Clint Hill, the Secret Service agent who leaped onto President John F. Kennedy’s limousine as it came under fire in Dallas and prevented a scrambling Jacqueline Kennedy from falling to the ground, died on Friday at his home in Belvedere, Calif. Mr. Hill, hailed for his bravery but long tormented by his inability to save the president’s life, was 93.
His death was announced on Monday by Jennifer Robinson, his publicist.
It is a signature image of the Kennedy assassination, reproduced in an Associated Press photograph and the amateur motion picture footage known as the Zapruder film: A figure in a business suit grasps the trunk of the presidential limousine as Mrs. Kennedy, in her pink outfit and matching pillbox hat, climbs onto the rear of the auto.
Mr. Hill, the man in the suit, who was assigned to protect Mrs. Kennedy, pushed her back into her seat, alongside her mortally wounded husband.
“I think Special Agent Clinton Hill saved her life,” David F. Powers, an aide to Mr. Kennedy who was riding in the backup Secret Service car, later told the Warren Commission investigating the president’s assassination.
Mr. Powers said that Mrs. Kennedy “probably would have fallen off the rear end of the car and would have been right in the path of the other cars proceeding in the motorcade.’’
Thirteen days after the assassination, in a ceremony attended by Mrs. Kennedy, Mr. Hill received the highest award bestowed by the Treasury Department — the agency that oversaw the Secret Service at the time — for his “extraordinary courage and heroic effort in the face of maximum danger.”
Mr. Hill had been riding on the left-front running board of a Secret Service car directly behind Kennedy’s open-top limousine as the presidential motorcade wound through downtown Dallas on the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963.
“The motorcade began like any of the many that I had been a part of as an agent — with the adrenaline flowing, the members of the detail on alert,” Mr. Hill wrote in an essay in The New York Times in 2010, on the 47th anniversary of the assassination. But then he heard “an explosive noise.”
“I scanned the presidential limousine and saw the president grab at his throat and lurch to the left,” he wrote. He ran toward the limo. “I was so focused on getting to the president and Mrs. Kennedy to provide them cover that I didn’t hear the second shot,” he recounted.
He was just feet away when he heard the third shot. “It hit the president in the upper right rear of his head, and blood was everywhere,” he wrote.
After shoving Mrs. Kennedy back into her seat, Mr. Hill climbed atop it to shield the president and his wife. It was then that he saw a bloodied John Connally, the governor of Texas, who was riding in the middle seats with his wife, Nellie. He, too, had been shot but survived.
As the limousine, with two Secret Service agents in the front seats, sped to Parkland Memorial Hospital, Mr. Hill continued to hover over the rear seats. Beneath him, the president lay face up in his wife’s lap. Mr. Hill heard Mrs. Kennedy say, “Jack, Jack, what have they done to you?”
When the limousine entered the hospital grounds, Mr. Hill removed his suit coat and placed its lining around the president’s head, covering his gruesome wounds. Only then did Mrs. Kennedy let go of him, enabling him to be wheeled into the hospital. Minutes later, John F. Kennedy was pronounced dead.
“I stayed by Mrs. Kennedy’s side for the next four days,” Mr. Hill wrote in The Times. “The woman who just a few days before had been so happy and exuberant about this trip to Texas was in deep shock. Her eyes reflected the sorrow of the nation and the world.”
Clinton J. Hill was born on Jan. 4, 1932, in Larimore, N.D. His mother, Alma (Peterson) Paulson, who already had five children, took him to an orphanage when he was an infant. He was adopted a few months later by Chris Hill, a county auditor, and his wife, Jennie, who lived in Washburn, N.D.
He graduated from Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn., in 1954 with a degree in history and physical education. After serving as an Army counterintelligence agent, he joined the Secret Service in 1958 at its Denver office. A year later, he was assigned to the White House detail protecting President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Mr. Hill had anticipated continuing on the White House detail when John F. Kennedy was elected and felt “as though I had been demoted from the starting lineup to the bench,” he recalled in a best-selling 2012 memoir, “Mrs. Kennedy and Me,” written with Lisa McCubbin, a journalist and author whom he married in 2021. “I was devastated.”
