenter Sr. that will be auctioned later this month. (RR Auction via AP)

FILE – In this Friday, Nov. 22, 1963 file photo, President John F. Kennedy slumps in the back seat of the presidential limousine as it speeds down Elm Street toward the Stemmons Freeway overpass in Dallas after being fatally shot. First lady Jacqueline Kennedy leans over the president as Secret Service agent Clint Hill pushes her back into her seat. (AP Photo/James W. “Ike” Altgens)

President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade races down a Dallas freeway toward the hospital where he was mortally wounded, November 22, 1963. (Al Volkland, Dallas Times Herald Collection, courtesy of The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza via AP)

An undated painting posted by RR Auction shows a box containing a home video of President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade racing down a Dallas freeway to the hospital after he was fatally wounded on Nov. 22, 1963. The painting comes from a home movie shot by Dale Carpenter Sr. that will be auctioned later this month. (RR Auction via AP)

An undated image posted by RR Auction shows home video of President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade racing down a Dallas freeway to the hospital after he was fatally wounded on Nov. 22, 1963. The image comes from a home movie shot by Dale Carpenter Sr. that will be auctioned later this month. (RR Auction via AP)

Clint Hill, a member of the Secret Service who served in the unit of the late First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, speaks to the media after laying a wreath at the JFK memorial outside the Hilton Hotel on Friday, November 22, 2013. (Joyce Marshall/Star-Telegram via AP)

FILE – A photo of President John F. Kennedy and flowers laid at a memorial plaque in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Thursday, Nov. 21, 2013. (AP Photo/LM Otero, File)

FILE – In this Nov. 12, 2013 file photo, the former Texas School Book Depository building (left), now known as the Sixth Floor Museum, looms over Dealey Plaza in Dallas, where Lee Harvey Oswald fired a shot from the building, killing President John F. Kennedy, on Nov. 22, 1963. (AP Photo/LM Otero, File)