Bodyguard Clint Hill dies: He tried to protect Kennedy

The footage has shocked the world since November 22, 1963. While President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, accompanied by the Governor of Texas, John Connally, and his wife Nellie, are driving through Dealey Plaza in Dallas in an open black limousine surrounded by cheering people, shots are fired. As Kennedy's body collapses, a bodyguard jumps onto the running board of the car.

He succeeds in getting the First Lady, who is in shock and has crawled from the seat of the limousine onto the trunk, to turn around. As she pushes herself back, the man in the black suit protects the President's wife with his body. Contemporary witnesses and historians still believe that Clint Hill saved the First Lady's life.

The fact that he was unable to protect her husband at the time weighed on him for decades. "If I had reacted about five-tenths of a second, maybe a second faster, I wouldn't be here today," Hill told CBS twelve years after the assassination. When moderator Mike Wallace asked him whether the bodyguard would have thrown himself in front of Kennedy, he answered in the affirmative. "That would have been fine with me."

After the fatal attack on Kennedy, which the Ukrainian-American textile entrepreneur Abraham Zapruder happened to film, Hill suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and began drinking. Nevertheless, the son of Norwegian immigrants from North Dakota continued to work for Kennedy's widow until the 1964 presidential election, remained in the White House under her husband's successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, and rose to become head of the Secret Service's presidential protection team.

When the nightmares did not subside, Hill took early retirement in 1975, shortly after his 43rd birthday. He and his second wife, journalist Lisa McCubbin, processed the memories of November 22, 1963 in books such as "Mrs. Kennedy and Me" and "Five Days in November". As has now been announced, Hill died last Friday at home in Belvedere, California. He was 93 years old.