Clint Hill, a courageous Secret Service agent who famously leaped onto President John F. Kennedy’s limousine during the assassination in Dallas, passed away at 93 in Belvedere, California. Hill’s swift actions on November 22, 1963, prevented First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy from falling from the vehicle. He was deeply affected by the event, feeling guilty for not being able to save the president. Recognized for his bravery, he received awards and later authored several books detailing his experiences. Hill struggled with emotional turmoil after retirement but eventually found peace, reflecting on his service and the tragic events of that day.
Clint Hill, the Secret Service agent who jumped onto President John F. Kennedy’s limousine as it was fired upon in Dallas and prevented a frantic Jacqueline Kennedy from falling, passed away on Friday at his residence in Belvedere, Calif. Mr. Hill, celebrated for his valor but deeply haunted by his inability to save the president, was 93.
His passing was made public on Monday by his publicist, Jennifer Robinson.
An iconic image from the Kennedy assassination, captured in an Associated Press photo and the amateur film known as the Zapruder film, shows a man in a suit clutching the trunk of the presidential limousine as Mrs. Kennedy, dressed in a pink ensemble and matching pillbox hat, climbs onto the back of the vehicle.
Mr. Hill, the figure in the suit assigned to protect Mrs. Kennedy, pushed her back into her seat next to her fatally injured husband.
“I believe Special Agent Clinton Hill saved her life,” David F. Powers, an aide to Mr. Kennedy who was in the backup Secret Service vehicle, later stated during the Warren Commission’s inquiry into the president’s assassination.
Mr. Powers noted that Mrs. Kennedy “likely would have fallen off the back of the car and directly into the path of the other cars in the motorcade.”
Thirteen days post-assassination, in a ceremony attended by Mrs. Kennedy, Mr. Hill was awarded the highest honor from the Treasury Department — which oversaw the Secret Service at that time — for his “extraordinary courage and heroic actions under extreme peril.”
On the fateful afternoon of November 22, 1963, Mr. Hill was on the left-front running board of a Secret Service car positioned directly behind Kennedy’s open-topped limousine as the presidential motorcade traversed downtown Dallas.
“The motorcade commenced like any of the multiple ones I had participated in as an agent — filled with adrenaline, detail members on high alert,” Mr. Hill recounted in an essay for The New York Times in 2010, marking the 47th anniversary of the assassination. But suddenly, he heard “an explosive noise.”
“I scanned the presidential limousine and witnessed the president clutching his throat and tilting to the left,” he wrote. He dashed toward the limo. “I was so concentrated on reaching the president and Mrs. Kennedy for cover that I didn’t hear the second shot,” he remembered.
He was merely feet away when he heard the third shot. “It struck the president in the upper right rear of his head, and blood was everywhere,” he wrote.
After pushing Mrs. Kennedy back into her seat, Mr. Hill climbed onto it to shield both the president and his wife. It was then that he noticed a bloodied John Connally, the governor of Texas, who was seated in the middle with his wife, Nellie. Connally, too, had been shot but survived.
As the limousine, with two Secret Service agents in the front, raced to Parkland Memorial Hospital, Mr. Hill maintained his position over the rear seats. Below him, the president lay on his back in his wife’s lap. Mr. Hill heard Mrs. Kennedy utter, “Jack, Jack, what have they done to you?”
Once the limousine drove onto hospital grounds, Mr. Hill took off his suit coat and draped its lining around the president’s head, concealing his grievous wounds. It was only then that Mrs. Kennedy released him, allowing him to be carried into the hospital. Shortly after, John F. Kennedy was declared dead.
“I stayed by Mrs. Kennedy’s side for the next four days,” Mr. Hill wrote in The Times. “The woman who just days earlier had been so joyful about the Texas trip was engulfed in profound shock. Her eyes mirrored the sorrow of the nation and the world.”
