Five Presidents: My Extraordinary Journey With Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford

by Hill, Clint

  In early 1975, I went to Bethesda Naval Hospital to undergo my annual physical exam. One of the examining physicians was Navy Captain Bill Voss, who had been on the medical staff at the White House and served as Vice President Agnew’s physician. We had become good friends during all those flights playing cards aboard Air Force Two. As luck would have it, Dr. Voss had been reassigned to Bethesda.

  Upon conclusion of my physical, Dr. Voss came to me with a very sad look on his face.

  “Clint,” he said, “I’m afraid I have some bad news for you. You did not pass your physical. You are no longer qualified to be an agent.”

  I was shocked. I could not believe what he had just said.

  “What is wrong?” I asked.

  “Clint, it’s a multitude of things. I hate to be the one to tell you this, but the only way for you to get better is to leave the Secret Service and get away from the stress you have been under.”

  I left Bethesda in a depressed state and drove to my home in Virginia. Over the next few months I continued to see my private doctors, but I knew the decision had been made. On July 31, 1975, I retired from the Secret Service. I was forty-three years old, but I felt much older. Having grown up around farms and cattle, I felt like I was being put out to pasture, no longer a productive member of the herd.

  I cleaned out my office and said good-bye to my longtime administrative assistant, Eileen Walsh. Two Secret Service special officers helped me carry my things to the trunk of what used to be my official Secret Service car. They took me to my home, helped to carry all the files into the house, said good-bye, and returned the car to Secret Service headquarters. Two days later, WHCA arrived and disconnected the direct telephone line from my home to the White House switchboard. And that’s when it hit me hard. My career had ended, and I was thrust into a state of extreme depression.

  I had to get out of there or I knew it would not end well.

  The only place I had to go to was North Dakota. Even after all this time in Washington, North Dakota was still home. That’s where my roots were.

  Two days later, I flew to Grand Forks. My sister, Janice, and her husband, Oben Gunderson, owned a farm forty miles from there, near McCanna, and they let me stay for a while. I’d get up at sunrise and head into the field, all alone, and for the next twelve hours I’d pick rocks off the summer fallow, preparing the land for seeding. By the end of the day, every muscle in my body ached. But when I was out there in the field, with the wind blowing, it was as if I were sweating out twelve years of grief, remorse, and guilt—feelings I had buried deep within my soul.

  Every day I’d come back to the house at sunset, caked with dirt and sweat, covered in the dust of the land, nearly unrecognizable, and Janice would greet me at the door and laugh.

  “The only way I know it’s you is by the whites of your eyes,” she’d say. Her laugh was my connection to my past, and her hugs were what kept me in one piece.

  Even as I struggled to deal with the anger and guilt I’d locked away for so long, it felt good to work the land, to be with my sister, far away from Washington and politicians. There was a sense of accomplishment at the end of each day, and I realized how much a part of me that land was. I had been around the world multiple times and met more kings and queens and princes and presidents than I could remember, but nowhere did I feel more at home than on a farm in North Dakota.

  On the afternoon of September 5, 1975, I returned to the house, and when Janice greeted me at the door, she had a worried look on her face.

  “Clinton, you better come in here. There was just a report on television. Somebody tried to assassinate President Ford.”

  The details from the TV reporters were limited, as usual—we never told the press everything—but early reports said that Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a twenty-seven-year-old follower of murderer Charles Manson, had tried to assassinate President Ford with a .45-caliber automatic as he shook hands with spectators near the state capitol in Sacramento, California. Agent Larry Buendorf had seen the gun and quickly jammed his hand onto it and threw the woman to the ground before the pistol could fire, while the other agents rushed President Ford away from danger.

  Good work. Those were my guys. Were my guys. I was proud of them, yet I couldn’t stand not knowing what had happened. I had always been in the middle of the action and now I was on the outside, looking in. I had been away long enough and it had been so good for me, but I needed to return to my home in Virginia. I had a wife and two sons to support.

