Secret Service agent Clint Hill heard the third rifle shot that exploded the back of President John F. Kennedy's skull that November day 50 years ago in Dallas. "It was the sound of something hard hitting something hollow." He had already seen the president grab his throat and lurch to the left, after the first shot.
Using every bit of his strength and with the driver hitting the gas, Hill somehow pulled himself onto the back of the presidential limousine to get to First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy who was at that very moment — in shock — climbing on the trunk toward him. "What is she doing? What is she doing?" he thought. "Good God, she's going to go flying off the back of the car!" He remembered seeing her eyes filled with terror. Then it dawned on him; she was reaching for a piece of her husband's head.
Those horrific moments in Dallas haunted Hill for decades. He struggled with alcohol and depression. The North Dakota boy who grew up to protect one of the world's most glamorous women was in anguish for years, thinking "what if?" What if he had been faster and moved toward the big black Lincoln just a second sooner, after he heard the first shot?
He could have saved the president.
It is only now — after coming to terms with what happened that day, after visiting the crime scene on Elm Street in 1990 and after just last year writing a book, "Mrs. Kennedy and Me," that he has reached some peace — a peace that allowed the 1954 graduate of Concordia College in Moorhead to return to his home state this month to tell his story.
"I think about it every day … There's always something there to remind you," Hill told a crowd of about 600 at Bismarck State College for a Nov. 5 symposium, "The Kennedy Legacy: 50 years later." "It never goes away."
At every twist and turn of those terrible four days — from the assassination to Monday's funeral — Clint Hill was there, all the time wrestling with guilt and fighting back the memories of what he had seen — blood, bone and brain matter splattered everywhere. "She [Jackie] didn't even know I was there," Hill said in Bismarck, 40 miles south of his hometown, Washburn. "I got a hold of her and put her in the back seat. The president fell onto Mrs. Kennedy. I could see that his eyes were fixed."
Hill knew then that the president was dead.