Personally, watching the portion of the Zapruder film in which JFK is hit is disturbing to me. So I typically only view it when necessary. This clip does depict some interesting details which I haven’t considered before. It appears to me that at the very beginning of the clip that JFK has his head turned so that he is looking directly at Jackie. Then his head suddenly drops so that he is looking down toward her lap. And he does appear to be trying to say something and appears to be pointing toward his throat with his left index finger. However, with a wound in his trachea below his larynx it is doubtful that he could actually speak. Jackie appears to be trying to see what is wrong with JFK but also appears to have been momentarily distracted by what Connally is saying/doing. Such a sad moment in time and one of the reasons so many of us continue to be interested in the assassination.
Hi Charles, I totally agree that JFK probably couldn't have spoken. I believe what's happening in the film is that he's trying to speak, but obviosuly nothing is coming out because his voice box is destroyed, The "My God I'm hit" claim from Roy Kellerman had to have been his imagination because no one else in the car heard JFK utter a word, but Kellerman. We need a lip reader to possibly tell us what JFK may have been trying to say. I know what you mean about this section of the film being disturbing. When I first saw it back in 1978, upongetting the first Groden enhanced Zapruder film with this famous "Rotoscoped" version of the film, it upset me as well. The older Iget, the more disturbing it is to watch the Zapruder film. Mrs. Kennedy's staring at Governor Connally as she said his "Screaming" drew her attention, and she's tranfixed on him. Her actions of being transfixed on Connally has always disturbed me because she could have pulled JFK down and saved his life. She had a little over 4 seconds to do so from the time she put her hands on him as he's shot. And then there are Kinney, Roberts,both sitting there staring at JFK after he's been hit-as seen in the Altgens 6 photograph-and Kinney's 1978 statement to the HSCA that he saw the first shot hit JFK. Why didn't these men tell the agents on the running board to GO! But, no, other than Clint Hill, they wait until the fatal shot is fired to react, and the proof of this lies in the Nix film where we can see both McCintire and Ready start to take off . Ready should've been right there on top of JFK after the 1st shot, since he was the closest. It's very frustrating and deeply sad to watch what happened because of these men!