  I flew back to Washington on September 19, and three days later there was another assassination attempt on President Ford—also by a woman. As President Ford exited the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, Sara Jane Moore fired a revolver at the president from forty feet away. Just as the gun went off, a bystander managed to grab Moore’s arm, and the shot missed. The agents flung the president into the waiting limousine and sped away, just as they’d been trained to do.

  Shortly after I returned to Washington, the Secret Service held a retirement party for me at the Washington Hilton. I had no idea what to expect, and wasn’t even sure I wanted to go, but Paul Rundle and his wife, Peggy, picked up Gwen and me at our home, and we all headed to the party.

  When I walked into the ballroom, I was stunned. There had to be at least two hundred people standing there, and when they saw me, they all started clapping. All the SAICs in the Secret Service from offices across the country were in Washington for a conference and had come to the party, and as I looked around the room, I saw so many faces of people I never dreamed would show up to a retirement party in my honor.

  Seventy-nine-year-old former first lady Mamie Eisenhower had been driven down from Gettysburg by her Secret Service detail; former Vice President Hubert Humphrey was there; former Vice President and Mrs. Spiro Agnew; a few members of the press corps who had become friends; and even Senator Ted Kennedy and Ethel Kennedy. One by one the guests came up to wish me well and to express their gratitude for my service.

  Paul Landis and his wife came in from Cleveland, Ohio, to surprise me. I hadn’t seen Paul since he left the Secret Service in 1964. It was a wonderful evening, and at the end of the night I was presented with a huge book filled with personal notes from everyone who was there. To top it off, a presidential suite had been arranged for Gwen and me to stay overnight.

  When I returned to my home the next morning, it really hit me. The party had been terrific, but it was a final reminder that I was no longer an agent in the U.S. Secret Service.

  38

  * * *

  60 Minutes

  November 1975

  “Can I take you back to November the twenty-second, 1963?”

  It was a question I should have anticipated, but it caught me completely off guard. 60 Minutes reporter Mike Wallace was sitting across from me, one leg crossed over the other, relaxed, oblivious to the cameras and bright lights that surrounded us in a small ballroom at the Madison Hotel in Washington, D.C. Having recently retired as assistant director of the United States Secret Service, responsible for all protective activities, I had agreed to be interviewed about the history I had witnessed spanning five presidents, from Eisenhower to Ford.

  Gwen was seated next to me on the sofa, nervously clutching her hands together. A couple of weeks earlier we had been in the same room, wearing the same clothes, and as the cameras rolled, Mike Wallace had asked me all kinds of questions about my career in the Secret Service, how our protective activities had evolved, and, not surprisingly, about the recent assassination attempts on President Gerald Ford. I thought the interview had gone pretty well. A few days later, however, Wallace called and said there had been some technical difficulties and they needed to reshoot some parts of the interview.

  Mike told Gwen and me to wear the same clothes as before so they could splice parts of the two segments together without it being noticeable. That sounded reasonable to me, so I agreed. When we arrived at the Madison for the second taping, the same crew was there, set up exactly
as they had been the last time, with one new addition. Don Hewitt, the show’s notoriously demanding executive producer, had come to oversee the interview. Perhaps there hadn’t been a technical problem. Perhaps Don Hewitt expected more than what I had delivered the last time.

  Can I take you back to November the twenty-second, 1963?

  Before I could respond, Mike Wallace rattled on. “You were on the fender of the Secret Service car, right behind President Kennedy’s car. At the first shot you ran forward and jumped on the back of the president’s car. In less than two seconds . . . pulling Mrs. Kennedy down into her seat, protecting her.”

  The scene flashed through my mind just as it had, incessantly, for the past twelve years. I closed my eyes and sucked in my breath, trying to block the memories, but it was no use.

