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.

The John F. Kennedy Assassination - my perspective 50 years later

                It was the voice of Walter Cronkite that came crackling over the school loudspeakers sometime after 2 PM that day to announce that the President of the United States was dead. I was in 6^th grade math at Ontario Junior High School in Ontario, Ohio. On hearing the news report, our teacher burst out crying and ran out of the room. The rest of us began whispering to each other trying to make sense of what we’d just heard, but for most of us, it had no immediate impact. Two days later, my family had the TV on after coming home from a church service and we saw Lee Oswald get shot live on TV. The events completely baffled me. I couldn’t understand why someone would want to kill the president. Then, who would try to kill his alleged assassin right in front of a room full of policemen? Surely our government officials would get to the bottom of this and give us the truth.

           Yes, there were anomalies, like J. Edgar Hoover immediately claiming Oswald did it alone, before any investigation had been undertaken. (How did he know?) Yes, there were the Parkland doctors and nurses who said the president’s massive wound was on the back of his head, not on the side or front. (Apparently these trained medical experts were ALL wrong and only the Bethesda autopsy team, under the ‘guidance’ of a cabal of high-ranking military officers jamming the autopsy room and overseeing things, got it right.) Yes, the FBI and Secret Service said that all three shots hit their mark, yet they didn't account for the bullet that struck the curb across Dealey Plaza and slightly injured bystander James Tague who was near the triple underpass. (To this day, they still maintain that all three shots hit their mark and none missed.) And yes, there was the CBS report in the summer of 1964 that stated none of the expert riflemen they’d assembled could duplicate Oswald’s shooting, even when allowed all the time they needed for the first shot. (Cronkite claimed even if others couldn’t do it, obviously Mr. Oswald could.) I refused to believe our government would lie to us and mislead us, so I was sure they had solved the murder with the final report from the Warren Commission in September 1964. Its premise was: Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone in killing Kennedy, and he in turn was gunned down by Jack Ruby who, wonder of wonders on this weekend of wonders, just happened to time it perfectly, was armed, and in the right place in the crowd assembled in the basement of the Dallas Police building just as Oswald was being transferred to the county jail. The government let everyone know that any other scenario was conjured up by sensationalists, kooks, and people with an ax to grind, and their information was just utter nonsense. I had no reason to doubt it. I never even thought the immediate benefactor of the assassination, Lyndon Johnson, could be party to something so heinous. But in my defense, I didn't see the picture below until years later. 

         Johnson turns and winks at Albert Thomas immediately after taking the oath of office aboard Air Force One. Does either man look unhappy with the turn of events?

             It wasn’t until 1988 while working at a radio station in Raleigh, NC that I met someone who told me a completely different version of the assassination and its aftermath. At first, I thought they were crazy…no government could be that underhanded, that deceptive, and that malevolent. They wouldn’t really try to hide the facts of the murder from us and pin the whole thing on an innocent man. This researcher and writer encouraged me to read the books of Harold Weisberg, Mark Lane, and Sylvia Meagher and see what I thought afterward. I already had the Warren Commission Report and had read William Manchester’s The Death of a President so I felt I had all the facts at hand I would need to disprove any of those other authors and their conspiracy theories.

            At last count, I’ve read the works of 42 authors on the Kennedy assassination that cover the entire pro and con spectrum regarding the Warren Commission Report, all 26 volumes of the Warren Commission evidence and testimonies, seen countless TV specials on various aspects of the murder, heard hours of radio interviews with many of the people involved in the event and purchased 16 different video documentaries on the assassination. Without hesitation, I can say the books of Harold Weisberg are, by far, the best on the subject. None of the Warren Commission defenders have been able to find any fault with his investigation. Many have condemned him, by employing ad hominem attacks, but none have been able to refute his conclusions. Mr. Weisberg used the same information that was available to the Warren Commission, only he didn’t have an agenda to find Oswald guilty at all costs. He let the evidence the FBI, the Secret Service, the CIA, and the Dallas Police Department collected speak for itself. Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t shoot anyone on November 22, 1963, and Oswald was killed to keep his mouth shut. He was exactly what he shouted he was in the Dallas Police Department building...a patsy!

             We’ll never know just who killed John F. Kennedy, but the cover-up in the assassination is still maintained by people within the United States government so there is duplicity on the part of our government officials even to today. If you don’t believe that's possible, take a look at just this one inconsistency. These are from the official JFK Autopsy photographs and X-rays that are housed in the National Archives in Washington DC. The keepers of our national inheritance insist these are authentic:

 

Does the “stare of death” photo of Kennedy coincide with what is shown in the X-ray? How can his face, especially his right brow area and eye, hold their structure and position when the X-ray clearly shows there is no bone remaining behind them with half of the right eye socket missing? How can these possibly be of the same body? If they can botch this up, and they have; what else has the government botched? The Archive information and Warren Commission evidence is rife with thousands of other inconsistencies that Mr. Weisberg has ferreted out, but check into that one first and see what conclusion you reach when you read about what kind of an autopsy was carried out on JFK’s body. It was a travesty.

The incomplete autopsy sheet that was verified and signed by presidential physician Dr. George Berkley who was the only doctor that saw the body at Parkland and Bethesda.

 

            We’ve been lied to for the past 50 years, and we continue to be lied to. One would think a government that had nothing to hide in the Kennedy assassination wouldn’t have locked up various records from the FBI, Secret Service and CIA until September 14, 2038. I’ll be an old man by the time they are released, but I hope to be there when they are. I’m not holding out hope that they haven’t already gutted those files of any useful information, but I’ll be curious to see just what was so important to the government that it had to hide it away from the American people for 75 years. By then, the perpetrators of the crime will have long since died, but I’ll bet there will still be supporters of this injustice.

Announcing Kennedy's death at Parkland Hospital, Assistant Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff indicates where the fatal shot hit the president; not where it exited, but where it entered.

            My trust in our government was shattered by the way they handled the JFK assassination. They’ve earned my disgust and condemnation. They’ve earned yours too.