Untenable Risk - Part 1

The Secret Service and the Protection of the President

Captain Broome watched as his acquaintance, Robert Randolph, removed a glove from his hand as he stood next to President Andrew Jackson. In Broome’s mind, Randolph was seeking either forgiveness or revenge. Not trusting it to be the former, Broome advanced to be closer to the president, hoping for the best outcome; his fear, however, turned out to be correct.

On May 6, 1833, President Jackson was aboard Sydney, a steamboat, docked in Alexandria, Virginia. He had just returned from Fredericksburg, where he had lay a cornerstone at a monument then under construction for Mary Washington. Seated at a table set in preparation for dinner, Jackson was reading a newspaper surrounded by others in his entourage, which included the wife of a judge, his private secretary, a clerk, and Captain Broome of the marine corps. Although there was only a narrow space between the table and the ship berths behind him, Jackson had no one sitting to his right. Local citizens had been let on the ship to greet the president and one of them who made his way into the cabin was Randolph, a former navy lieutenant who had been dismissed from his position due to an embezzlement scandal. Randolph approached the president on his side of the table, appearing to want to speak to him. Broome, having just spoken to Randolph and having long known him, thought there was a chance Randolph would ask for the president’s assistance in being rehired by the navy. In case his intent was to become violent, Broome moved behind Randolph to the same side of the table.

Unfamiliar with the man in front of him, Jackson apologized for not getting up. He had a severe pain in his side, Jackson explained, which made standing difficult. Randolph said nothing and began attempting to take off a glove with some difficulty. Witnessing this and thinking the man wanted a handshake, Jackson offered him his hand, saying, “Never mind your glove, sir.” In the next moment, Randolph thrust one hand straight into Jackson’s face. Before he could land another hit, Broome grabbed him and pulled Randolph away from the president. A portion of the table was broken in the scuffle as others on the ship became involved. Randolph’s friends, who had been standing in the cabin, took him outside and off the boat, leaving his hat behind.

Some blood was visible on Jackson’s face and he was asked if he was injured. “No,” Jackson replied, “I am not much hurt; but in endeavoring to rise, I have wounded my side, which now pains me more than it did.” Another citizen, upon hearing the story, offered to “kill” Randolph “in fifteen minutes” if the president promised to pardon him afterwards. Jackson declined the offer, preferring to handle the matter personally. Six days later, Jackson wrote to his Vice-President Martin Van Buren of how he now wanted to approach Randolph: “Solomon says, ‘there’s a time for all things under the sun,’ and if the dastard will only present himself to me, I will freely pardon him, after the interview, for every act or thing done to me, or he may thereafter do to me.” Presented with the option of prosecuting Randolph for the assault five years later, Jackson again declined to participate, writing to Van Buren: “I have to this old age complied with my mother’s advice to indict no man for assault and battery or sue him for slander.” Randolph’s attack was the first documented case of someone assaulting a U.S. president.

For 125 years, the U.S. Congress remained unwilling to pass legislation to assign a protection detail to the president, viewing the practice as “antagonistic to our traditions” and wishing to avoid having a president who never went “anywhere unless he is accompanied by men in uniform and men with sabers as is done by the monarchs of the continent of Europe,” in the words of one Senator. While President Abraham Lincoln had discussed the creation of the U.S. Secret Service before his assassination in 1865, the mandate envisioned for the organization at the time was that of quelling the spread of counterfeit money across the country. It took two further assassinations of President James Garfield in 1881 and President William McKinley in 1901 for Congress to act, although the appropriation of funding for “the protection of the person of the President of the United States” did not follow until 1906. The legislation formalized what the Secret Service had been doing informally and illegally for decades, done an ad hoc basis at the request of presidents.

The Secret Service would have its ethical bounds tested by President Warren Harding, who in the early 1920s would use the Secret Service to hide his extramarital affairs at the office, as well as deliver secret child support payments. The Service’s first serious test of security came during an attempted assassination attempt of President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt, which claimed the life of Chicago mayor Anton Cermak in 1933. Further tests followed when a letter bomb was sent to President Harry Truman in 1947 and defused by the Secret Service. Three years later, an attempted assassination of Truman was stopped by Secret Service agents and police outside the President’s Guest House, which resulted in the death of a White House police officer, Leslie Coffelt.

