John F. Kennedy's 100th Birthday - Clint Hill's Remembrance of the Assassination

May 29, 2017 is the celebration of John F. Kennedy’s 100^th birthday. For a man who was president a little less than three years he certainly impacted much of the world. He made errors, he had human weaknesses, and numerous flaws like all of us do. But he was able to motivate people and touch their hearts in a way few men have done down through history. A case can be made that it is because of his assassination that so many find some connection to him. Almost everyone who was old enough that day can remember where they were and what they were doing when the announcement was made of his murder. I cannot and will not forget him. While I was just 11 when he was gunned down, I saw and understood the traumatic impact it made on the world’s population. I didn’t understand why it had happened, just that it had. I believed the lie the government built around his assassination.

My mom came home from work that afternoon in tears. She later told me that she was devastated that day because she had voted for Kennedy in 1960. She secretly admired and supported Kennedy but said dad never knew because he was a hardline conservative and voted for Nixon. Mom felt he would get extremely upset if he knew her vote cancelled his out in that election. Mom said she never believed he was killed by Lee Oswald, but not wanting to incur dad’s wrath, she didn’t bring it up because dad believed the Warren Commission Report on the assassination. I came to the conclusion that we had all been lied to only later in life, mostly because my dad reacted scathingly toward any suggestion, from anybody, that the Warren Commission didn’t get it right. He never questioned any of it; he believed it hook, line and sinker. I was finally convinced the Warren Commission was wrong when I began reading the works of Harold Weisberg in the late 1980s at the behest of a guest that had been interviewed at a radio station where I worked.

I have never stopped reading everything I could get my hands on regarding the assassination. 

What prompted this post, in honor of JFK’s 100^th birthday, was the release in 2016 of the book Five Presidents: My Extraordinary Journey with Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford, written by Clint Hill and Lisa McCubbin. I had read Clint’s Warren Commission testimony but was always fascinated by his story pre and post assassination. The book is his remembrances of his time in the Secret Service.  Agent Clint Hill was immortalized in Kennedy assassination history as the man who rushed up to the presidential limousine after the first shot was fired. He appeared to be the only agent “on the job” that day. So his observations, to me, are vital. He at least reacted. He heard the shots and knew what they were. He was a critical observer. It is important to know what he saw. His recollections have changed over time, mostly because he has been “encouraged” to reflect the official line that Oswald did it by himself from the TSBD’s Southeast 6^th floor window. But Hill did not hear the same number of shots, as he himself said back then. He also saw a different head wound than the Warren Commission conjured up.

In his book on pages 153 and 154 Clint Hill wrote “Suddenly, there was a loud explosive noise, like a firecracker, that came from behind…I saw President Kennedy grab at his throat and lurch to his left. I realized the explosive noise had been a gunshot.”

Hill heard the first shot and saw that it had hit the president. To his credit, he reacted appropriately and was the ONLY Secret Service agent to attempt to reach the president after the gunfire started. The other agents appear to be doing nothing more than bird-watching. The mystifying part is, if the shot came from the back, why did the president grab his throat and “lurch to the left”? That would suggest a shot from the front right.

Agent Glenn Bennett, sitting in the car directly behind the presidential limousine, testified that he SAW the second shot hit the president in the back, exactly where the autopsy diagram, marked at Bethesda Hospital by Dr. Boswell, shows it struck the president’s body [which means it could only have come out of his throat if it was travelling upward]. 

Agent Bennett stated it hit the president about four inches down from the right shoulder. At that angle it could not have come out the throat moving downward, as Arlen Specter reinvented it for the Warren Commission. None of the Parkland doctors who saw the throat wound thought it was an exit wound. Their testimony was eventually bent to fit the single bullet theory. But when they first saw it, every medical person in Dallas identified it as a wound of entry.

Hill continues his story with this: “While I was running there was a second shot. I didn’t hear it – perhaps because I was so focused on catching up to the car, or because of the sounds of the motorcycles on either side of me drowned out the sound – but I am convinced, from all the evidence I’ve seen, read, and studied, that this second shot was the one that hit Governor Connally.”

