Lost JFK assassination tapes on sale

Updated: 09:55, Wednesday November 16, 2011

A long-lost version of the Air Force One recordings made just after President John F Kennedy's assassination, with more than 30 minutes of material not in the official version in the US government's archives, has been found and is for sale for $A491,666.26.

The two-plus hour recording predates what was thought to be the only surviving version of the tape. That version is housed in the National Archives and the Lyndon B Johnson Library in Texas.

The reel-to-reel tape is inside its original box with a typewritten label showing it was made by the White House Communications Agency for Army General Chester 'Ted' Clifton Jr, who was Kennedy's senior military aide and was in the Dallas motorcade when the president was assassinated.

The tape is titled Radio Traffic involving AF-1 in flight from Dallas, Texas to Andrews AFB on November 22, 1963.

It consists of in-flight radio calls between the aircraft, the White House Situation Room, Andrews Air Force Base, and a plane that was carrying Kennedy press secretary Pierre Salinger and six cabinet members from Hawaii to Tokyo when the president was assassinated.

Clifton, who died in 1991, had kept a collection of audio tapes, documents, photographs and video stemming from his years in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. The Raab Collection, which is selling the archive, acquired the items at a public sale from Clifton's heirs after the death of Clifton's wife in 2009.

The Clifton tapes include additional debate about whether Kennedy's body would be brought to Bethesda Naval Hospital or Walter Reed Hospital for autopsy and if first lady Jackie Kennedy would accompany the fallen president, as well as expanded discussions about arranging for ambulances and limousines to meet the plane.

The edited recording in the National Archives and the LBJ Library, available to the public since 1971, begins with an announcer stating it has been 'edited and condensed' but not explaining how much was cut or by whom.

A more complete version of the Air Force One tapes were long sought but never found, adding fuel to decades-old suspicions that there is more to Kennedy's assassination than the official account naming Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone gunman.

The Assassination Records Review Board, created by an act of Congress in 1992 after the Oliver Stone film JFK caused public uproar to re-examine Kennedy's killing, unsuccessfully sought the unedited Air Force One tapes for its probe.

'That this tape even exists will change the way we view this great event in history,' Raab said. 'It took decades to analyse the shorter, newer version and it will take years to do the same here.'

The Clifton tape has been professionally digitised and a copy is being donated by the Raab Collection to the National Archives and the John F Kennedy Library so the public will have access to the material.

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