Caracas

“Here they come.” Secret Service agent-in-charge Jack Sherwood announced the arrival of hundreds of people who quickly surrounded Vice-President Richard Nixon’s car in Caracas, Venezuela during a goodwill tour of South America on May 13, 1958. Rocks had already flown in their direction, hurled by an angry mob but the driver had accelerated and got them to approximately four blocks from the National Pantheon of Venezuela, where traffic blocked their way forward. Their Venezuelan motorcycle escort quickly disappeared and hundreds ran towards the car. Only 12 Secret Service agents remained to protect the Vice-President; those outside of the car used their arms to push back against the crowd. At the moment Nixon realized they were now on their own, a rock crashed into the car window, spraying glass shards onto the passengers as it remained lodged in the window. A sliver entered the eye of Venezuelan Foreign Minister Óscar García Velutini, who began bleeding profusely, moaning: “This is terrible. This is terrible.”

Nixon could see someone carrying an iron pipe approaching: “He was looking right at me as he began trying to break the window,” he recalled. The glass held once again but slivers hit Nixon’s translator Vernon Walters in the mouth while some hit Sherwood and Nixon in the face. Nixon felt relieved as the car began moving again; however, this was only as a result of the mob rocking the car back and forth. He envisioned the next step would be for the car to be turned over and set on fire. Nixon now believed he was in danger of being killed; he turned to check on his wife Pat’s car and was “relieved to see that the mob was concentrating on us and ignoring her car.” A press truck in front of them was able to clear a path: “Our driver gunned the engine and shot around the truck, picking up speed. I was greatly relieved to see Pat’s car right behind us.”

Nixon’s entourage had been trapped for 12 minutes but it had felt “like a lifetime.” In recommending the agents afterwards for commendations, Nixon wrote:

“In Caracas, at a time when local police protection was virtually nonexistent, they moved back an armed mob with their bare hands, then broke the roadblock and freed the motorcade so that it could proceed out of danger. There is no doubt in my mind but that, had one of them failed to exercise that rare combination of restraint and courage in an exemplary degree, bloodshed might have resulted which could have led to almost frightening international repercussions.”

There were two errors in Nixon’s note, which nonetheless took nothing away from what he termed as “a superhuman job in trying to fend off the mob.” The first was relatively minor: the press truck had cleared the path and not the Secret Service, according to Nixon himself in his memoirs. The second was more significant: rather than show restraint, Sherwood had attempted to escalate the situation. According to Nixon’s own account, before the path had been cleared “Sherwood pulled out his revolver and said, ‘Let’s get some of these sons of bitches.’ I told him to hold his fire. Once a gun went off the crowd would go berserk and that would be the end of us.” Any systemic or personal deficiencies on the part of the Secret Service in their role as protectors would not enter public consciousness for another five and a half years.

Dallas

“[Secret Service Director] Jim Rowley is most efficient. He has never lost a president.”

-President John F. Kennedy

Secret Service Agent Winston Lawson was riding in the lead car in the presidential motorcade in Dallas on November 22, 1963. As they drove on Elm Street, Lawson looked up at the upcoming overpass and noticed a mistake; there were people on the structure. A local police officer who should have been there to clear the crowds posing a risk to the president was missing. Lawson began motioning to an officer “through the windshield trying to get his attention to move the people from over our path the way it should have been,” he later recalled. As the car approached the overpass, that is when Lawson heard the first shot.

Seven months before, on April 10, Lee Oswald fired his rifle at Edwin Walker, a U.S. army major general who had run for governor of Texas. The bullet hit the frame of Walker’s dining-room window as he sat inside at a nearby desk. The glass shattered and fragments struck his forearm. Upon returning home, Oswald was pale and out of breath. His wife Marina asked him what had happened and why he had left a note with instructions on what to do if he did not come back. “I just shot General Walker,” Oswald explained. Marina replied, asking who Walker was and adding: “How dare you go and claim somebody’s life?” Oswald remained indignant: “Well, what would you say if somebody got rid of Hitler at the right time? So if you don’t know about General Walker, how can you speak up on his behalf?” Walker was a “fascist,” Oswald explained, and he turned on the radio to listen for news on the shooting. He was “extremely nervous,” Marina recalled, and finally “kind of angry” when he learned his assassination attempt had failed.

