Clint Hill

 

 

If there is one topic I have avoided in my 15 years of blogging, it is The Kennedy Assassination.

There have been many reasons for this.

One, I was four years old when IT (and it was always referred to as "IT") and I was still taking Inez* Mandated Naps.

 
Inez always told the story like this.  "Me and your grandmother were watching our stories." (That's what people called afternoon Soap Operas back then: "stories".) "Walter Cronkite came on and said Kennedy had been shot. You (meaning me) loved cartoons back then and you kept asking when the cartoons were going to come back on. You had to live two whole days without The Popeye Club."**

Two, just about everything that can be said about IT has been said.  It was a gory, terrible event and the one moment every one of a certain age can pinpoint when everything down the toilet.

Pretty soon four guys from England came over with that old long hair, everybody got color TV sets, and girls left their bras at home.

Here's your draft card, burn it or keep it. The new President, Lyndon Johnson, was not nearly as charismatic as JFK, got us into Vietnam. Martin Luther King and brother Bobby got shot.  That old long hair got longer and soon the kids were taking drugs and getting all freaky.

Things didn't calm down until Ford became President (a long story) and all of the hippies (the boys that grew their hair out) decided to settle down and make money. 

Three, for about sixty years there has been controversy about the assassination with everybody having an opinion which may/may not have a basis in fact because, let's face it, it happened a long time ago and we are just a tad bit more cynical about "official narratives".

The official narrative is a 24-year-old man took a rifle to work and shot the President of The United States from the sixth floor of (all together now) The Texas School Book Depository.  He shot three times, hitting the President twice and once hitting the governor of Texas who was sitting in front of him.

The official narrative has this man, (all together again) Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone.

People really don't believe that. They think either the CIA, Lyndon Johnson, the FBI, Russia, or the Mafia killed the President. Oh yeah, Lee Harvey was killed by the owner of a strip club, two days later, in the basement of the Dallas Police station.

The assassination was back in the news when Clint Hill, the Secret Service Agent assigned to Mrs. Kennedy, died at the age of 95.

He was the man running towards the Presidential limousine after the shots were fired, somehow hopping on board the car, and pushing Mrs. Kennedy back into her seat where she could cradle the expired President in her lap.

At Parkland Hospital, where they took the President in a desperate but futile attempt to save his life, Hill took a call from brother Bobby who asked, "How bad is it?"  Hill's reply: "It is about as bad as it can get".

Hill lasted about 13 additional years with the Secret Service. In 1975, he flunked a physical and was retired from the Secret Service. At his retirement reception, Mrs. Kennedy, Mrs. Johnson, and Mamie Eisenhower attended. 

By his account, he spent the next several years holed up in his basement, smoking and drinking. Today, we would say he had PTSD.

He eventually began talking about IT. The story was always the same. He on the running board of the car behind the President's. He heard the first shot coming from behind him. He heard another shot coming from behind him. He heard another shot coming from behind him and saw it hit the President's head. All in the span of less than eight seconds.

Hill wrote several books, of course, having to relive what has to be the worst day at work ever. 

Hill regretted he could not do more. But that's not fair to him. He did all he could do.

By the way, Hill threw his coat over the President to cover the head wound from the media. When all was said and done, he took the coat to be dry cleaned. He presented the dry cleaning receipt at work for reimbursement.

It was turned down. 

* My mom.

** "The Popeye Club" was an afternoon show that aired on WSB-TV in Atlanta from Monday through Friday.  It starred Don Kennedy (no relation to the President) as "Officer Don" and they showed Popeye cartoons.  They didn't try to teach you anything. It was great.  The assassination happened on a Friday and it was wall-to-wall news coverage until after the burial on Monday.  "The Popeye Club" came back on the air on Tuesday.