Clinton J. Hill was born on January 4, 1932, in Larimore, N.D. His mother, Alma (Peterson) Paulson, left him at an orphanage when he was just an infant, already having five other children. He was adopted a few months later by Chris Hill, a county auditor, and his wife, Jennie, who resided 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 officer, he joined the Secret Service in 1958 at its Denver office. The following year, he was assigned to the White House detail to protect President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Mr. Hill had anticipated remaining on the White House detail when John F. Kennedy was elected, feeling “as though I had been demoted from the starting lineup to the bench,” he recounted in a successful 2012 memoir, “Mrs. Kennedy and Me,” co-authored with Lisa McCubbin, a journalist and author he married in 2021. “I was heartbroken.”
He assumed he was chosen to protect Mrs. Kennedy because she would feel more at ease with him, being close in age (he was 28 and she was 31) and having a child nearly the same age as her almost 3-year-old daughter, Caroline.
Mr. Hill accompanied Mrs. Kennedy on her global travels, and even while observing formalities — he consistently referred to her as Mrs. Kennedy, and she addressed him as Mr. Hill — he held her in high regard and as he noted in The Times, “we developed trust and confidence in one another, akin to close friends.”
Mr. Hill continued to safeguard Mrs. Kennedy, Caroline, and the Kennedys’ son, John Jr., for a year following the president’s assassination. He later oversaw protection for Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, and Gerald R. Ford.
Upon his retirement from the Secret Service in 1975, he served as the assistant director responsible for all protective operations.
In December 2013, the Secret Service honored him at its James J. Rowley Training Center in Maryland by erecting a bronze plaque next to a street named Clint Hill Way.
However, the recognition and his rise within the agency could not alleviate Mr. Hill’s feelings of guilt. He held himself responsible for not reacting a fraction of a second faster to the gunfire, convinced that he had lost a chance to save President Kennedy. His emotional distress led to his resignation in 1975 at the age of 43, following medical advice.
Not long afterward, Mr. Hill was interviewed by Mike Wallace for “60 Minutes” and openly spoke of his torment for the first time, becoming emotional at one moment.
“I carry a significant amount of guilt about that,” he admitted. “If I had turned in another direction, I would have made it. It’s my fault.”
He added that he would “carry that burden to my grave.”
Recalling that interview in his book “Between You and Me” (2005, with Gary Paul Gates), Mr. Wallace shared that Mr. Hill confided off camera that “he was experiencing severe depression.”
In his memoir, Mr. Hill reflected that after retiring, he isolated himself in the basement of his Virginia home, sitting “all alone on the worn sofa with a bottle of Scotch and a pack of cigarettes, attempting to escape the painful past.”
In 1982, a doctor warned him he would not survive if he didn’t change his destructive habits.
“We had friends who would come visit — I wouldn’t even acknowledge them,” he stated in an interview with Brian Lamb of C-SPAN shortly after the publication of his memoir. “I never even stood up. I was just — I didn’t want anything to do with anyone.
“Eventually, I began to improve when the doctor persuaded me to change. I went cold turkey. It was tough. I almost wore out my shirt pockets trying to reach for the cigarettes that weren’t there anymore.”
A reminder of Mr. Hill’s significance in history came in 1993, when Clint Eastwood portrayed a Secret Service agent in the movie “In the Line of Fire,” a character loosely inspired by Mr. Hill’s experiences.
On May 19, 1994, hours before her passing at 64 due to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, President Bill Clinton invited Mr. Hill to the White House to personally thank him for his dedication to Mrs. Kennedy and his service in the Secret Service.
Ms. McCubbin survives him, along with his two sons, Chris and Corey, from a previous marriage to Gwendolyn Brown, a former college classmate; five grandchildren; and two step-grandsons.
Mr. Hill collaborated with Ms. McCubbin on several works, 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 contributed memories for “The Kennedy Detail” (2010), which Ms. McCubbin authored with retired Secret Service agent Gerald Blaine.
In a 2004 documentary on the Secret Service for the National Geographic Channel, Mr. Hill mentioned that he still experienced nightmares related to the assassination. However, he added that he had revisited the scene in Dallas, which had helped him reconcile with his emotions.
“In 1990, I returned and walked through the area,” he shared. “I entered the building where the shooter was located, and I ultimately concluded that nothing I could have done would have altered the outcome.”