'Lost JFK Tapes' Takes Viewers Back to 1963

Alan Peppard - The Dallas Morning News

'The Lost JFK Tapes: The Assassination' Takes Viewers Back to 1963

John F. Kennedy was only 46 when he died, and today marks 46 years that have passed since his murder in Dallas. The images of the crime and its aftermath may be seared into the nation's psyche, but on Monday, the National Geographic Channel will premiere a spare and revelatory documentary assembled from digitized and restored TV news footage and personal film that virtually no one has seen.

Most haunting of these is Robert Hughes' home movie of President Kennedy's limousine approaching the Texas School Book Depository a few seconds before the shooting. The open sixth-floor window with the stacked boxes of the sniper's perch is plainly visible.

Those with a slow-motion DVR and a large television can see a human silhouette -- presumably Lee Harvey Oswald -- move stealthily above the window frame waiting for the focus of the crowd and police to move west toward the triple overpass.

"When the car is going down [Houston] street, that window is in the frame of the shot," says filmmaker Tom Jennings, executive producer of The Lost JFK Tapes: The Assassination. "I saw what looks to me like someone moving up there, and I believe it is Lee Harvey Oswald."

In 1964, the FBI examined the Hughes film and was unable to find a clear image in the window. But later technological improvements refined the frames.

"A 1993 computer enhancement of the original film for a PBS/Frontline program, Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?, found a moving object in the window as President Kennedy's car passed underneath," says Gary Mack, curator of the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza. "The movement suggests an object turning from its left to its right or right to left as one looks at the film. The Sixth Floor Museum acquired the original Hughes film in 2002 and video blowups of the window seem to confirm the PBS/Frontline findings."

In 1995, Jennings was rooting through the archives of the Sixth Floor Museum researching a piece on Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald. "Tape after tape, I kept seeing images I'd never seen before, and I told Gary [Mack], 'We should do a documentary with just these images.' But there's been so much done on this topic that everyone I talked with thought they'd seen it all."

It was a highlight reel that he showed to National Geographic Channel senior vice president Michael Cascio that got him a green light. "It got the reaction I hoped it would have," Jennings says. "He kept saying, 'I've never seen that before, I've never seen that before.' "

"It documents an important period in a way we feel has not been done," Cascio said before a private screening Tuesday at the Sixth Floor Museum.

The Lost JFK Tapes represents an addition to the lay assassination oeuvre because Jennings consciously avoids running the bases of well-worn sources. In his film, there is no Walter Cronkite, no Pulitzer-winning photo of Ruby shooting Oswald and no Zapruder film. There is also no contemporary narration, only the voices of the era.

"It's as if you had a remote control in 1963 and went from channel to channel," Jennings says. "That's how this plays."

There is an amazingly well-restored copy of Orville Nix's home movie that captured the shooting from the south side of Dealey Plaza. The frantic foot flailing of Secret Service agent Clint Hill as he tries to climb aboard the limousine without getting hit by a pursuing Cadillac shows him within a nanosecond of falling.

"Clint Hill came very close to being the third casualty of the assassination," says Mack.

A Houston Street sequence from the Hughes film is slowed to clearly illuminate President Kennedy leaning in to hear something Jackie is saying -- probably the final words between the president and first lady.

And the clip of two bewildered boys west of the triple underpass waving enthusiastically as the blood-soaked Lincoln speeds past them is one of dozens of poignant moments.

Conspiracy hounds will dissect B reel news footage of Jack Ruby loitering with reporters Saturday night in a hallway near Oswald's interrogation room, the night before he shot him. Was Ruby stalking Oswald or was he merely a cop groupie?

For the attentive repeat viewer, The Lost JFK Tapes is a treasure trove of new material.

"There is so much I hadn't seen, like the photos of LBJ's swearing in," says Jennings, referring to a 17-picture montage by White House photographer Cecil Stoughton, which tells a larger story than the one iconic photo we've all seen.

Aboard Air Force One, Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry and JFK's secretary Evelyn Lincoln stand behind Lady Bird Johnson while Jackie's look-alike press secretary Pamela Turnure -- alleged by many to be a longtime mistress of JFK -- looks on with Bill Moyers.

There is a satisfying completeness to most of the segments. Rather than Channel 8 program director Jay Roach's merely introducing Abraham Zapruder, we get the whole interview. Zapruder describing the first shot: "Then he slumped to the side, then I heard another shot, I couldn't tell you if it was one or two."

"I didn't want to see another highlight reel," Jennings says. "My feeling with a lot of these things like the Zapruder interview was, 'Let 'em run.' "

The Lost JFK Tapes: The Assassination

8 p.m. Monday on National Geographic Channel.

Produced by Tom Jennings. 96 mins.

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