Thanksgiving — A happy time, and a melancholy anniversary

Carl P. Leubsdorf, Tribune News Service

The crisp, short days and the multicolored leaves fluttering down mark a time of year that for me always means two things, one happy, one sad. The happy one is our family’s annual Thanksgiving dinner, for 19 this year. The sad one, the anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, made more melancholy this year by the passing of two of the last living links to that day. As a young Associated Press reporter, I helped write about some of that weekend’s shocking events. But I really learned what it was like from Clint Hill, the valiant Secret Service agent who threw himself over Jackie Kennedy when Lee Harvey Oswald fired those fatal shots in Dallas, and Sid Davis, the last living reporter at Lyndon B. Johnson’s swearing in on Air Force One.

Hill, who took decades to come to terms with the guilt he felt for being unable to save Kennedy, and Davis, who debarked to tell the assembled press corps — and the world — of the peaceful transfer of power, both died in recent months. Hill was 93, Davis 97. Both were in their 30s when they played key supporting roles in the drama that came to epitomise how the unexpected can transform a nation’s history. No one can doubt that the course of the United States, and with it the world, might have been far different — less ground-breaking domestically perhaps, less devastating abroad — had the nation’s youngest president lived to win and serve a second term.

I first met Hill nearly a decade later when he was the No. 2 agent on the detail of Spiro Agnew, President Richard Nixon’s vice president, on a series of lengthy trips to Asia and Africa. His businesslike demeanor neither betrayed his heroic past nor how it still ate at him. As Mrs. Kennedy’s main agent, Hill was in the car immediately behind the presidential limousine when the fatal shots interrupted the president’s triumphant motorcade past thousands of cheering Texans in downtown Dallas. Jumping out and racing forward, he hurled himself onto the rear of the limo as Mrs. Kennedy tried to climb out to escape the bullets and pushed her back down into the seat alongside the mortally wounded president. “I think Special Agent Clinton Hill saved her life,” Kennedy aide David Powers told the Warren Commission that probed the assassination.

Hill held his position until the limousine arrived at Parkland Memorial Hospital, where Kennedy was taken from the car and, shortly after, pronounced dead. For more than a year thereafter, he remained at Mrs. Kennedy’s side. Though he reportedly considered it a demotion from being in the presidential detail, he would later write joyfully of those times. Unsurprisingly, Hill rose in the Secret Service’s ranks to be an assistant director. But the debilitating impact of his guilt led to early retirement at age 43. In 1975, speaking publicly about it for the first time, he explained how he felt in an emotional interview with Mike Wallace on CBS’ “60 Minutes.”

“Had I turned in a different direction,” he said, “I’d have made it,” a reference to his failure to save Kennedy. “That was my fault.” Suffering from severe depression, he spent more than a decade in self-isolation at his Virginia home, drinking heavily and chain smoking before, as he said, “I started to snap out of it.” After two trips to Dallas — one with his wife in 1990 and a later one with fellow agents — “I came to the conclusion that I did the best I could and there was nothing more I could have done that day,” he said during a 2010 Georgetown University panel. Even then, he said in a 2023 interview with NPR’s Juana Summers, “That assassination is like a movie — goes around in my brain all the time... It’s not an easy thing to live with.” With the aid of author Lisa McCubbin, whom he subsequently married, Hill recounted those harrowing days and the happier times with Mrs. Kennedy in a series of books that became bestsellers. I became reacquainted with him during his visits to a luncheon group of retired reporters over which Davis presided.

In Dallas, Davis, then White House Correspondent for the Westinghouse Co.’s radio stations, was the radio representative in the press pool assigned to follow President Kennedy. That pool normally had five reporters then, but, when Johnson was sworn in, only three were there, Newsweek’s Charles Roberts, UPI’s Merriman Smith and Davis.

The absence of someone from the normally ever-present Associated Press and the usual newspaper reporter always baffled me until Davis explained it. The AP representative, longtime political reporter Jack Bell, was in the wire car when the shots resounded but was beaten to its only phone by the more agile Smith, whose reporting that day earned him the Pulitzer Prize. Later, seeking to recover, Bell rebuffed assistant White House press secretary Malcolm Kilduff when he quietly rounded up pool members at Parkland to return to Air Force One, Davis told us, so he could keep writing his own account of the day’s historic happenings.