It has become a cliche that everyone of a certain age could tell you where they were when they heard President John F Kennedy was dead. Clint Hill spent decades trying to forget.
The Secret Service agent was in the Dallas motorcade as a member of the first lady’s detail when Kennedy was assassinated on 22 November 1963. Hill leaped on to the back of the presidential limousine to use his body to shield the Kennedys from any additional shots.
For a long time he remained silent, stalked by guilt and gnawed by doubts that he could have done more to save the president. He drank himself into depression before turning his life around. In recent years he has published memoirs, taken part in public forums and, at 91, is the most prominent living link to the day that, in his telling, America lost its innocence.
But as the 60th anniversary approaches, Hill fears that the last surviving witnesses will take the truth of the assassination to their graves. In an age of division, disinformation and internet-fuelled movements such as QAnon, conspiracy theories about who killed Kennedy and why are thriving as never before.
“It concerns me a great deal,” says Hill, who addresses the issue in the afterword of a new edition of his book, Five Days in November, “because there aren’t many of us left – very, very few – and eventually, the way things have been going, those conspiracy theories are going to win out and take over, and then you won’t have any factual information about what happened on November 22nd, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, and that’s a shame.
“It should be documented, it should be factual, not conspiratorial, and that’s why I wrote the book because I wanted to make sure everybody who wants to has an opportunity to get the facts about November 22nd, 1963, and not be just part of a conspiratorial theoretical group.”
The official account holds that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the assassination but unproven conspiracy theories include claims of a second gunman and the involvement of organised crime or the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Hill was appalled by Oliver Stone’s Hollywood film JFK, which in 1991 helped popularise the “magic bullet theory”, and by Stone’s follow-up documentary two years ago.
He has lived to see Donald Trump suggest that the father of the Republican senator Ted Cruz was somehow involved and QAnon followers gather at the scene of the crime in the belief that Kennedy or his son John F Kennedy Jr – who died in a plane crash in 1999 – would appear alive to announce Trump’s reinstatement as president with Kennedy Jr as vice-president. Robert Kennedy Jr has claimed that the CIA was involved in his uncle’s murder and is now running for president himself.
Hill dismisses it all with the weary indignation of an Apollo astronaut insisting that yes, he really did land on the moon. “Conspiracies are nothing more than theories,” he says, wearing spectacles, red shirt and sleeveless cream vest, and speaking via Zoom from his home in Belvedere, California. “They’re not fact.”
Hill was born in North Dakota in 1932, worked in counterintelligence for the US army and joined the Secret Service as a special agent in 1958. When he was assigned to protect the first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, his heart sank. He had witnessed the fate of other agents detailed to first ladies such as Bess Truman or Mamie Eisenhower – an unexciting life of shopping and card games such as canasta.
“But it wasn’t like that with Mrs Kennedy,” he recalls. “She was an athlete. She liked to play tennis. She played golf. She was an excellent swimmer. She water-skied. She rode horses – she was a really great equestrian. She had a real sense of history and she was so smart. She could speak French, she could speak Spanish, she could speak Italian and she used it to help the president in many ways.”
What does Hill remember about the couple? “We saw them up close and personal 24/7 so we knew what they liked, what they didn’t like, everything about them. But we also knew what the relationship was like. They did not express in public the feelings that they made visible in private.”
But that changed in August 1963 when Jacqueline Kennedy gave birth to a boy, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, who died two days later of respiratory distress syndrome. “They were both very depressed because they had really looked forward to this young boy. After that they didn’t seem to care what the public thought. They held hands in public, they embraced in public. They let their guard down from that point of view in public and it was nice to see how close they were. They really loved each other. They didn’t care if people saw that they were actually two lovers.”
This might help explain why Jacqueline, who tried to stay out of politics and had not previously travelled with her husband on a domestic political trip, decided to join him in Texas for the unofficial start of his 1964 re-election campaign. Kennedy had won the state by just 2% in 1960 but the couple drew huge crowds. Hill recalls Air Force One landing at Dallas Love Field airport and Kennedy’s open-topped limousine heading into the city, where he was due to deliver a major speech at the Trade Mart.
“As we got into the heart of the city down on Main Street, the crowd was so large they could not be contained on the sidewalk. They were into the street. People were on top of buildings. They were hanging out of windows. They were on external fire escapes. Any place that they could get their body to that would give them an advantage to see the president, Mrs Kennedy, the vice-president, Mr Johnson, the [Texas] governor [John Connally] and Mrs Connally in this motorcade is what they were going to do, and that’s what they did.”
With Hill on the running board of the car behind the Kennedys, the motorcade travelled a 10-mile route that wound through downtown Dallas and turned off Main Street at Dealey Plaza, beneath the Texas School Book Depository building, where Oswald was perched on the sixth floor. As he recalls what happened next, his voice holding steady, it as if six decades have melted away and Hill is back there in the sunshine, the crowds, the explosion of violence.
“I was scanning the area to my left, which is a grassy area, and the overpass that we were going to have to go under and I saw nothing that would cause any concern. All of a sudden I heard this explosive noise over my right shoulder. I turned my head, started looking toward the right, but only got as far as the back of the presidential vehicle and I saw the president grabbing his throat and starting to fall to his left. I knew then that he apparently had been shot.”
Hill jumped from his position on the follow-up car and ran toward the presidential vehicle but, as he approached, he “felt” the third shot hit Kennedy in the head. “It entered lower on the back of the head and blew out a section of his skull just behind and above the right ear.
