by Clint Hill
As I went over and over in my mind what had just transpired, the only conclusion I could come to as to why I’d been chosen for this assignment was that Mrs. Kennedy and I were fairly close in age—I was now twenty-eight and she was thirty-one—and that I had a child nearly the same age as her three-year-old daughter Caroline. I couldn’t come up with any other reason.
I finally realized I had no recourse. I was a Secret Service agent on the White House Detail, and the first lady required protection. Somebody had to do it. So I pulled myself up, grabbed the keys to one of the Secret Service sedans, and headed to the historic streets of Georgetown.
THE THREE-STORY REDBRICK townhouse at 3307 N Street stood so close to the street that the front door was just two steps up from the sidewalk. The house was not very big—just three windows across on the upper two floors and two windows next to the front door on the ground floor.
The Secret Service agent posted in front of the house had been alerted to my arrival and allowed me inside without difficulty. Agent Jim Jeffries was waiting inside and came to the door to greet me.
Agent Jeffries was about five foot ten, the same height as me, with a medium build, and was about thirty-two or thirty-three years old. He had light, reddish hair, and a ruddy complexion, which I imagined would burn to a crisp if he spent more than a few minutes in the sun. As he approached me, he had a serious, almost stern look on his face that didn’t do much to calm the apprehension I was already feeling.
“Come on in, Clint,” he said, in a clipped voice. “I’m Jim Jeffries. Glad to have you aboard. Let me go find Mrs. Kennedy and introduce you.”
“Great. I’m looking forward to meeting her,” I said, with as much sincerity as I could muster.
As Jeffries walked out, I looked around the living room to try to get a feel for Mrs. Kennedy’s tastes and what kinds of things she liked. The room was elegantly decorated, but it had a feeling of warmth to it as well. Dark wood antiques were mixed with light-colored upholstered pieces and the furniture seemed as if it were arranged in such a way to invite guests to stay for long, lingering evenings by the fireplace. Built-in bookshelves were filled with a mixture of books and decorative ornaments that had a distinctly European feel. Everything seemed to be placed just so, and I got the feeling that should an object be moved ever so slightly, it would be noticed immediately. It was a home for tea parties and ladies’ luncheons. Just thinking about it made the feelings of disgust and disappointment wash over me again in a sudden wave.
After a few minutes, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy walked into the room, with Agent Jeffries a few steps behind.
I’d seen newspaper photographs of her, of course, but in person she was much more striking than I had imagined. She was tall—about five foot seven inches—but it was the way she carried herself, almost gliding into the room with a dancer’s erect posture, that exuded an air of quiet confidence. Her chin-length, dark brown hair was perfectly coiffed, and she wore just a touch of makeup, enough to accentuate her dark brown eyes and full lips but still look natural. She was very attractive, very gracious, and very pregnant.
“Mrs. Kennedy,” Jeffries said matter-of-factly, “this is Clint Hill. He will be the second agent for your personal protection.”
Mrs. Kennedy approached me and smiled warmly as she offered her hand.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Hill,” she said in a soft, breathy voice.
“It’s very nice to meet you, too, Mrs. Kennedy,” I said with a smile, as I shook her hand and looked directly into her eyes. She returned my gaze for an instant, then blinked and looked away, giving me the impression that, while she wanted to appear confident, on the inside she was rather shy.
The three of us sat down in the living room, as Agent Jeffries took the lead in explaining our duties, and how we would need to work with Mrs. Kennedy and her staff.
“There will be various agents assigned to handle the perimeter security of your residence—whether that’s here, the White House, Palm Beach, or Hyannis Port—at all times. Either Mr. Hill or I will be with you whenever you leave the residence, and if you travel outside of Washington, both of us will accompany you.”
The smile had worn off Mrs. Kennedy’s face as she resigned herself to the fact that, from now on, she would never be alone.
