Clint Hill, Secret Service agent who leaped onto JFK's car after he was shot, dies at 93
Hill died Friday at his home in Belvedere, California, according to his publisher, Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. A cause of death was not given.
Although few may recognize his name, the footage of Hill, captured on Abraham Zapruder's chilling home movie of the assassination, provided some of the most indelible images of Kennedy's assassination in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.
Hill received Secret Service awards and was promoted for his actions that day, but for decades blamed himself for Kennedy's death, saying he didn't react quickly enough and would gladly have given his life to save the president.
'If I had reacted just a little bit quicker. And I could have, I guess,' a weeping Hill told Mike Wallace on CBS' 60 Minutes in 1975, shortly after he retired at age 43 at the urging of his doctors. 'And I'll live with that to my grave.'
It was only in recent years that Hill said he was able to finally start putting the assassination behind him and accept what happened.
On the day of the assassination, Hill was assigned to protect first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, and was riding on the left running board of the follow-up car directly behind the presidential limousine as it made its way through Dealey Plaza.
Hill told the Warren Commission that he reacted after hearing a shot and seeing the president slump in his seat. The president was struck by a fatal headshot before Hill was able to make it to the limousine.
Zapruder's film captured Hill as he leaped from the Secret Service car, grabbed a handle on the limousine's trunk and pulled himself onto it as the driver accelerated. He forced Mrs. Kennedy, who had crawled onto the trunk, back into her seat as the limousine sped off.
Hill later became the agent in charge of the White House protective detail and eventually an assistant director of the Secret Service, retiring because of what he characterized as deep depression and recurring memories of the assassination.
The 1993 Clint Eastwood thriller 'In the Line of Fire,' about a former Secret Service agent scarred by the JFK assassination, was inspired in part by Hill.
Hill was born in 1932 and grew up in Washburn, North Dakota. He attended Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, served in the Army and worked as a railroad agent before joining the Secret Service in 1958. He worked in the agency's Denver office for about a year, before joining the elite group of agents assigned to protect the president and first family.
Since his retirement, Hill has spoken publicly about the assassination only a handful of times, but the most poignant was his 1975 interview with Wallace, during which Hill broke down several times.
'If I had reacted about five-tenths of a second faster, maybe a second faster, I wouldn't be here today,' Hill said.
'You mean you would have gotten there and you would have taken the shot?' Wallace asked.
'The third shot, yes, sir,' Hill said.
'And that would have been all right with you?'
'That would have been fine with me,' Hill responded.
In his 2005 memoir, 'Between You and Me,' Wallace recalled his interview with Hill as one of the most moving of his career.
In 2006, Wallace and Hill reunited on CNN's 'Larry King Live,' where Hill credited that first 60 Minutes interview with helping him finally start the healing process.
'I have to thank Mike for asking me to do that interview and then thank him more because he's what caused me to finally come to terms with things and bring the emotions out where they surfaced,' he said. 'It was because of his questions and the things he asked that I started to recover.'
Decades after the assassination, Hill co-authored several books — including 'Mrs. Kennedy and Me' and 'Five Presidents' — about his Secret Service years with Lisa McCubbin Hill, whom he married in 2021.
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Sirhan frequently expressed 'anti-Jewish feelings,' acquaintances told The Times, and his supreme hatred was the existence of the state of Israel. Kennedy, who had reported in British Palestine for the Boston Post in his early 20s, had become a stalwart supporter of the Jewish state and in a recent interview had proposed selling it 50 Phantom fighter jets. In one of his notebooks, Sirhan had written, 'Kennedy must be assassinated before June 5, 1968.' That was the one-year anniversary of the start of the Six-Day War in which Israel had defeated a coalition of Arab armies. Sirhan had missed his timeline, as it happened, by just a few minutes. 'RFK must be disposed of like his brother was,' Sirhan wrote in a journal found by investigators, a theme he stressed in many scribbled notes. 'Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy must soon die die die die die die die die die die.… My determination to eliminate RFK is becoming more the more (sic) of an unshakable obsession…. Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated assassinated assassinated assassinated.' At his trial, Sirhan's legal team did not dispute that he had killed Kennedy and said he acted alone. Their goal was to spare him the death penalty by convincing jurors it was second-degree murder. It was the act of an 'immature, emotionally disturbed and mentally ill youth' who had killed in a trancelike state, said defense attorney Emil Berman. He had been traumatized by the sight of political violence as a child, the attorney said, and news of the Arab-Israeli conflict unleashed blinding rage. 