The Associated Press
Clint Hill, the Secret Service agent seen on the Zapruder Film leaping onto President Kennedy’s limousine on Nov. 22, 1963, has died. He was 93.
The assassination would haunt him until his dying day, he told us 21/2 years ago, on the 60th anniversary of the assassination, during an hourlong interview in which he provided unvarnished details of what he saw that day.
“From the time the first shot was fired until leaving Love Field it’s like a movie that runs in my mind,” Hill said on a Zoom call. “I see that whole period of time. I see his movement upon being hit the first time. Grabbed at his neck like this, started to fall over to his left. I jumped, I ran, I got on back of the car. About that time, just before I got there, he was dead in the head. All that material came off, just exploded — brain, blood, bone fragments. I got over the trunk of the car and got over Mrs. Kennedy.
“All of that is ingrained in my mind — it never goes away.”
Hill died at his home in Belvedere, California, according to news reports. The day we spoke, he mentioned he was battling COPD and relying on oxygen.
As President Kennedy and Gov. John Connally slumped in the backseat, Hill, who had been riding on the left-front running board of a Secret Service car behind the president’s, jumped onto the back of the car to corral a scrambling first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, undoubtedly in shock by what had just happened. Hill likely saved her life.
Two weeks after the assassination, Hill received the Treasury Department’s highest award for “extraordinary courage and heroic effort in the face of maximum danger.”
The emotional impact of the events of November 1963 ultimately chased him from the Secret Service 12 years later.
“I was a mess,” he said. “There is no question I had PTSD. They didn't know what to call it, but that's what it was. I really had a difficult time from the day after the assassination. I still have problems at times.”
Clinton J. Hill was born on Jan. 4, 1932, in Larimore, North Dakota. His mother, who already had five children, took him to an orphanage when he was an infant. He was adopted a few months later.
After graduating from Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, in 1954 with a degree in history and physical education, he served as an Army counterintelligence agent before joining the Secret Service in 1958. A year later, he was assigned to the White House detail protecting President Dwight D. Eisenhower. After Kennedy’s election, he was assigned to Jacqueline Kennedy’s detail, the same detail he was on in November 1963. He said in a best-selling memoir, “Mrs. Kennedy and Me,” that he felt the assignment was a demotion.
Hill stayed with the first lady until the 1964 election.
“She wanted her two little children to be raised in such a manner that they didn't feel that they were special, that they would grow up to be just like normal kids,” Hill said. “We had instructions for the agents that if they fall down, let them get up. If they make a mistake, let them learn from it. I told her once, “Mrs. Kennedy, you know they’re always going to be the children of a president. No matter what you try to do, you can't change that.”
Hill was also present at the death of the Kennedys’ infant son, Patrick, in August 1963.
The president and his wife “never expressed much emotion to each other until August of 1963,” Hill said. “From that point on, President and Mrs. Kennedy's attitude toward people seeing them embrace or hold hands or hug or anything didn't matter anymore. They were much closer is, I guess, the best way to put it. They were just much closer having lost this child in such a manner.”
Hill said he heard two of the three shots fired that day on Elm Street, both of them from behind his right shoulder. He also explained that it was logistically implausible for a shot to have come from the front, considering the entrance wound was in the back of the skull.
Hill also emphatically rejected a newer theory suggesting that a Secret Service agent accidentally fired the fatal shot.
“I only know of three shots, and I only heard two,” Hill said. “I started to run toward the presidential car. That put me in a line between the president's car and the follow-up car, running in between a motorcycle on the left and a car I was riding on the right and they told me later that there was a shot fired at that time, but I couldn't hear because of the engine noises of the motorcycle and the car.
“So, I get up on it [running at full speed] just to approach the back of the presidential vehicle when he gets hit in the head and that, you know, it's just horrendous. Mrs. Kennedy all of a sudden turns and comes up onto the trunk. She's grasping at some of that material. I grabbed her, put her back in the seat. And when I did that, then his body fell farther to its left. His head ended up in her lap. His face was cut off. I could see his eyes. They were fixed. There was a hole in the skull about the size of my palm. There was nothing there. The brains were gone. Everything was just ... I assumed he was dead at that time.”