Calmly, in a measured tone, her voice almost whisper-like, she said, “Well, you don’t have to worry about me traveling in the next few weeks. My baby is due in a month and I plan to stay here in Washington. My biggest concern, really, is maintaining as much privacy as possible—not only for me, but for Caroline and the new baby, as well. I don’t want us to feel like animals in a zoo, and I certainly don’t want someone following me around like a puppy dog.”
Her gaze transferred between Jeffries and me, making sure that both of us understood her wishes.
“I also know that as soon as the baby is born, the press will be overbearing. They can be so intrusive.” She pressed her lips together, turning her mouth into a sly smile, and looking directly at me, she added, “I used to be one of them, you know, and I’m well aware of how they operate.”
In that instant, I realized that Mrs. Kennedy was a lot more intuitive and in control than her public image at the time suggested.
“Yes, Mrs. Kennedy,” I replied. “Part of our job will be to protect you from the press, and to make sure that you and your children can live as normal a life as possible. Believe me, we don’t like the press any more than you do.”
Her smile widened for an instant, and then she stood up and said, “It’s been lovely meeting you, gentlemen. Now I have some things to attend to.”
Jeffries and I stood up as Mrs. Kennedy walked out of the room. She had decided the meeting was over.
It was clear that she wasn’t excited about having two Secret Service agents around, and I realized that, if I was going to be able to do my job effectively, I would have to earn her trust.
“Let’s go outside and discuss how we’ll handle the schedule,” Jeffries said. “With just two of us on her protection, we’re going to be working a lot of overtime.”
Agents temporarily assigned from field offices would handle the perimeter security of her residence, no matter her location. One of us had to be available whenever Mrs. Kennedy was awake, and be prepared to perform whatever task was required to provide a secure environment in which Mrs. Kennedy could function in her capacity as wife of the President of the United States. Whether it was work or play, it was our job to make sure she could do the things she wanted or needed to do, safely. That included each and every location she visited. In order for either of us to have a day off, it required the other agent to work a full day, with no relief. When Mrs. Kennedy traveled outside the Washington, D.C., area, we both would have to work a full day in order to provide adequate coverage. A full day meant we worked during the periods Mrs. Kennedy was up, awake, and active. When she slept, we slept.
Thus began my new assignment.
I HADN’T BEEN briefed on Mrs. Kennedy at all, so I had very limited knowledge of her background, her likes and dislikes, or what activities were of interest to her. I didn’t like this feeling of being unprepared and I knew it was going to require a great deal of research to become knowledgeable about my new protectee. In those first few days, I collected newspaper and magazine articles to find out as much about Mrs. Kennedy as I possibly could. The more I read, the more I realized that her background and mine were about as different as they could possibly be.
Jacqueline Lee Bouvier had grown up on the East Coast in a sophisticated environment, learning social graces and developing an appreciation for art and literature from a young age. She was born on July 28, 1929, in Southampton, Long Island, to Jack and Janet Bouvier, and while her father instilled in her a love of horses and horseback riding, her mother developed her interest in painting, reading, and foreign languages. She had a sister named Lee, who was four years younger, and when the two were around eleven and seven years old, their parents divorced.
Two years later, Janet Bouvier remarried a very wealthy man named Hugh Auchincloss.
The young Jacqueline Bouvier attended Miss Porter’s School, an exclusive boarding school in Farmington, Connecticut, where she was a straight-A student. Upon graduation from Miss Porter’s, she enrolled in Vassar College, in Poughkeepsie, New York, and in 1948 she was named “Debutante of the Year.” Summers were spent at her stepfather’s estate—a twenty-eight-room oceanfront “cottage” in Newport, Rhode Island, called Hammersmith Farm.
She became fluent in French when she spent her junior year of college in France, studying at the Sorbonne in Paris and the University of Grenoble. Upon her return from Europe, Jackie enrolled for her senior year at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where she graduated, in 1951, with a bachelor of arts degree in French literature.