'In his fantasies, he was often a hero and savior of his people,' Berman said. With the trial in headlines worldwide, the Palestine Liberation Organization distributed posters of Sirhan praising him as 'a commando, not an assassin.' Sirhan's angry outbursts became a regular feature of the trial. He was enraged at the release of his notebooks, of his poor school grades, of his 89 score on an IQ test. At one point, he announced he wanted the gas chamber. 'I killed Robert F. Kennedy willfully, premeditatedly, and with 20 years of malice aforethought,' he told the court, later explaining it was a reference to the 1948 birth of Israel. Taking the stand, Sirhan testified that he could change the color of a candle flame with the power of his mind. He said he not remember committing the shooting. He said he'd been drunk. He delivered a screed on the history of the Middle East, telling his attorney, 'Zionism is more inimical to me than communism is to you.' Defense psychiatrists said Sirhan suffered paranoia and social maladjustment, that he viewed Kennedy as a surrogate for the father who had abandoned him, and that mirrors at the Ambassador Hotel might have initiated his homicidal trance. Prosecutor Lynn Compton ridiculed the claims. 'If you don't buy it, like I don't buy it,' he told jurors, 'then there's nothing left but plain old cold-blooded first-degree murder.' Jurors convicted him and gave him death, a sentence commuted to life in prison in 1972 when the state Supreme Court ruled capital punishment unconstitutional. Sirhan's release was among the demands a year later, when the Black September terrorist group kidnapped the U.S. ambassador and two other Western envoys in Sudan. (The U.S. refused; the three were executed.) In a 1989 interview with journalist David Frost, Sirhan again disavowed any conspiracy in Kennedy's death, suggesting it was at odds with his mistrustful nature; he knew how a collaborator could easily become a witness against him. He claimed to feel remorse, while at the same time comparing himself to a Jew who had been given the opportunity to kill Adolf Hitler. By his 2016 parole hearing, Sirhan's rhetoric had changed. He was now insisting he had not even done the crime, buoyed by conspiracy theorists positing that he had somehow been hypnotically programmed to fire his gun in order to divert attention from the real shooter. 'Legally speaking, I'm not guilty of anything,' he said. It was not until 2021, however, that he convinced a parole panel that he should go free, a decision supported by the victim's third son, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is now the U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services. RFK Jr. described Sirhan's guilt as 'a fiction.' He believed a security guard had done it, perhaps as part of a CIA scheme. When he met the 77-year-old Sirhan in prison, he wrote, he found him 'gentle, humble, kindhearted, frail and harmless.' Most of the Kennedy family rejected the plea for parole, as did Gov. Gavin Newsom, noting that Sirhan refused to take responsibility for his crime. His lack of insight made him a continued threat, the governor wrote, and described him as 'an ideological lightning rod' who might inspire further political violence. 'Sirhan, one man with a gun, acting alone, inflicted grievous harm to our country,' Newsom wrote. The Trump administration recently released a cache of classified files on the assassination, and Sirhan's current attorney, Angela Berry, said a team of researchers is combing them for new evidence. 'So far there hasn't been anything of use,' she said. The investigative journalist Dan Moldea, who studied the case for years, went into it believing there was a good case for a second gunman but emerged with a book, 'The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy,' that meticulously debunked the theories. (One popular theory involved gouges in the pantry walls misidentified as holes from unaccounted-for bullets.) After multiple prison interviews, Moldea came to believe Sirhan was intent on using him. 'I said, 'Why not admit you did it, instead of this bulls— that you were drunk and don't remember anything?' ' Moldea told The Times in a recent interview. 'He said to me, 'Listen, why should I admit guilt when I got you out there coming up with exculpatory evidence saying I didn't do it?' ' Author Mel Ayton, who has written extensively about Sirhan, said the killer was a chronic failure who believed the murder would make him a hero. 'What [Sirhan] thought would be a redeeming feature of his life is his politics, which has been ignored by conspiracy writers,' Ayton told The Times. He said crackpot theories have found oxygen in historical amnesia: 'If there's no motive, they can promote their idea that he was just an innocent patsy.' In a forward to Ayton's new book, 'The Making of an Assassin: Why Sirhan Sirhan Murdered Robert Kennedy,' former FBI profiler John Douglas (with Mark Olshaker), describes Sirhan as both 'a mentally unstable and angry nobody and a driven, mission-oriented ideologue.' Well before he did it, Sirhan expressed his plans, not just in writing but in conversation. At the 1969 trial, a Black trash collector named Alvin Clark testified about arguing with Sirhan a few weeks before the California primary. To Clark, Kennedy was the man who had paid to bring the murdered Martin Luther King Jr.'s body home to his family. Sirhan said, 'I'm planning on shooting him.' Clark replied, 'If you do, you'll be killing one of the best men in the country.'
