JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
If the name Clint Hill doesn't sound familiar, you might know him as the man on the back of the presidential limousine. He was a Secret Service agent, and moments after John F. Kennedy was shot back in 1963, he leaped on to the president's moving car trying to shield the Kennedys. Clint Hill lived with that memory for decades. He died last week at age 93. On the 60th anniversary of the assassination, he opened up to "Radio Diaries" about that day in Dallas.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW "60 MINUTES")
MIKE WALLACE: It was 12 years ago we first saw this picture - Secret Service agent Clint Hill climbing in the back of the presidential limousine that dreadful November day in Dallas to try to push Jacqueline Kennedy back to protect her life. Clint Hill was a Secret Service...
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CLINT HILL: Before Dallas I was just - you know, I was Clint Hill. After that, I've been known as the man who climbed on to the president's car.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BOB WALKER: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. This is Bob Walker speaking from Dallas Love Field where a large crowd has...
HILL: In November of 1963, we arrive in Dallas. As we're going through this crowd, I'm in the follow-up car immediately behind the presidential vehicle.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: There's Mrs. Kennedy, and the crowd yells.
HILL: I'm on the running board, left-hand side, which puts me closest to Mrs. Kennedy, who is in the left rear of the presidential vehicle.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: And here is the president of the United States, and what a crowd, what a tremendous welcome he's getting now.
HILL: By the time we got to Main Avenue, the crowd was so large they could not be contained on the sidewalks. People were hanging out of windows, they were on top of buildings, they were on fire escapes - any place they could be to see the president and the first lady. We got down to the end of Main, turned right, entering an area called Dealey Plaza. And all of a sudden, I hear this explosive noise over my right shoulder. I didn't think at first it was a gunshot. I thought it was a firecracker or something. But when I saw the president's reaction, I knew that was not normal. I mean, he threw his hands to his throat and started to fall to his left.
I jumped off of the car I was on, running as fast as I could run so I could provide some protection for both President and Mrs. Kennedy. That was what I was trying to do. But as I approached the vehicle, there was a gunshot. The shot hit him somewhere in the lower portion of the head, in the rear, and exploded out just above the ear. And it was just a mass of blood all over me, all over Mrs. Kennedy. Mrs. Kennedy had come up on the trunk. I got up there, and I helped her get back into the back seat.
She was in shock. There's no question about that. She was in absolute shock. And I'm up there on the back of the car, so I turned, and I gave a thumbs down to the follow-up car crew, shook my head no. And I hollered at the driver, get us to a hospital. We pulled up at the emergency room. They had five or six doctors at one time working, one on the heart, one on the lungs. They did everything they could. So I asked the nursing staff, get me a phone, I want to talk to people at the White House. And the operator cut in and he said, the attorney general wants to talk to you. Well, the attorney general was Robert Kennedy, the president's brother. He said, well, how bad is it? I did not want to tell Robert Kennedy that his older brother, Jack, was dead. So I simply said, it's as bad as it can get. And with that, he hung up.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #3: We interrupt this program for a CBS Radio NetALERT bulletin.
ALLAN JACKSON: The Associated Press in its first report says that President Kennedy was shot just as his motorcade left downtown Dallas. Clint Hill, a Secret Service agent assigned to Mrs. Kennedy, escorted the president into the hospital.
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HILL: When I was a kid, my father taught me that when you're given a job to do, you do it completely, all the way through, until it's totally done correctly. And I had failed in this case because the president was dead. I then went into an extreme depressed state at my home in Virginia. I lived on two packs of cigarettes a day and a bottle of scotch. That's how I slept. I just refused to talk to anybody - not the agents, not the family, nobody. The only time I ever talked about it was that I talked to the Warren Commission in 1964, and I talked to "60 Minutes" in 1975.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "60 MINUTES")
WALLACE: Clint Hill was a Secret Service agent for 17 years. He was chief of the White House detail. But Clint retired from the Secret Service four months ago at the age of 43. In the first public statement he has made, sitting...
HILL: I was really emotional, and much more than I had anticipated.
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WALLACE: Was there anything that the Secret Service or that Clint Hill could have done to keep that from happening?
HILL: Clint Hill, yes.
WALLACE: Clint Hill, yes? What do you mean?
HILL: If he had reacted about five-tenths of a second faster, maybe a second faster, I wouldn't be here today.
WALLACE: You mean, you would have gotten there, and you would have taken the shot?
HILL: Yes, sir.
WALLACE: And that would have been all right with you?
HILL: That would've been fine with me.
WALLACE: You couldn't have gotten there. You don't - you surely don't have any sense of guilt about that?
HILL: Yes, I certainly do. I have a great deal of guilt about that. Had I turned in a different direction, I'd have made it. That was my fault.
Over the years, a lot of agents have said they're agents now because they saw what I did in 1963 - it was heroic. But I don't take any comfort in being considered a hero.
(SOUNDBITE OF VASCO HEXEL'S "LOOKING OUTWARDS")
HILL: That assassination is like a movie - goes around in my brain all the time. The total elapsed time, they say, from the time of the first shot until the last shot was six seconds. That six-second period in Dallas, it's not an easy thing to live with. It's kind of weird to think that six seconds can last for a lifetime.
SUMMERS: That was the late Clint Hill sharing his story on "Radio Diaries" in 2023.
(SOUNDBITE OF VASCO HEXEL'S "LOOKING OUTWARDS") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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