  I tapped my cigarette into the ashtray in front of me, and without looking at Wallace brought the cigarette to my lips and inhaled. Smoke swirled around my head as I tried to avoid Mike’s gaze, unaware that the cameraman had zoomed in tight on my face, magnifying the anguish welling inside me.

  “First of all, she was out of the trunk of that car,” Wallace continued.

  No, that’s not accurate.

  “She was out of the backseat of that car,” I blurted out, “not out of the trunk of that car.” As the words came out of my mouth, I could see her, vividly, as if it were happening right in front of me. That pink suit, splattered with the brains and blood of her husband, her eyes filled with terror.

  Wallace cut in. “Well, she had climbed out of the back and she was on the way back, right?”

  Nodding, my face contorted as I tried desperately to control the wave of emotions flooding my brain, I could barely form the words to answer him.

  “And because of the fact,” I said, “that her husband’s—part of her husband’s head . . . had been . . . shot off . . . and had gone off into the street.”

  Mike was incredulous. “She wasn’t trying to climb out of the car?”

  I still couldn’t look at him. Shaking my head, I said, “She was simply trying to reach that head . . . part of that head.”

  “To bring it back?” Wallace asked.

  “That’s the only thing,” I said. My chest heaved, and tears began to well up in my eyes. I was struggling to hold myself together, but the emotions were taking over. No one had ever asked me about this before. No one had dared. And now here I was, on national television, on the verge of losing all self-control. It was mortifying.

  “In the twelve years since that assassination,” Mike said, “undoubtedly you have thought and thought and thought again about it. And studied it. Do you have any reason to believe that there was more than one gun, more than one assassin?”

  Still unable to look at Wallace or the camera, I merely shook my head. No.

  “Was Lee Harvey Oswald alone, or were there others with him?” Mike asked, trying to provoke an answer from me.

  “There were only three shots,” I said, shrugging. “And it was one gun. Three shots.”

  “You’re satisfied Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone,” Wallace confirmed.

  I lifted my head and turned to look directly at Mike to make sure there was no denying my conviction. “Completely,” I said. If there was one subject I had analyzed inside and out, it was the investigation of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

  “You’re satisfied,” Wallace repeated. He paused, and then asked the question that would finally break me.

  “Was there any way, anything that the Secret Service or that Clint Hill could have done . . . to keep that from happening?”

  I had asked myself the same question a million times. What could I have done differently? How did I let this happen? The smoke from my cigarette lingered, ghostlike, as those unforgettable seconds in Dallas replayed inside my mind. I couldn’t look at Mike, I couldn’t face the camera, but finally, I spoke.

  “Clint Hill . . . yes.”

  “Clint Hill, yes?” Mike asked, perplexed. “What do you mean?”

  “If he had reacted about five tenths of a second faster, or maybe a second faster . . .” I said. Turning to face Mike, I added, “I wouldn’t be here today.”

  “You mean you would have gotten there and you would have taken the shot?”

  “The third shot. Yes, sir,” I said, pursing my lips.

  “And that would have been all right with you?” Mike asked gently, almost as if he couldn’t believe what I was saying.

  The emotions were overwhelming me. I swallowed hard as tears welled in my eyes. “That would have been . . . fine with me,” I said.

  Mike’s eyes were tearing up now too. “But you couldn’t—you got there in less than two seconds, Clint. You couldn’t have gotten there. You don’t—surely you don’t—have a sense of guilt about that?”

  “Yes, I certainly do,” I said, wincing. “I have a great deal of guilt about that.”

  I paused, took a deep breath, and said, “Had I turned in a different direction, I’d have made it. It was my fault.”

  My anguish had been buried inside for twelve years, and to admit my failure out loud, on national television, was my breaking point.

  Mike could see that I was about to lose it completely. He tried valiantly to rescue me.

  “No . . . No one has ever suggested that for an instant,” he blurted. “What you did was show great bravery and great presence of mind. . . . What was on the citation that was given you? For your work on November twenty-second, nineteen sixty-three—”

  “I don’t care about that, Mike,” I interrupted.

