'She Climbed Onto the Trunk & Was Reaching for a Piece of the President's Head': Jackie Kennedy's Secret Service Agent Recounts Day JFK Was Assassinated

The Daily Mail

The secret service agent employed to protect Jackie Kennedy has recounted the terrifying moments after the president’s assassination in 1963, and how the First Lady scrambled to reach his limp body.

In a memoir, Clint Hill, now 80, reveals his sheer determination to throw himself between the Kennedys and the bullets as parts of the president’s brain and skull splattered over his shirt.

As he moved towards Mrs Kennedy, he watched her reaction: ‘Her eyes were filled with terror,’ he wrote. ‘She was reaching for something. She was reaching for a piece of the President’s head.’

Hill was alongside the presidential vehicle when John F. Kennedy was shot in the neck and head before he slumped into his wife’s arms while driving through Dallas, Texas in November 1963.

Hill is the figure in the famous Zapruder film of the shooting which shows him climbing onto the back of the president’s limousine.

In his book Mrs Kennedy and Me, Hill recalled the crowds cheering for the motorcade and the moment he heard an explosion. He looked around and saw the president grab his throat.

‘Somebody had fired a shot at the President, and I had to get myself between the shooter and the President and Mrs. Kennedy,’ he wrote. ‘Nothing else mattered.’

Before he could reach them, two more bullets were shot – the final one hitting the president in the head, just above his right ear.

‘The impact was like the sound of a melon shattering onto cement,’ he remembered, adding that the President’s blood and parts of his skull splattered over his clothes, face and hair.

Pulling Mrs Kennedy, as he always called her, into her seat, the president’s body fell into her arms with his eyes open. ‘Jack, Jack, what have they done to you?’ she wailed.

Hill, who has previously said he could have taken the third bullet had he moved a second sooner, then had the thought: ‘How did I let this happen to her?’ 

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