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It has become a cliche that everyone of a certain age could tell you where they were when they heard 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 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.
But as the 60th anniversary approaches, Hill fears that the will take the truth of the assassination to their graves. In an age of division, disinformation and internet-fuelled movements such as QAnon, 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, , “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 , which in 1991 helped popularise the “”, and by Stone’s 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 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 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.”
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 , 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.”
