“We have been hit.” The phrase uttered on that fateful November 22, 1963 by Special Agent Kellerman has resonated for decades in the ears of presidential escort Clinton J. Hill. He was the first member of John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s security detail to climb into the official vehicle immediately after he was shot dead in Dallas. About to turn 92, this former Secret Service veteran is asked by dozens of media to remember an assassination that haunted him for almost thirty years, plunging him into a deep depression until in 1990 he was able to return to the scene of the crime and look again, for the first time since the assassination, the window from which Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK.
“To the hospital, to the hospital.” His partner Kellerman was shouting into the radio. He protected the first lady with his body, perched on the trunk of the limousine that was speeding through the streets of Dallas toward Parkland Memorial Hospital. Next to Jacqueline, JFK lay. Dead. In front, Governor Conolly. Bleeding out after receiving one of the bullets before the terrified and helpless gaze of his wife. Jackie, in the back row, was screaming, holding on to Kennedy’s body: “My God, they shot him in the head.” Upon arriving at the hospital, Hill took off his coat and wrapped it around the president’s head and shoulders. He remembers that he did it as a last gesture of protection towards the man whose last image he did not want to be that of a mangled corpse.
Clinton J. Hill is a retired veteran of the White House Protective Service. He has taken care of the security of five leaders: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Gerald Ford. This month ‘Five Days of November’ came to light, a book in which he tells how he experienced the assassination that shocked America. He has written several volumes of memoirs tied primarily to the years he spent serving the Kennedy family. There is nothing of sensationalism, morbidity, or desire to exploit that tragic murder in its pages. Only respect, honesty and a tribute to what she was the most famous first lady of the United States. Critics have summed them up with one word: ‘Moving’.
Entrusted during those years to the protection of JFK’s wife, in ‘My Travels with Mrs. Kennedy’ the former agent recounts how during the Cold War he had to supervise the security of the presidential clan. He brought her couple together and explained to the first lady that, in the event of an atomic weapons attack, her priority would be to immediately get her and her children John and Caroline to safety in a fallout shelter. But she replied that they would not flee. They would “walk out onto the grass and face the same fate as every other American.”
In this same book, Hill also tells of her most painful trauma and a suicide attempt a month after JFK’s death, during a brief official trip by Jaqueline with her children to attend a tribute in Palm Beach (Florida), “The Guilt and anguish consumed me. “All I could think about was Dallas,” explains the former agent, who the morning before the end of the year decided to dive into the sea and drown. «The tears ran down my cheeks, and when the cold water enveloped me they turned into sobs. “I wanted the water to swallow me.” However, a police officer observed the scene from the promenade and saved his life.
A noise similar to that of a firecracker
Clinton J. Hill’s story inspired Wolgfang Petersen and Clint Eastwood to film ‘In the Line of Fire’. The classic story of the Secret Service agent consumed by guilt for not having stopped the bullet intended for the president with his body. Only in his case it was a reality.
Hill was traveling in the vehicle immediately behind the presidential limousine, a nine-seater Lincoln convertible occupied by the president’s bodyguards, when the fateful first shot by Oswald (considered the sole perpetrator of the assassination) was fired. «As we came out of the curve and started to straighten out, I was looking at the area that appeared to be a park. There were people scattered throughout the park. And I heard a noise behind me from the right that sounded like a firecracker. “I immediately looked to that side and, as I did so, my eyes crossed the presidential limousine and I saw President Kennedy holding on while he lurched forward and to the left,” he recounts in his testimony before the commission that investigated the assassination.
“Was this the first shot?” one of the commissioners asks him.
“Yes sir. I jumped out of the car realizing something was wrong and ran towards the limo. Just when I got there, another sound was heard, which was different from the first one. I think I described it in my statement as if someone were shooting a revolver at a hard object; It seemed to have some kind of echo. I put my right foot on the left rear step of the car, and grabbed the handle with my hand. The vehicle lurched forward. I lost my balance and had to run three or four more steps before I could get back into the car. The second noise I heard had torn off a portion of the president’s head and he had slumped noticeably to the left of him. Mrs. Kennedy had jumped out of her seat to reach for something when she noticed me trying to climb up. She turned to me, I grabbed her and put her in the back seat. “I got on top of the seat and stayed there.”
It was later learned that Jacqueline was crawling on the trunk of the vehicle in an attempt to catch a fragment of the president’s skull. Hill received the medal of valor for placing his body between the first lady and the place where the shots had allegedly come from. He did not know if the shooter had planned to kill her as well. «I never thought that they could kill me or that I would never see my children again. I didn’t think about that at all. My goal was to get to the seat to form a cover (with her body) so that there could be no more damage,” the bodyguard declared in ‘Vanity Fair’.
But, somehow, the bullets hit him. In 1975 he confessed in the program ’60 Minutes’ his “regret” for not having been able to prevent the assassination. «My job was to protect them and I was not able to do it. “If I had been a little faster I might have been able to prevent the president’s fatal injury.” His life became hell, plagued by nights of terror in which he remembered Jacqueline Kennedy “coming out of the back seat, her terrified eyes looking at me but not seeing me, as if I were not there,” and her screams when the doctors removed the JFK’s corpse: “Jack, Jack, what have they done to you?” Another image that, as he admitted in 2021, he has never managed to leave behind is that of the president already dead in the car seat. «The right part of his head was missing. She was sprawled across the back seat. I saw that her eyes remained fixed. Mrs. Kennedy was completely covered in blood. “There was so much blood that you couldn’t tell if the president had other injuries or not.”
Alcohol and nightmares
Hill continued to serve under Jacqueline, then President Lyndon B. Johnson, and later moved to a prominent position in the Oval Office protection team during Nixon’s term. In 1975 he retired in a spiral of self-destruction. Alcohol, depression, nightmares. He closed himself off. It took him years to talk about the assassination. «I was not as close to my two children as I should have been. They grew up practically without a father; “Their mother raised them.” He was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
In 1982, a friend of his, a doctor, warned him that if he continued on that path, he had five years to live. “It was then when I decided to live, give up drinking, smoking and play sports.” In 1990 he completed his “improvement” process when he dared to travel to Dallas. He arrived in front of the infamous book warehouse that Oswald had chosen as a rifleman’s post, looked at the sixth floor windows, looked down the avenue and sighed as if he had freed himself from a heavy burden. “I left knowing that he had truly done everything I could have done that day.” Today he continues to advise other Secret Service agents on escort procedures, who has named a street after him. But what he appreciates most is Jaqueline’s dedication in one of his books. “For everything you did to make those years the happiest for President Kennedy and me.”
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