Walker had resigned from the military in 1961, becoming the only U.S. general to do so in the 20th century. Before his resignation, the Army had relieved him of his command, following an investigation finding that he had taken part in “controversial activities which were beyond the prerogatives of a senior military commander.” Walker had become explicitly political, referring to former President Truman as “definitely pink,” and applying the leftist label to Eleanor Roosevelt, former Secretary of State Dean Acheson and Adlai Stevenson, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Walker had also distributed copies of the Conservative Voting Index to his solders, hoping to influence the outcome of the 1962 congressional elections. Walker ran for Texas governor in 1962, finishing last among six candidates in the Democratic primary.

Walker gave a speech in Dallas on October 23 celebrating what he called U.S. Day, in advance of Adlai Stevenson’s U.N. Day speech scheduled for the following day. Oswald was in attendance, writing a week later:

On October 23rd, I had attended a ultra-right meeting headed by General Edwin A. Walker, who lives in Dallas.

This meeting preceded by one day the attack on A. E. Stevenson at the United Nations Day meeting at which he spoke.

As you can see, political friction between ‘left’ and ‘right’ is very great here.

Stevenson’s speech in Dallas on October 24 was attended by protestors and Walker supporters, though Walker himself was absent. “Kennedy will get his reward in hell,” one of the hecklers chanted. “Stevenson is going to die. His heart will stop, stop stop. And he will burn, burn burn.” After the speech, Stevenson was approached by a woman who hit him in the head with her protest sign. “It’s all right to have your own views,” Stevenson said to the woman, “but don’t hit anyone.” Stevenson soon telephoned Kennedy’s special assistant Arthur Schlesinger to advise against the president’s planned trip to Dallas, saying: “there was something ugly and frightening about the atmosphere. Later I talked with some of the leading people there. They wondered whether the president should go to Dallas, and so do I.” Walker was infuriated when local officials apologized to Stevenson over the treatment he received in Dallas. Walker flew five flags outside of his home upside down in protest, noting that Dallas was a “city in distress.” He was quoted in the press on November 1: “I think Stevenson got what he expected. He assisted Khrushchev in taking over Cuba and establishing it as a base of subversion.” Walker declined to say whether his supporters would demonstrate during Kennedy’s visit to Dallas on November 22, saying only that the president was “a liability to the free world.”

A member of Texas’ Democratic national committee, Byron Skelton, picked up on that remark and sent a letter to Attorney General Robert Kennedy: “Frankly, I am worried about President Kennedy’s proposed trip to Dallas. You will note that General Walker says that ‘Kennedy is a liability to the free world.’ A man who would make this kind of statement is capable of doing harm to the President…I would feel better if the President’s itinerary did not include Dallas. Please give this your earnest consideration.” Senator William Fulbright was more direct in his advice to Kennedy: “Dallas is a very dangerous place. I wouldn’t go there. Don’t you go.”

President Kennedy’s trip to Dallas in November 1963 was meant to shore up support in a state that he had barely won in 1960, 50.52% to Nixon’s 48.52%, and amounted to political considerations overriding security concerns. On November 4, the Secret Service was first informed by the White House of the planned trip, for which the logistics had already been planned without their input. “Political priorities have always been a problem, 99% of the time,” Agent Lawson later explained. “There’s always gonna be a political side versus a Secret Service side.”

On November 9, William Somersett, a police informant in Miami, recorded a conversation with political extremist Joseph A. Milteer, who suggested that there was a plot underway to assassinate President Kennedy using a rifle from a tall building. Miami Police met with the Secret Service on November 12, providing them with a transcript which included:

SOMERSETT: I think Kennedy is coming here November 18 to make some kind of speech. I don’t know what it is, but I imagine it will be on TV.

MILTEER: You can bet your bottom dollar he is going to have a lot to say about the Cubans; there are so many of them here.

SOMERSETT: Well, he’ll have a thousand bodyguards, don’t worry about that.

MILTEER: The more bodyguards he has, the easier it is to get him.

SOMERSETT: What?

MILTEER: The more bodyguards he has, the easier it is to get him.

SOMERSETT: Well, how in the hell do you figure would be the best way to get him?

MILTEER: From an office building with a high-powered rifle.

SOMERSETT: They are really going to try to kill him?

MILTEER: Oh, yeah; it is in the working.

SOMERSETT: Hitting this Kennedy is going to be a hard proposition. I believe you may have figured out a way to get him, the office building and all that. I don’t know how them Secret Service agents cover all them office buildings everywhere he is going. Do you know whether they do that or not?