Two years later she married John Fitzgerald Kennedy, a junior senator from Massachusetts, in a highly publicized wedding in Newport that was deemed the “social event of the year.” Twelve hundred guests attended the lavish reception, which was held at Hammersmith Farm.
I, on the other hand, grew up in North Dakota in a very small town called Washburn. It was a farming community, with a large Norwegian population, and my father, Chris Hill, was the county auditor. My mother, Jennie, was a homemaker, and was devoted to my older sister, Janice, and me. My mother was hearing impaired and we, as family, made adjustments to cope with that situation. We spoke louder and always spoke in front of her so she could see that we were talking to her. She handled this difficult problem very well, but from a young age, I learned to anticipate her needs and was always protective of her.
My mother had long, dark brown hair that hung straight down her back—so different from my jet-black hair that grew in tight curls—but I never thought anything about it, until, when I was about six years old, the girl who lived across the street told me I was adopted.
I didn’t know what “adopted” meant, so I ran inside the house to ask my mother. She tried to explain it in six-year-old terms—how she and my father had driven 240 miles to Fargo in our 1929 DeSoto to the North Dakota Children’s Home for Adoption to choose me from all the other babies, how my aqua blue eyes beckoned to them—but it certainly wasn’t the way she had planned on me finding out. It turned out my sister was also adopted, and my mother was fearful that we wouldn’t feel as loved as if we had been her natural children. The truth was, I was lucky to have been raised in such a loving, stable home.
It wasn’t until many years later—after the world crashed in around me and I was searching for something to cling to—that I returned to North Dakota to meet my birth mother, and learned, as she lay on her deathbed, how I happened to become available for adoption.
Clint, Jennie, Janice, and Chris Hill, circa 1943
I was the sixth child of Alma Peterson, born January 4, 1932, in Larimore, North Dakota. Seventeen days after my birth, on a cold, snowy day, which happened to also be Alma’s thirty-ninth birthday, she had me baptized in a Lutheran church in Fargo, and then turned me over to the Children’s Home.
By the time I met her, she had suffered a stroke, and the details of the story were told to me by one of my half sisters. It wasn’t clear who my father was, she said, but she remembered Alma sending her to a French Canadian man named Vassau, who was the proprietor of the hotel where Alma was a maid, to collect some money for my birth.
Growing up in Washburn, though, I didn’t know any of this, and it didn’t really matter. I had a great childhood. Even though I never had my own room—I shared the porch with my grandfather and kept my belongings in one drawer of a dresser that was jammed next to the piano—I never went hungry, and was always supported by my family. My adoptive parents were very conservative—they didn’t smoke or drink alcohol—and were quite religious. Our whole family was active in the Evangelical Lutheran Church, where my sister played piano and I was an altar boy.
I attended the public schools in Washburn and was involved in many school activities: I played trumpet in the high school band, sang in the glee club, acted in plays, and played football and basketball and ran on the high school track team. I also played baseball for the Washburn American Legion team and, in my junior year of high school, had the great honor of being selected to attend the Boys State leadership program as the representative from Washburn. In 1950, I graduated from high school and when I left Washburn that fall to attend Concordia College, in Moorhead, Minnesota, the sign at the edge of the city read: WASHBURN POP. 912.
Now, ten years later, I was responsible for protecting the wife of the president-elect of the United States. I realized I had nothing to complain about, and I might just as well get used to it. Little did I know that life with Mrs. Kennedy was going to be anything but dull.
Clint Hill family home, Washburn, North Dakota
2
The Family
Clint Hill with Mrs. Kennedy and John, Jr. leaving Georgetown Hospital
With every presidential transition, it is not only the first family that changes, but the entire political and personal staff as well. There is a period of adjustment between the Secret Service agents and the incoming administration, which sets the tone for the next four years. It was evident from the beginning that the Kennedy administration would be much less rigid and far more unpredictable than the Eisenhower administration, and even though this was my first experience with a changeover in power, I quickly realized that there were certain people in the Kennedys’ inner circle who could either make my job a whole lot easier or be a constant headache. It was important to get these relationships started on the right foot.
