Desperate Bid to Save J.F.K. Shown in Resurfaced Film
The footage from 1963, taken by a Texas businessman and seen only by a few, shows the president’s limousine speeding to a Dallas hospital. It is being auctioned this month.
Nearly 61 years ago, Dale Carpenter Sr. showed up on Lemmon Avenue in Dallas, hoping to film John F. Kennedy as his motorcade passed. But the president’s car had already gone by, and he recorded only some of the procession, including the back of a car carrying Lyndon Johnson and the side of the White House press bus.
So Mr. Carpenter, a businessman from Texas, rushed to Stemmons Freeway, several miles farther along the motorcade route, to try again.
There, just moments after Kennedy had been shot, he captured an urgent and chaotic scene. The president’s speeding convertible. A Secret Service agent in a dark suit sprawled on the back. Jacqueline Kennedy, in her pink Chanel outfit, little more than a blur.
For decades Mr. Carpenter’s 8-millimeter snippets of what transpired in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, have been a family heirloom. When he died in 1991 at 77, the reel, which included footage of his twin boys’ birthday party, passed to his wife, Mabel, then to a daughter, Diana, and finally to a grandson, James Gates.