MILTEER: Well, if they have any suspicion, they do that, of course. But without suspicion, chances are that they wouldn’t.

The Secret Service ignored the threat, not informing the Forrest Sorrels, U.S.S.S. special agent-in-charge of the Dallas office or the agent in charge of trip preparations. While checking the Dallas motorcade route, Sorrels remarked that if someone wanted to assassinate the President, it could be accomplished using a rifle from a tall building. President Kennedy agreed, commenting that he could be shot from a high building and little could be done to stop it.

On November 14, Lawson and Sorrells were scouting out the proposed routes for Kennedy’s motorcade in Dallas when they were informed by the Democratic National Committee that the luncheon on November 22 was to be held at the Trade Mart, which made a route going through Dealey Plaza an obvious choice. Two days later, the Dallas press published a general route so that the public could gather to watch the motorcade. On November 18, Lawson and Sorrells and two members of the Dallas Police Department took a dry run of the motorcade route, identifying potential crowd control issues and ways of sealing off the route from other traffic. Plans were made to assign police officers to each of the overpasses along the route, to keep spectators away from them and to prevent objects from falling into the open car. The Secret Service guidelines from 1954 had little guidance on potential snipers and focused a great deal on aspects of crowd control. The outer perimeter, the guidance made clear, was typically the responsibility of local police rather than the Secret Service: “The outer concentric defense areas will usually be sufficiently protected if local officers carry out their own responsibilities of providing security and control of citizens and public property in a cooperative manner, which is fully coordinated with the protective forces,” the training handbook stated. The next day, the exact motorcade route was printed in Dallas newspapers.

The night before the Dallas motorcade, after President Kennedy had left for the night to sleep at his hotel, 9 of the 28 Secret Service agents working in Dallas stayed out late drinking. First they drank beer and mixed drinks at the Fort Worth Press Club, some staying between half an hour to two hours. Two agents went back to their hotel, with another seven going to The Cellar coffeehouse from 1:30 am to 3:00 am. One agent stayed there until 5 am.

President Kennedy’s car lacked security in comparison with other cars in the motorcade. Seated at the front were two Secret Service agents, William Greer, the driver of the car, and Roy Kellerman, who sat next to him on the passenger side. Those agents would have needed to crawl over an intervening seat to get to Kennedy, who sat in the third row behind Texas governor John Connally and his wife Nellie. In contrast, Vice-President Lyndon Johnson had no such extra seating between him and his Secret Service agents. Perhaps most significantly, there were no running boards on the side of the president’s car with agents stationed on them as was the case with the follow-up car behind the president in the motorcade.

Once the crowd became larger, Agent Clint Hill, assigned to protect the First Lady, jumped on the rear step of the president’s car during the ride: “The president glanced back at me,” Hill recalled, “but he didn’t say anything. I knew he didn’t want us on the back of the car, but I had a job to do. I would answer later if necessary.” He again rode on the car on Main Street when he noticed the police motorcycles having difficulty staying next to the car and exposing the First Lady to danger. “Again I saw the president glance my way but not say anything,” Hill recounted. “I stayed there, on the rear step of the limousine, all the way down Main Street.” He had returned to the left running board of the follow-up car by the time the motorcade turned left off Houston Street onto Elm Street. As the president’s car slowed to 11 miles per hour, Nellie Connally remarked: “Mr. President, you can't say Dallas doesn’t love you.” As shots rang out, Greer thought he was hearing a motorcycle backfire. Kellerman heard President Kennedy say: “My God, I’m hit” and told Greer to move out. Rather than speed up or carry out an evasive maneuver, Greer looked back twice towards the president and decelerated the car. “Maybe he didn’t believe me,” Kellerman reasoned.

David Powers, special assistant to the President, watched the events unfold from the follow-up car behind Kennedy: “After the first shot, I noticed then that the president moved quite far to his left after the shot from the extreme right hand side where he had been sitting. There was a second shot and Governor Connally disappeared from sight and there was a third shot which took off the top of the President’s head and had the sickening sound of a grapefruit splattering against the side of a wall.”

Riding with Lyndon Johnson in a car behind the president's follow-up car, Secret Service Agent Rufus Youngblood reacted quickly, moving to protect the Vice-President in the back seat before the second shot was fired. “As we were beginning to go down this incline,” Youngblood recalled, “all of a sudden there was an explosive noise. I quickly observed unnatural movement of crowds, like ducking or scattering, and quick movements in the presidential follow-up car. So I turned around and hit the Vice-President on the shoulder and hollered, ‘Get down!’ and then looked around again and saw more of this movement, and so I proceeded to go to the back seat and get on top of him.”

