Clint Hill was a Secret Service agent under five presidents, best known for jumping onto the presidential car to protect the first lady after President John F. Kennedy was fatally shot in 1963.
- Died: February 21, 2025 (Who else died on February 21?)
- Details of death: Died at his home in Belvedere, California at the age of 93.
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Clint Hill’s legacy
Born and raised in North Dakota, Hill began his career in the U.S. Army. Trained in Army intelligence, he served for three years in the 1950s as a counterintelligence special agent. The work prepared him for his later career, and upon leaving the military, he joined the Secret Service in 1958. He was assigned to the detail for President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the first of five presidents under whom he served.
The moment that changed his life – and changed the face of the U.S. – came when Hill was on the security detail for Eisenhower’s successor. The November 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) has been meticulously studied by scholars and the public alike, and Hill’s actions are widely known. As the presidential motorcade made its way through the streets of Dallas, Texas, a gunman shot the president. Hill was on the left-front running board of the car behind the president’s, and the moment he heard the shot, he leapt onto the trunk of the president’s open limousine, intent on protecting him and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (1929–1994) from any further harm.
Tragically, Hill was too late to help President Kennedy, but later analysis concluded that he likely saved the first lady’s life by preventing her from climbing out of the car. He was commended for his actions, receiving the Secret Service’s highest honor in a ceremony not two weeks after the assassination. No one blamed Hill for the president’s death – no one except Hill himself.
In the years after the assassination, Hill remained in the Secret Service, assigned to the former first lady’s security detail and later to those of President Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) and Vice President Spiro Agnew (1918–1996). Before his retirement in 1975, he served as assistant director of the Secret Service. But throughout those years, he was plagued by an agonizing belief that he had failed in his duties.
Hill fell into such a deep depression that his doctors recommended he retire early, and so he did, at the age of 43. Retirement didn’t help. He later revealed that he went through a period of several years in which he cut himself off entirely from his friends and spent much of time in his basement, drinking and smoking to excess. Hill’s mental state eventually improved, but his feelings of guilt never entirely faded.
A few things helped. One was a 1975 interview with Mike Wallace (1918–2012) for “60 Minutes,” in which Hill offered gut-wrenching details of the day and his struggles in its wake. Just talking about it publicly made a small difference, he said. Even more healing was a 1990 trip to Dallas in which he returned to the scene of the assassination. With a better understanding of the day’s sequence of events from the years of analysis that had happened since, he was able to retrace his steps and conclude that he had done all he could. His split-second reaction was as fast as humanly possible; it was simply impossible for him to have reacted quickly enough to save the president.
Notable quote
“My dad drilled into me that when you’re given an assignment to do, you do it ’til it’s fully finished. I had an assignment to keep the president and Mrs. Kennedy alive. I only kept one of them alive. One died on my watch.” — from a 2024 interview for “60 Minutes: A Second Look”
Tributes to Clint Hill
Full obituary: The New York Times