  But he continued on. “Extraordinary courage and heroic effort in the face of maximum danger . . .”

  Shaking my head, desperately trying to blink back the tears that were filling my eyes, I said, “Mike, I don’t care about that. If I had reacted just a little bit quicker . . . and I could have, I guess.” Looking down, too humiliated to face the camera, I took a deep breath and said, “And I’ll live with that to my grave.”

  At that point, Mike realized I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. “Clint,” he said. “Let’s take a break. Stop the cameras.”

  And they did. The cameras stopped, and Mike escorted me out to the hallway. Tears streamed down my face, and as I wiped them away with my hands, I apologized. I was beyond embarrassed.

  “I’m sorry, Mike.”

  He put his hand on my shoulder. “Clint, it’s okay. I can see that you’re struggling. I didn’t realize how deeply the events were still affecting you. But it’s understandable. It’s completely understandable.”

  “The thing is, Mike,” I said as I pulled out my handkerchief, “I’ve never spoken about this to anyone. Not anyone. Not Gwen, not the other agents. You’re the first person I’ve ever discussed this with.”

  Mike looked at me with utter disbelief. But it was the truth. Other than my testimony to the Warren Commission in 1964, I had never discussed the details of that horrific day, and the days that followed, with anyone. Now the emotions I had buried twelve years earlier had suddenly surfaced for the whole damn world to see on 60 Minutes.

  It is still hard for me to watch that interview. It is not something I am proud of. I was ashamed that that’s how I would be remembered—as the crumbling shell of a man on 60 Minutes in an episode they called “Secret Service Agent #9.” I was forty-three years old when that interview aired on December 7, 1975, and the days would get worse before they got better.

  In the months following the airing of the 60 Minutes episode, I spiraled into a depression that deepened as time went on. I cut off contact with friends and associates and spent the majority of my time in the basement of my home in Alexandria. I drank as a form of self-medication and smoked heavily. It wasn’t until 1982 when a doctor friend told me I would have to change the way I was living, or I would die. I decided I wanted to live and so I quit drinking and quit smoking. Gradually I improved, but it wasn’t easy and thoughts of the assassination were still prevalent in my mind.


  In 1990, I decided to go back to Dallas. I went to Dealey Plaza, and walked the area where the Texas School Book Depository building still stood at the corner of Houston and Elm. For nearly two hours I walked outside, analyzing how everything transpired that awful November day in 1963.

  A nonprofit museum dedicated to President Kennedy’s life and his death had opened on the sixth floor of the building. I stood at the window where Lee Harvey Oswald had fired those three shots and, in the end, I came away with the feeling that I had done everything I could on November 22, 1963, to protect President and Mrs. Kennedy. I wished I had returned to Dealey Plaza much sooner. I felt better, but instead of spending my retirement years traveling and enjoying life, I continued my reclusive existence, still mired in depression.

  In 2009, Jerry Blaine, a friend and former Secret Service agent, was writing a book about the agents on the Kennedy Detail and asked if I would agree to be interviewed by the writer who was helping him. I reluctantly agreed, and so it was that in August 2009 I met Lisa McCubbin for two hours at the Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington.

  She was primarily interested in my memories of the trip to Texas by President and Mrs. Kennedy in November 1963. I had a difficult time talking about the assassination, having not done so except to the Warren Commission in 1964 and briefly to Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes in 1975. As unbelievable as it sounds, in the forty-six years since the assassination, I had never discussed the subject with friends, family, or even fellow agents. It was just too painful.

  At the end of the interview, I made one mistake. Lisa asked for my telephone number in the event she needed additional information, and I gave it to her. At first she would call with a question or two, and then, over the next several months the frequency and duration of the calls gradually increased. I began to realize that the more I talked with her about the assassination, the better I felt. She listened with compassion and I trusted her.