Two agents drew their guns while the shooting was in progress, but none made it to the presidential limousine until after the fatal shot, when Hill ran from the follow-up car climbed onto the back of the president's car. There he saw the Jacqueline Kennedy climbing towards him. What is she doing? he thought. Good God, she's going to go flying off the back of the car! Then he realized she was grabbing for a piece of her husband's skull. “She didn’t even know I was there,” Hill remembered. “I got a hold of her and put her in the back seat. The president fell onto Mrs. Kennedy. I could see that his eyes were fixed.” He could also “see inside the back of the president’s head.” Senator Ralph Yarborough, two cars behind, caught a glimpse of Hill laying across the back of the presidential car as it sped to the hospital: “His face turned back towards us, just…agony; and beating with his hand [against the car] like a terrible thing had happened. I knew then that Kennedy’d been shot. And within several minutes, we came to Parkland Hospital and the Secret Service immediately jumped out the minute Johnson—they practically pulled him out and formed a cordate around him, four or five, and one of them said ‘Mr. President.’ I knew then Kennedy was dead.” The driver, Agent Greer, at Parkland Hospital gave his apologies to the First Lady: “Oh, Mrs. Kennedy, oh my God, oh my God. I didn’t mean to do it. I didn’t hear. I should have swerved the car, I couldn’t help it...Oh, Mrs. Kennedy, if only I’d seen it in time.”

The Secret Service had lost a president for the first time in its history. The Service’s Director at the time, James Rowley, had worked as an agent since 1938 in the FDR administration, following a brief stint in the FBI. He had become the 14th Secret Service Director in 1961 under Kennedy, and despite the assassination, ended up serving in the position until 1973. Responding to a question from the Warren Commission that President Kennedy may have asked Secret Service agents to not be on his car, Rowley responded: “No President will tell the Secret Service what they can or cannot do.” Asked why no agent was stationed on the rear bumper of the car at the time of the assassination, Rowley replied: “the running board on the follow-up car has an important place in the setup. It is a much better place to be than on the rear step if you see a situation, and you want to move fast.”

Rowley declined to discipline the agents who had drank and stayed out late the night before, despite their violation of the Secret Service’s regulations. Rowley believed that disciplining those agents would be unfair, testifying as follows: “I did consider what type of punishment would be provided. Then I also considered the fact that these men in no way had—their conduct had no bearing on the assassination. And, therefore, I thought that in the light of history, to place a stigma on them by punishing them at that time, from which inevitably the public would conclude that they were responsible for the assassination of the President—I didn’t think this was fair, and that they did not deserve that, with their family and children.” Earl Warren, Chairman of the Warren Commission, wondered if the agents’ conduct still had an impact on the outcome given their requirement to be alert to threats: “Now, other people, as they went along there, even some people in the crowds, saw a man with a rifle up in this building from which the President was shot. Now, don’t you think that if a man went to bed reasonably early, and hadn’t been drinking the night before, would be more alert to see those things as a Secret Service agent, than if they stayed up until 3, 4, or 5 o’clock in the morning, going to beatnik joints and doing some drinking along the way?”

Kellerman assured the FBI that “the precautions employed in Dallas were the most stringent and thorough ever employed...for the visit of a president to an American city.” Greer misled the Warren Commission as to how he reacted to Kellerman’s instructions:

ARLEN SPECTER: Did you step on the accelerator before, simultaneously, or after Mr. Kellerman instructed you to accelerate?

GREER: It was about simultaneously.

SPECTER: So that it was your reaction to accelerate prior to the time—

GREER: Yes, sir.

SPECTER: You had gotten that instruction?

GREER: Yes sir; it was my reaction that caused me to accelerate.

SPECTER: Do you recollect whether you accelerated before or at the same time or after the third shot?

GREER: I couldn’t really say. Just as soon as I turned my head back from the second shot, right away I accelerated right then. It was a matter of my reflexes to the accelerator.

SPECTER: Was it at about that time that you heard the third shot?

GREER: Yes, sir; just as soon as I turned my head.

SPECTER: What is your best estimate of the speed of the car at the time of the first, second, or third shots?

GREER: I would estimate my speed was between 12 and 15 miles per hour.

