Clint Hill: A Tortured Hero
30/04/23 10:06
April 30 2023 (Vol. 17 No. 22) - On a recent visit to a half-price book store, I purchased a copy of Five Presidents: My Extraordinary Journey with Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford written by former Secret Service agent Clint Hill with Lisa McCubbin. It was on The New York Times Best-Seller List in 2016, but I was too busy being a college professor at the time to read it. Anyone old enough to remember the assassination of John F. Kennedy remember Hill from the picture above, taken from a frame of the infamous Zapruder film. Within two seconds of the first of three shots being fired, Agent Hill reacted. As it turned out, it was too late to save the President. But he may well have saved the First Lady who, in shock, had climbed on back of the limousine to retrieve a piece of her husband's skull. The book is one of three Hill has written since he was forced to retire in 1975 because of the stress of the job and the toll it took on his health. A recurring theme throughout the book is how much those six seconds in Dallas in November 1963 haunted him - and continues to haunt him. In an 1975 interview with 60 Minutes, Hill told CBS correspondent Mike Wallace that the president's death was his fault, that he had responded too slowly. At that moment, Wallace, as has every one else since, told Hill that it wasn't his fault and that he had acted heroically. Another recurring theme in the book is how the men whose lives he has guarded at the risk to his own can be so cavalier about their personal safety. Even after JFK's assassination, subsequent presidents occasionally took unnecessary risks. There's another message from his book: Presidents are humans with gigantic egos. If they didn't have those egos, they probably wouldn't have been president in the first place. Hill saw Eisenhower as a formal, but polite man. Kennedy was the friendliest and kindest of the presidents he guarded. Johnson was crass and bullying. Nixon was devious and insecure. Ford was "an everyman" who was easy to get along with. Interestingly, he really enjoyed his time on Vice President Spiro Agnew's detail and was saddened by his self-inflicted fall from power. But the greatest message that comes out of this book is that protecting the President of the United States comes with a great personal cost. While Clint Hill has learned to cope with his demons from Dallas, he will forever be haunted by the nagging sense of "What if I had acted sooner?" One can only hope that someday he will achieve that elusive inner piece by realizing that he, too, is human, and did the very best he could under horrific circumstances. That's it for now. Fear the Turtle.