“With that came blood, bone fragments, brain material. Mrs Kennedy then started to get up on the trunk: she was trying to reach some of that material that had come out of the president’s head. I grabbed hold of her when I got up on top of the car and helped her get back into the back seat. When I did that, the president’s body fell further to its left and his head ended up in her lap.”
He continues in a steady voice: “I got up on the back of the top of the trunk and lay there forming a barrier so that nothing further could injure them. But I looked down and I saw the condition the president was in. There was a massive hole in the skull area: there was nothing there, no brain material.
“When Mrs Kennedy went up in the back, she actually did get some piece of that material and had it in her hands. I looked down and there was just no way I thought president could survive this and I turned and gave a thumbs down to my fellow agents in a follow-up car and screamed at the driver of the president’s car to get to a hospital.”
The motorcade raced to Dallas’s Parkland Memorial hospital at high speed. Hill clung to the car with his left hand and one of his feet. On arrival at the hospital, Jacqueline would not let go of her husband’s body. Hill recalls: “I said, ‘Please, Mrs Kennedy, let us help the president’. I got no response. I said it again and got no response. I’d been with her for a little over three years. I knew her pretty well and I realised she didn’t want anybody to see the condition he was in so I took off my suit coat and I covered up his head and his upper back and, when I did that, she just let go.”
The president was taken to trauma room one where doctors tried to save his life. But it was a futile exercise. Kennedy, 46, the youngest elected president in American history, was dead, along with the era of “Camelot”. Hill was instructed to order a casket.
“The nurses removed all his clothing, wrapped him in sheets and placed him within the casket. We then proceeded to leave the area of trauma room one and went out to where the hearse was. Mrs Kennedy walked behind the casket. I was with her. I said to her, Mrs Kennedy, ‘We could ride in a car right behind the hearse.’ She said, ‘Mr Hill, no, I’m going to ride in the back with the president’.”
The sad procession arrived back at Love Field. Hill helped carry the heavy casket up the steps to the rear of Air Force One but it was too wide to fit through the door. “We had to break the handles off to get it through the door and get it into the confines of Air Force One. The air crew had removed the seats from an area within the back of the aircraft so that we could place the casket there. Mrs Kennedy sat then in the rear of the aircraft adjacent to the casket.”
Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as president with Jacqueline at his side, still wearing the pink Chanel suit that was stained with her husband’s blood (“Let them see what they’ve done,” she said).
Hill continued to protect Jacqueline and her children until the end of 1964, served Presidents Johnson, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and received the nation’s highest civilian award for bravery. But he was haunted by that day in Dallas and whether, had he reached the presidential limousine a second earlier, he might have been able to take the third shot to his own body.
He recalls: “From that point on, my life changed. Before that day, before I attempted to put my body up on top of the car to protect President Kennedy and Mrs Kennedy, I was just Clint Hill. But afterward, because of photographs and the Zapruder film [a colour sequence made by Abraham Zapruder with a home-movie camera], I was no longer just Clint Hill. I was that guy that got on to the back of the presidential vehicle and I went through life from that point on with that being said about me and of me.
“It has bothered me a great deal. I had a serious guilt complex about not being able to help him more than I did and that just grew and grew and grew from that point on.”
Hill failed the Secret Service’s physical exam in 1975 and was forced into retirement. He gave one TV interview and then sank into a deep depression. “I went in so deep that you wouldn’t even know me, probably. I didn’t want to see anybody, didn’t want to talk to anybody. I couldn’t sleep so I drank scotch heavily and smoked two packs a day. By 1982 my friend, who was a doctor, came to me and said, Clint, either you quit living the way you have been living or you’re going to die very soon. I thought about it and I decided I wanted to live so I quit smoking and I quit drinking cold turkey, which was very difficult.”
The feelings of guilt and shame lingered into old age but then he found a talking cure. In 2009 a friend and former agent asked for Hill’s help on a book, leading to a meeting with the journalist Lisa McCubbin in Washington. They talked for two hours and she asked for his number in case she had any follow-up questions; they began speaking weekly, then daily, and became friends. McCubbin encouraged him to take part in a TV documentary with other former agents – the first time they had talked about the assassination among themselves.
Hill and McCubbin have co-authored books including Mrs Kennedy and Me and Five Days in November – and they married in 2021. Today she sits in on Hill’s interview with the Guardian, occasionally repeating questions for his benefit or giving gentle prompts to tease out extra memories while lamenting the choppiness of the Zoom connection. The couple are in a home office adorned by books, framed family photos, an Apollo 10 memento and a poster for the new book.
With each book and each speaking engagement, Hill has found it easier to deal with history and his part in it. “I seem to feel better after every event,” he reflects. “I guess that’s because what I was suffering was PTSD. I did not know it at the time but that’s what it was. I can now talk about it, like I have here. I still have emotional feelings about it but it’s much more easily discussed than it had been in the past.”
Kennedy was the fourth and still the last US president to be assassinated, although Ronald Reagan narrowly survived an attempt on his life in 1981. Hill expresses the fervent wish that no more acts of violence be seared into the American consciousness – and that agents are never again tormented by losing a man or woman on their watch.
“Undoubtedly the Secret Service has improved tremendously since that time,” he says. “I pray for these agents working there every night. Please Lord, watch over them.”
