If you remember where you were when President John Kennedy was assassinated, you know Clint Hill – you just didn’t know his name. Hill is the Secret Service agent, assigned to Jacqueline Kennedy’s detail, who threw himself over the trunk of the President’s limousine seconds after the fatal shots were fired, as the First Lady scrambled to get out of her seat. That iconic photograph has been reprinted thousands of times in the 60 years since that moment was frozen in time as well as in the memory of millions of people around the world.

Hill gives a chilling and thought-provoking reason for her almost-instinctive reaction in those first awful seconds. It’s just one of the many insightful details provided by a dedicated professional security man, who had been assigned to the First Family since President Kennedy’s election. In clear and straightforward narrative, Hill lists each step in the President and First Lady’s campaign and fence-mending trip to Texas, revealing the depth of detail and coordination these tours involve, and providing a glimpse into the behind-the-scenes organization and preparation for which the Secret Service is responsible.

There’s no foreshadowing here, no second-guessing, though most readers will know exactly where the narrative is going as the Dallas motorcade wends its way toward the end of its route. Hill shows no more than the usual paranoia – part of his job – as his charges ride, exposed, through massive crowds. And his narrative of what happens after that first shot is fired remains, at this remove, collected and unemotional, even as he undergoes the full range of shock, understanding that the President’s wounds are not survivable, anger at his own inability to have foreseen and prevented the attack, heartbreak at the personal loss, and awareness that his assignment is not over. He comprehends that his duty is still to protect Mrs. Kennedy, to preserve evidence for the inevitable investigation, and to do what he can to ensure a rational and appropriate transfer of power.

As the book’s title indicates, Hill follows the events through the chaotic and sorrowful days between the attack and the formal state funeral, supported by the detailed notes he habitually made about his on-duty activities. Less scholarly than journalistic, the book is copiously illustrated with photographs (including frames from the Zapruder film) in ways that reinforce the immediacy of the narrative. It is, at times, an emotionally difficult piece to get through.

But it is the Epilogue and the new Afterword of this 2023 reprint of the book (originally released at the time of the 50-year commemoration of the event) that makes it particularly valuable, not only as a unique first-person view, but as one man’s attempt to comprehend the longer-lasting heritage of those five days in November.

He writes that “I fear that once all of us who were witnesses to history are gone, the truth will be buried along with us,” and is particularly incensed about Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie JFK, and its companion work, 2021’s JFK Revisited, which presents itself as a documentary even though, according to Hill, it consists solely of “more wild, unproven conspiracy theories featuring researchers, authors, and ‘experts’, none of who were in Dealey Plaza” when the shots were fired.

Hill says “…the persuasiveness of this particular film has convinced an entire generation that Oliver Stone’s fantasy is what actually happened,” and notes that Stone never once contacted any of the Secret Service agents on duty during that period.

If Hill makes any missteps in his evaluation of post-JFK America, it’s buying into the Camelot myth, calling “…the assassination of President Kennedy … the end of the age of innocence in America.” People, he writes, “… no longer believed they were being told the truth by politicians or the news media,” managing of course to ignore the reality that the politicians and the news media had in fact been massaging the truth for as long as either institution had existed.

Perhaps more accurately, he recalls that “it felt as if America were coming apart at the seams” after Kennedy’s death, opening up a decade that included escalation of the war in Vietnam, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

As an attempt to understand why the controversies and conspiracy theories about Kennedy’s assassination continue to proliferate, it is less than comprehensive. But as an accurate, firsthand depiction of a seminal moment in American history, Hill’s book is an important contribution. ( )

This takes you through the days before the assassination of President Kennedy and the days after. It gives you a first hand look at death of the president and trying to get his body from Texas, back to Washington D.C. and how the beautiful casket used to transport the body was too big to fit through the plane door and they had rip the handles off. Clint Hill was one of secret service agents assigned to the motorcade on that fateful day. He is the one you see climbing on the back of the car in which Kennedy was riding, in the films after the shots were fired.
After returning to Washington, D.C. he is the one to escort Jackie back out to Arlington National Cemetery at midnight after the funeral, when Jackie can't sleep. A very moving book. ( )

Mr Hill, you keep breaking my heart! I loved Mrs Kennedy and Me, and of course I have read about the assassination many times before, not least in William Manchester's Death of a President, but hearing about those fateful, tragic five days in November 1963 from the agent assigned to protect Mrs Kennedy is somehow ten times more powerful.

Recounted in the present tense, so that the reader almost feels like they were right there with Clint Hill, flying from Washington to Texas and back again in the worst reversal of circumstance possible, we follow the President and First Lady, so happy together and full of life, on the motorcade tour through San Antonio, Houston, Fort Worth and finally Dallas. Jack was keen to reach out to seemingly every one of the thousands of people who turned out in each city, much to the agents' concern, and Jackie followed where he lead, even though she didn't really like crowds or public speaking. The book is filled with photographs of the two of them beaming at each other and at the warm welcome they received throughout the tour, which makes what happened in Dallas all the more soul-destroying. When they finally appear on the steps of Air Force One at Love Field, I'm always left thinking, 'No, go back!'

Whether you believe, as Mr Hill staunchly insists, that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole assassin, or that there was far more to the violent deaths of President Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and other key figures of the 1960s, only the hardest heart could read this personal and first hand account of the President's murder and funeral without tearing up.

Beautiful images, heartfelt words, a terrible loss. ( )

This is a highly personal, insider account of those historical five days as Hill details the events while acting in his role as Secret Service for Mrs. Kennedy. While the text is highly charged with Hill's emotions and his duty as a Secret Service agent, the text coupled with the photographs provide a unique account of the events that have been hashed and rehashed by numerous individuals before him. Yes, it gets a little tedious to have Hill explain, innumerable times, of the enormous task the security detail faced, not just during the trip to Texas, but the delivery of the body back to Washington D.C. and the funeral services, but one can not help but appreciate just how personal the events are for Hill, even fifty years later. I do like how in the epilogue he points to one picture that he says should refute the "grassy knoll" shooter debate.

Overall, a lovely commemorative book to mark that historic event. ( )

I read this right after listening to an audiobook on JFK and the assassination, and while I found the narrative in the other book more riveting, this one makes up for it in pictures and personal anecdotes from a member of Jackie Kennedy's Secret Service detail, an eyewitness who was there every step of the way in the days preceding and following JFK's assassination. Recommended!
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