Clint Hill, Secret Service agent who leapt onto JFK’s car after the president was shot, dies at 93

As the Trump administration prepares to release the Kennedy assassination files, a Secret Service agent who was famously photographed in 1963 throwing himself on top of President John F. Kennedy’s limousine to protect the first family from more shots has died.

Clint Hill was decorated with honors for his bravery that day, but the memories of the gruesome assassination — and his belief he could have done more to stop it — haunted the agent for life.

He died Friday at home in Belvedere California, from congestive heart failure and other ailments, according to his family. He was 93.

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, an Army veteran who had spent years protecting the Kennedys, was riding on the front running board of a Secret Service car directly behind the president and first lady when shots rang out. He was unable to reach Kennedy before the president was fatally shot in the head.

As Jaqueline Kennedy reached behind her to recover a part of the president’s skull, Hill dove onto their limousine, pushed Kennedy back into the car, and used his body to shield the first couple, as the motorcade sped off to the hospital.

“I scanned the presidential limousine and saw the president grab at his throat and lurch to the left,” Hill later wrote of the experience in a 2010 essay in The New York Times. “I was so focused on getting to the president and Mrs. Kennedy to provide them cover that I didn’t hear the second shot,” he added.

Hill’s quick thinking was later credited with saving the first lady’s life. An aide testified before the Warren Commission investigating the assassination that Ms. Kennedy “probably would have fallen off the rear end of the car and would have been right in the path of the other cars proceeding in the motorcade.’’

Hill, who became close with Kennedys while on their security detail, also helped comfort the first lady in the chaotic moments after the shooting.

At the hospital, Hill helped convince Kennedy to release her husband to the doctors by covering his wounds with his suit jacket to maintain the president’s dignity as the eyes of the world watched on.

“It suddenly hits me,” Hill wrote in his 2013 memoir. “She won’t let go because she does not want others to see the president in this condition. It is a gruesome scene, beyond the imagination. But worse, her husband’s normally sparkling eyes are unblinking, his magnetic smile gone.”

Despite his valor in 1963, and subsequently rising to coordinate the White House protective detail and serve as assistant director of the Secret Service, Hill continued to suffer from major grief and depression over the shooting.

“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.”

After retirement, Hill wrote that he spent years “all alone on the tattered sofa with a bottle of Scotch and a carton of cigarettes, trying to forget the painful past,” at one point throwing himself into the ocean during a post-assassination trip to Florida with the former first lady.

It was only in recent years that Hill said he was able to finally start putting the assassination behind him and accept what happened.

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.

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 about his Secret Service years with Lisa McCubbin Hill, whom he married in 2021.

“We had that once-in-a-lifetime love that everyone hopes for,” McCubbin Hill said in a statement. “We were soulmates.”

Clint Hill also became a speaker and gave interviews about his experience in Dallas. In 2018, he was given the state of North Dakota’s highest civilian honor, the Theodore Roosevelt Rough Rider Award. A portrait of Hill adorns a Capitol gallery of fellow honorees. A street outside the Secret Service’s James J. Rowley Training Center in Maryland is named Clint Hill Way.

A private funeral service will be held in Washington, D.C., on a future date.