Agent Hill only heard two shots and surmised there was a third, not because he heard it, or saw its effects, but because of what he read and studied afterward. From this it is apparent that Hill, like all other members of the Secret Service, claims all three shots hit their targets; shots one and three hit Kennedy and shot number two (that Hill didn’t hear) hit Connally. If that is their official assessment, how do they explain the shot that ricocheted off a curb near the triple underpass and injured bystander James Tague? This has never been answered, and for all intents and purposes, it has been ignored because it doesn’t fit their speculative story. Nor does it square with the official Warren Commission version which has the first or second shot missing (to the Warren Commission, this wasn’t an important point) but one of those shots was re-cast as hitting Kennedy high in the back/lower neck area, passing through his neck to continue in a downward trajectory to slam into Governor Connally hard enough to shatter his rib, punch out of his chest, smash the radius bone in his right wrist and then in almost pristine condition, slide backward into his left thigh, coming to rest next to the thigh bone. Even that deep in his leg it was still able to work its way back out at the hospital and roll underneath the gurney mat the Governor had been wheeled into the hospital on. And the second bullet that hit Kennedy - supposedly the same caliber from the same rifle as the previous shot  - hit Kennedy in the skull against a much less dense bone (than a radius bone) and shattered into so many small pieces it appeared as dust and minute particles in X-rays.

               The most damning part of Clint Hill’s recollection is this from page 155 “The president’s head was in Mrs. Kennedy’s lap, his eyes fixed, and a gaping hole in the back of his skull.”

Clint Hill indicates where the gaping gunshot wound was on President Kennedy's head.

Other than Mrs. Kennedy, no one but Clint Hill had a closer look at the damage to the president’s head only moments after it happened. No one. This observation is in complete accord with what the Parkland Hospital doctors also said. They described it as a 4 to 5 centimeter blasted out area in the back of the head, in the occipital-parietal area. Which means the killing shot came from somewhere to the president’s front. Lee Oswald did not fire that shot.

Agent Hill stated this description of the head wound to the Warren Commission, even telling Arlen Specter “The right rear portion of his head was missing. It was lying in the rear seat of the car. His brain was exposed. There was blood and bits of brain all over the entire rear portion of the car.”Yet that wasn’t part of the Warren Commission’s conclusion. They decided the Bethesda autopsy doctors were right that the damage to the president’s head was on the right side over his ear. It is still a mystery why the Warren Commission did not call Kennedy’s personal physician George Burkley, M.D. as a witness. He was the only physician to observe the president at Parkland and at the Bethesda proceedings. His exclusion from the Warren Commission hearings was a conscious omission on Warren’s part. We can only speculate as to why.

Roy Kellerman, the agent who was in the right front seat of the limousine stated that the last two shots came almost one on top the other, and his testimony is backed up by Constable Seymour Weitzman who was in the lead car, by reporter Mary Elizabeth Woodward who was the closest reporter to the presidential limousine at the time of the assassination, by Abraham Zapruder and his secretary, and by Linda Kay Willis among others. All of those people testified to the Warren Commission that the second and third shots were very close together, and ALL of their testimonies...ALL OF THEM...were ignored. Agent Hill says he only heard two shots, but modified that to three after reading and studying the assassination. Or, he heard only two because the second and third shots were so close together that they blended into one over the sound of the motorcycles, his footsteps, and his hard breathing to catch up with the president’s car. He was trying to do his job. Ascertaining how many shots were fired wasn’t his top priority at the moment.

Agent Hill, center, in the dark suit, moments after the first shot was fired.

I recommend this book for those interested in the work of the Secret Service. On that point it is fascinating. I wish I could recommend it because of revelations about JFK’s assassination. But Clint makes it clear he supports the Secret Service/FBI story that the first and third shots hit Kennedy and the second one wounded Connally. The injury to James Tague is ignored. The Warren Commission Report says that Clint Hill’s assessment is wrong. The Commission invented the correct scenario - where Tague’s blood loss was caused by one of the shots that missed - The first or second shot goes through both Kennedy and Connally, and the last one practically blows the right side of the president’s head off. That is impossible based on the existing evidence…i.e. the location of the earliest gun shot wound in the upper back as marked on the autopsy diagram - that was signed by the president’s physician, - the X-rays of Kennedy’s head wound as compared to the official photographs of the same area, the virtually pristine bullet, CE399, which contained no blood, viscera, marks from the clothing it passed through or even lost much of its weight after injuring two people and smashing two hard bones. The discrepancies exist to this day and there has been no attempt to correct them.

John F. Kennedy deserves much better treatment from the U.S. government, especially on the 100^th anniversary of his birth. I consider us fortunate to have had him as our president if only for those few fleeting years. His death sent our country on a path it was never meant to tread. We can never repair the damage that has been done. But we can strive to get the country headed back into the right direction. It won’t happen under this current (Trump) administration. But it is something we can all aim for when the time is right.