He assumed he had been chosen to protect Mrs. Kennedy because she would be comfortable with him, since he was close to her age (he was 28 and she was 31) and he had a child about the same age as her nearly 3-year-old daughter, Caroline.
Mr. Hill accompanied Mrs. Kennedy on her world travels, and while they maintained formalities — he always called her Mrs. Kennedy, and she called him Mr. Hill — he admired her greatly and, as he wrote in The Times, “we grew to trust and confide in each other, as close friends do.”
Mr. Hill continued to protect Mrs. Kennedy, Caroline and the Kennedys’ son, John Jr., for one year after the president’s assassination. He was later in charge of protection for Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford.
When he retired from the Secret Service in 1975, he was the assistant director responsible for all protective forces.
In December 2013, the Secret Service honored him at its James J. Rowley Training Center in Maryland, erecting a bronze plaque next to a street it named Clint Hill Way.
But the accolades and his ascendancy in the agency could not overcome Mr. Hill’s feelings of guilt. He blamed himself for not reacting a split second faster to the sound of gunfire, becoming convinced that he had missed a chance to save President Kennedy’s life. His emotional turmoil resulted in his retirement in 1975 at age 43, at the urging of doctors.
Soon afterward, Mr. Hill was interviewed by Mike Wallace for “60 Minutes” and spoke publicly of his anguish for the first time, becoming tearful at one point.
“I have a great deal of guilt about that,” he said. “Had I turned in a different direction, I’d have made it. It’s my fault.”
He added that he would “live with that to my grave.”
Recalling that interview in his book “Between You and Me” (2005, with Gary Paul Gates), Mr. Wallace said that Mr. Hill had told him off camera that “he was suffering from severe depression.”
In his memoir, Mr. Hill said that in the years after he retired, he retreated to the basement of his Virginia home and sat “all alone on the tattered sofa with a bottle of Scotch and a carton of cigarettes, trying to forget the painful past.”
In 1982, a doctor told him he would die if he did not quit his self-destructive behavior.
“We have friends who would come and see me — I wouldn’t even respond to them,” he said in an interview with Brian Lamb of C-SPAN shortly after Mr. Hill’s memoir was published. “I never even got up. I just — I didn’t want anything to do with anybody.
“Finally I started to snap out of it when the doctor convinced me to, you know, I have to change. I went cold turkey. It wasn’t easy. I almost wore out the shirt pockets trying to get at the cigarettes that weren’t there anymore.”
A reminder of Mr. Hill’s place in history came in 1993, when Clint Eastwood portrayed a Secret Service agent in the movie “In the Line of Fire,” a role loosely based on Mr. Hill’s experiences.
On May 19, 1994, when Mrs. Kennedy — now Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis — was hours from her death at 64 from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, President Bill Clinton invited Mr. Hill to the White House, where he expressed his personal thanks for Mr. Hill’s service to her and for his career in the Secret Service.
Ms. McCubbin survives him, as do his two sons, Chris and Corey, from an earlier marriage to Gwendolyn Brown, a former college classmate; five grandchildren; and two step-grandsons.
Mr. Hill collaborated with Ms. McCubbin on several books, including “Five Days in November” (2013), “Five Presidents: My Extraordinary Journey With Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford” (2016), and “My Travels With Mrs. Kennedy (2022). He also provided recollections for “The Kennedy Detail” (2010), which Ms. McCubbin wrote with a retired Secret Service agent, Gerald Blaine.
In a 2004 documentary on the Secret Service for the National Geographic Channel, Mr. Hill said he still had nightmares about the assassination. But he added that he had returned to the scene in Dallas and that this had helped him come to terms with his emotions.
“In 1990, I went back and walked through the area,” he said. “I went into the building in which the shooter was located, and I finally came to the conclusion that nothing that I could have done would have made any difference.”
The post Clint Hill, Who Sprang to Kennedys’ Side as Shots Were Fired, Dies at 93 appeared first on New York Times.