The first staff member I met was Providencia Paredes, whom Mrs. Kennedy introduced as her “personal assistant.” Everybody called her “Provi,” and her duties included doing Mrs. Kennedy’s personal laundry, ironing, packing and unpacking for trips, and everyday errands. Whatever Mrs. Kennedy needed, Provi was there to assist. Originally from the Dominican Republic, Provi appeared to be about my age, and spoke broken English with a heavy Spanish accent. She had a delightful, cheery disposition and we quickly became friends.
One big adjustment for the Secret Service was that there were going to be young children in the White House. Caroline was not quite three years old, yet she too would have her own Secret Service agents. Initially two agents were assigned to the “Kiddie Detail” to protect Caroline, and since she was frequently with her mother, Agent Jeffries and I worked closely with them.
Like her mother, Caroline had been a tremendous asset to Jack Kennedy in his campaign for president, but she was oblivious to the fact that she was now world famous. My son, Chris, was just sixteen months older than the president-elect’s daughter, and even though I was not technically on Caroline’s detail, I was instinctively protective of her. She was a beautiful little girl with sandy brown hair that curled naturally just below her ears, and big, blue eyes that matched her father’s. She was very active and very inquisitive, but perhaps the thing that impressed me most was that even at this young age, she had wonderful manners. This was something that was critically important to her mother.
“Caroline will address you as Mr. Hill,” Mrs. Kennedy told me from the outset. “And she is to be respectful at all times. If there are any issues, I want to know about them immediately.”
Despite her public role and growing responsibilities, Mrs. Kennedy was adamant that there would always be time each day with her daughter. She was a very attentive mother, and her eyes had a special sparkle when she was with Caroline—almost as if she were constantly in awe of her child’s view of the world. Watching the two of them interact, I saw a playful and spontaneous side of Jacqueline Kennedy that, thus far, only came out when she was with her daughter. But most of the time Mrs. Kennedy spent with Caroline was activity-related. When it came to the day-to-day caring for her child—the dressing, bathing, feeding, and playground dates—she relied heavily on the family’s nanny, Maud Shaw.
Originally from Great Britain, Miss Sha
w was quite the contrast to Provi, but yet another wonderful ally for me. She was in her mid-fifties and spoke with a proper British accent, in a sort of singsong voice. Her hair was a light reddish color, streaked with tinges of gray, and it always seemed to be just a bit mussed, as if she had begun to brush it, then got interrupted, and never could be bothered to have another look in the mirror.
Standing about five foot two with her shoes on, Miss Shaw wasn’t a big person by any means, but with her matronly, methodical manner, she exuded an air of gentle authority, and in many ways seemed more like a grandmother than a nanny. Her standard uniform was a crisply ironed dress that hung just below her knees, paired with sensible shoes that allowed her to romp with Caroline. She had been in the employ of the Kennedy family since Caroline was a newborn, but it was clear to me that Miss Shaw understood her position as an employee and not a substitute mother. She and Mrs. Kennedy were cordial, but there was no question that Mrs. Kennedy was in charge.
As the wife of the president-elect, Mrs. Kennedy had a sudden onslaught of responsibilities, the first and most important of which was preparing for the Inauguration. Even though, at eight months pregnant, she would often become physically tired, she seemed to have an endless amount of mental energy. From the planning of the pre-inaugural gala to the formal balls and the finalization of the guest lists and the invitations, she was intent on putting her touch on everything, and she was well aware that the eyes of the world would be on her.
I was somewhat surprised by the level of attention the media was already paying to the new first family—especially to Mrs. Kennedy. The press had rarely covered anything President Eisenhower’s wife, Mamie, did, but suddenly the American public seemed to have an insatiable appetite for any news at all about Jacqueline Kennedy. At thirty-one years old, she was the youngest first lady in seventy-five years to occupy the White House, and American women, in particular, were fascinated by what she wore, where she shopped, and what her interests were.