Belvedere's Clint Hill, Secret Service agent who jumped onto JFK’s car as president was shot, dies at 93
Secret Service agent Clint Hill hangs on to the presidential limousine, preventing first lady Jaqueline Kennedy from climbing out, moments after President John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. (James W. 'Ike' Altgens archive / Associated Press 1963) ... The limousine races toward the hospital with Hill riding on the back. (Justin Newman archive / Associated Press 1963) ... Hill is seen with the first lady shopping for souvenirs at Rome's Fiumicino Airport in 1964. He was on her detail from 1960 to 1964 and the subject of two of his books, 'Mrs. Kennedy and Me' (2012) and 'My Travels with Mrs. Kennedy (2022), co-written with journnalist and wife Lisa McCubbin Hill. (Associated Press 1964)
Belvedere resident Clint Hill, the Secret Service agent who sprang onto President John F. Kennedy’s limousine during the president’s 1963 assassination and shielded first lady Jacqueline Kennedy from the gunfire, died at his home Feb. 21 of end-stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. He was 93.
Hill’s heroic actions cemented his place in American history, becoming one of the defining images of the assassination in Dallas as captured by an Associated Press photograph and Abraham Zapruder’s home video, showing Hill clad in a suit grasping the back of the car and pushing the first lady, who had begun to crawl onto the trunk, back into her seat as the limo sped off.
Hill, who served five presidents, had been assigned to protect Jaqueline Kennedy and the family’s children, Caroline and John Jr., at the time.
While he was commended by the Secret Service for “extraordinary courage and heroic effort in the face of maximum danger” and was later promoted up the agency’s ranks — eventually serving as the agency’s assistant director of protective services — Hill spoke for decades about the guilt that haunted him for failing to be able to save the president’s life. In a 1975 interview with Mike Wallace for CBS’ “60 Minutes,” he said he “will live with that to my grave.”
But Hill’s wife, journalist and Belvedere native Lisa McCubbin Hill, said that later in life he was never comfortable being called a hero, even though he is credited with saving Jacqueline Kennedy.
“At 92, I have come to terms with my place in history,” Clint Hill wrote on social platform X on Nov. 22, 2024, the 61st anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination. “I tried. I was unsuccessful, but at least I tried.”
During his 17-year career, Hill also served Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford in various roles through the Cold War, Vietnam War and Watergate scandal, including as the special agent in charge of Johnson in 1968 and on the detail for Nixon Vice President Spiro Agnew, a career he chronicled alongside his future wife in the 2016 memoir “Five Presidents.”
The couple also detailed Hill’s experience protecting Jacqueline Kennedy from 1960 to 1964, and his experience with the family in the books “Mrs. Kennedy and Me” (2012), “My Travels with Mrs. Kennedy” (2022) and “Five Days in November” (2023).
“He chose the Secret Service as a career because he liked to be in the shadows and he didn’t want attention on himself,” Lisa Hill said in a Feb. 26 interview. “He was an innate protector.”
Clinton J. Hill was born Jan. 4, 1932, in Larimore, North Dakota, to Alma Peterson and was adopted as an infant by Chris and Jennie Hill. He was raised alongside a sister, Janice, in Washburn, North Dakota. He was recognized by the state with its Theodore Roosevelt Rough Rider Award, the state’s highest civilian honor, in 2018 for his work in the Secret Service.
He graduated from Washburn High School and later attended Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, where he was a two-sport athlete in football and baseball and sang in a school quartet; he received the Concordia’s Alumni Achievement Award, the school’s highest honor, in 2011. Hill graduated with a bachelor’s in history and physical education in 1954 and looked toward a career as a teacher and coach. At Concordia College, he met Gwendolyn Brown, whom he later married. The couple had two sons together, Connor and Cooper, before eventually divorcing.
Soon after graduating, he was drafted into the U.S. Army, where he was assigned to work in counterintelligence; he left the Army in 1957.
Though he was hired after the Army to work as a detective for the Chicago Burlington and Quincy Railroad, Hill soon applied for an opening at Denver’s Secret Service field office. He joined the Secret Service in 1958, during Eisenhower’s second term, first tasked to oversee the president’s ailing mother-in-law in Denver. In 1959, Hill was assigned to protecting Eisenhower as part of the president’s detail.
Following President Kennedy’s election, he was assigned to the first lady’s detail and would continue to protect the family for a year after Kennedy’s assassination.
He told Concordia College in 2011 that he was initially “very disappointed” to receive the assignment, but after spending time with the first lady, he said protecting her “got to be the best assignment on the detail.”
