Why I blame myself for JFK’s death

Fifty years ago JFK was shot in Dallas. The man assigned to protect the president’s wife, Jackie, tells Tim Teeman why he felt he failed in his duty.

WHEN Clint Hill heard the first shot he leapt on to the back of the presidential limousine, seeing John F Kennedy grab at his throat. “My only thought was, ‘There are going to be more shots’,” Hill, the Secret Service agent assigned to protect Jacqueline Kennedy, recalls of November 22, 1963, the day JFK was assassinated in Dallas. “I wasn’t thinking of my own safety. I thought, ‘I have to shield them’.”

In his memoir, ‘Mrs Kennedy and Me’, Hill, now 81, writes of the third shot: “The impact was like the sound of something hard hitting something hollow — like the sound of a melon shattering into cement ... In the same instant, blood, brain matter and bone fragments exploded from the back of the president’s head ... and splattered all over me — on my face, my clothes, in my hair.”