Hill found he wasn’t too keen on the hot-tempered and sometimes crude president after spending nearly four years with the refined, soft-spoken Jackie Kennedy. Hill was assigned to continue as the lead agent protecting the former first lady for a year, then worked on Johnson’s detail. Johnson took the oath aboard Air Force One as the late president lay in a casket in the aft cabin and his shocked widow stood witness in a bloodied pink suit. He had gone from being Kennedy’s vice president on that trip to Dallas in November 1963 to hastily arranging his own swearing-in as president two hours later on the tarmac at Dallas’s Love Field. By all rights, Johnson should have had plenty of motivation to play it safe and defer to the service about his personal security. Some of the most vivid, hair-raising moments in “Five Presidents” come as Hill recounts his frustration in trying to create a secure bubble around an uncooperative and unpredictable Johnson. He met Arnold Palmer when Eisenhower played golf with him at Augusta National, got the word that Elvis Presley had showed up unannounced at the White House’s northwest gate to talk to Nixon and was at Cape Canaveral to watch the Apollo 11 launch, which first put men on the moon. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, and stood on the South Lawn as a disgraced President Richard Nixon boarded Marine One for the last time and left the White House. Hill visited 11 countries with Eisenhower during a massive 1959 peace-building campaign, took a helicopter tour of Washington with President Lyndon Johnson to see the devastation from the riots after the Rev. That detail is still the most prized assignment in the service, putting an agent on the right or left flank of the president when he is in the midst of making history, meeting celebrities or staring down a national crisis. Soon after, he was summoned to the White House detail to help shadow Eisenhower. One of his first tasks was guarding the Denver home of President Dwight Eisenhower’s 80-year-old mother-in-law. After graduating from college, serving in the Army intelligence corps and starting his own family, Hill applied on a whim for an open Secret Service position. McCubbin said Hill went into each of his books begrudgingly, “not sure anyone would be interested.” But what he considered a mildly routine day at work, she said, would have been a lifetime memory for most Americans.Īdopted as a newborn, Hill was raised by a loving North Dakota couple. Hill was a Secret Service agent from 1958 to 1975. He found solace when he started to talk through, and eventually write about, what happened.
After years of sustaining a breakneck work pace to numb the memory of losing Kennedy, he fell into heavy drinking, failed a physical and left the service at age 43.
It closes with Hill’s eventual realization that he is mentally and physically broken and must retire in 1975. Hill, who has written books about the assassination and his time protecting first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, is back now with “ Five Presidents: My Extraordinary Journey With Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford.” Hill and his co-author, Lisa McCubbin, take readers from Hill’s hiring in 1958 and his work in the agency’s Denver field office to the shock of Kennedy’s death and the agent’s vigilance afterward to prevent such a disaster from happening again. A legend in the close-knit world of former and current Secret Service agents, Hill is perhaps best known as the lone agent who raced toward Kennedy’s limousine at the sound of gunshots during the 1963 motorcade in Dallas and hurled himself onto the trunk in a failed attempt to shield the young leader and his wife. Hill carries a unique battle scar: He was a step or two away when an assassin’s bullet pierced President John F. It’s an understandable reaction for an elite bodyguard who spent nearly two decades protecting America’s presidents and has seen political rhetoric turn ugly and divisive before.
“Whenever I watch, I sit on the edge of my chair,” Hill said. Hill, one of the heroes of the Secret Service, instead trains his gaze on the icy-faced special agents in suits on the edge of the screen and worries about the vitriol of this campaign season: It could happen in an instant. When Clint Hill watches Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump or any presidential contenders verbally spar on television, he barely looks at the candidates or listens to the barbs they hurl. Leonnig, an investigative reporter at The Washington Post, won the Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of the Secret Service’s recent struggles and security failures in protecting the president.
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