“We got to know each other really well,” Hill said of Jacqueline Kennedy in 2011. “We were close both personally and professionally. She only called me ‘Mr. Hill,’ and I only called her ‘Mrs. Kennedy,’ but I knew a lot of her secrets, and she knew a lot of mine.”
On Nov. 22, 1963, Hill was riding in the car behind Kennedy’s vehicle as it traveled through Dallas on the way to a lunchtime speech the president was to give. Hill has said he heard “an explosive noise from my right rear,” and he turned around and saw Kennedy grabbing his throat and lurching left.
“I jumped off the running board and ran toward his car,” Hill wrote in 2010 for a New York Times op-ed. “I was so focused on getting to the president and Mrs. Kennedy to provide them cover that I didn’t hear the second shot.”
Hill said he was feet away when he felt and heard “the effects of a third shot” that struck President Kennedy’s head, with blood spilling everywhere. He soon threw himself on top of the president and first lady “so that if another shot came, it would hit me instead,” he said in the Times.
When they arrived at Parkland Memorial Hospital, Hill used his suit coat to cover the president’s head before he was wheeled inside and pronounced dead.
Later, during question-and-answer sessions for his and his wife’s books, Hill would often field audience questions related to conspiracy theories about Kennedy’s assassination. Every time, he gave the same answer: “Those are all theories — nothing based on factual evidence. Every conspiracy theory can be discounted by hard facts,” he said in a 2016 Ark article.
Hill retired from the agency in 1975, as he suffered for many years after the assassination from post-traumatic stress disorder, Lisa Hill said.
He touched on some of the personal sacrifices he made while working in the Secret Service in “Five Presidents,” such as long hours, grave stress and nearly all holidays spent with the presidents he served. He noted Christmas in 1967 was the first one he spent at home with his first wife and kids, then 6 and 11, since 1958.
Lisa Hill first met her future husband in 2009 while interviewing him for “The Kennedy Detail,” a book she wrote alongside fellow Kennedy Secret Service agent Gerald Blaine.
She said Hill started opening up to her with stories he hadn’t told others, including the good times “because nobody had ever taken the time to ask him about everything else.” They soon went on a tour for “The Kennedy Detail” in 2010 and became a couple. The two later came up with the idea to write “Mrs. Kennedy and Me” and then collaborated on “Five Presidents” before they married in December 2021.
In the acknowledgments of “Mrs. Kennedy and Me,” Hill wrote of his future bride: “You helped me find a reason to live, not just exist. … you helped me revive my life.”
“I thought, ‘Who couldn’t love this man?’” Lisa Hill said, adding that he had “the ultimate sense of humor,” was kind, selfless, “the ultimate gentleman” and “a lot of fun to be around.”
Clint Hill told The Ark in 2016 that he was trying to bring “history to life through my experiences.”
“The Kennedy assassination was a defining moment for me … but there was so much that led up to that moment and much that followed,” he said.
Hill spent 50 years in the Washington, D.C., area but moved to the Tiburon Peninsula with Lisa in 2013, first living in Tiburon before moving to the Belvedere Lagoon in 2020.
Lisa Hill said her husband loved the small-town nature of the peninsula, such as knowing restaurant owners and post office workers by name, and as well as the fact he didn’t need air conditioning because of the temperate climate.
Hill was a member of the San Francisco Yacht Club, and the couple frequently enjoyed brunch there, bringing along their dog, Dazzle, a black-and-white labradoodle named after Hill’s Secret Service codename.
Lisa Hill said that nickname fit her husband, as she was able to see his dazzling personality while interviewing him throughout for “The Kennedy Detail.”
She said that being with her husband was magic, and she could only think of two disagreements in their 15 years together. She notes she loved his sense of humor; he once joked it was easier traveling aboard Air Force One than it was in airport security lines, she said.
“He was one of a kind,” she said. “They don’t make men like him anymore. There’s a hole in my heart, and I thought I was so fortunate and so filled with joy that I was so lucky.”
Lisa Hill said that in the wake of her husband’s death, she has received “thousands of emails and text messages” from past colleagues, agents he supervised and people who “remember when they did this specific thing for them.”
She said Hill remained worthy and upheld the Secret Service’s motto of being “worthy of trust and confidence.”
“Not one person has a bad word to say about Clint Hill,” she said. “He was just the ultimate gentleman. He was the ultimate Secret Service agent.”
In addition to Lisa Hill, he is survived by his sons, Chris Hill and Corey Hill, from his first marriage; stepsons Connor and Cooper McCubbin; and five grandchildren. His former wife, Brown, predeceased him.
Private memorial services are being planned locally and in Washington, D.C. Donations in Hill’s name can be made to the U.S. Secret Service Association via secretserviceassociation.org.
Reach Tiburon reporter Francisco Martinez at 415-944-4634.
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