Rowley gave the Warren Commission the Secret Service’s official explanation as to why the buildings along the motorcade route were not checked:

“Except for inauguration or other parades involving foreign dignitaries accompanied by the President in Washington, it has not been the practice of the Secret Service to make surveys or checks of buildings along the route of a Presidential motorcade. For the inauguration and certain other parades in Washington where the traditional route is known to the public long in advance of the event, buildings along the route can be checked by teams of law enforcement officers, and armed guards are posted along the route as appropriate. But on out-of-town trips where the route is decided on and made public only a few days in advance, buildings are not checked either by Secret Service agents or by any other law enforcement officers at the request of the Secret Service. With the number of men available to the Secret Service and the time available, surveys of hundreds of buildings and thousands of windows is not practical.

“In Dallas the route selected necessarily involved passing through the principal downtown section between tall buildings. While certain streets thought to be too narrow could be avoided and other choices made, it was not practical to select a route where the President could not be seen from roofs or windows of buildings. At the two places in Dallas where the President would remain for a period of time, Love Field and the Trade Mart, arrangements were made for building and roof security by posting police officers where appropriate. Similar arrangements for a motorcade of ten miles, including many blocks of tall commercial buildings is not practical. Nor is it practical to prevent people from entering such buildings, or to limit access in every building to those employed or having business there. Even if it were possible with a vastly larger force of security officers to do so, many observers have felt that such a procedure would not be consistent with the nature and purpose of the motorcade to let the people see their President and to welcome him to their city.

“In accordance with its regular procedures, no survey or other check was made by the Secret Service, or by any other law enforcement agency at its request, of the Texas School Book Depository Building or those employed there prior to the time the President was shot.”

The Warren Commission found this justification to be “not persuasive. The danger from a concealed sniper on the Dallas trip was of concern to those who had considered the problem. President Kennedy himself had mentioned it that morning, as had Agent Sorrels when he and Agent Lawson were fixing the motorcade route.” A U.S. House investigator looking into the assassination in 1978 obtained a Secret Service School handbook entitled Principles of Protection of the President and Other Dignitaries, dated January 4, 1954. The investigator noted several problematic aspects of the manual compared to the events that transpired and the testimony of Secret Service agents at the Warren Commission, quoting key sections from the Secret Service handbook in their critique:

“-Pg. 56-7 ‘If great danger is suspected, the occupants of buildings facing parade routes should be checked and a person of known reliability should be given the responsibility in each location of assuring that no suspicious persons are allowed at windows or on roof tops in the danger area.’ Note ‘at windows or on roof tops’ is specifically stated. This is contrary to testimony given by several Secret Service agents.

[…]

“-Emergencies - counter attacks. Does mention that the nearest personnel would pursue attacker while rest close ranks. This is also in contrast to testimony given the Warren Commission. Agents stated that ALL personnel are to stay with their man (JFK) and thus no agents stayed behind in Dealey Plaza to help with the investigation.”

The investigator was most surprised at how little Secret Service practices had changed following the assassination, citing a 1964 memo in which it was noted that President Johnson now rode in a “closed car” for such events and there were “a few extra men…employed in its protective measures.” The investigator noted: “This information could be highly damaging to the Secret Service if found to be true still.” The 1978 United States House Select Committee on Assassinations investigation concluded that the Secret Service was deficient in performing its duties on November 22, 1963, citing “that the Secret Service did in fact possess information that was not properly analyzed and put to use with respect to a protective investigation in advance of President Kennedy’s trip to Dallas. Further, it was the committee’s opinion that Secret Service agents in the Presidential motorcade in Dallas were not adequately prepared for an attack by a concealed sniper.”

In ceremony attended by Jacqueline Kennedy on December 3, 1963, Agent Hill received an “Exceptional Service Award…for his bravery and courageous actions in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963” from the head of Secret Service’s parent organization, Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon. Agent Youngblood received the same award the next day. Hill wrote: “I don’t deserve an award. The president is dead.” As the agent who got closest to the president before his death, Hill felt a particular guilt for not acting more quickly, telling Mike Wallace in 1975 if he “had acted about five-tenths of a second faster, or maybe a second faster, I wouldn’t be here today.”

WALLACE: “You mean you would have gotten there and you would have taken the shot?”

HILL: “The third shot, yes sir.”

WALLACE: “And that would have been all right with you?”

HILL: “That would have been fine with me.”