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JFK’s Secret Service agent still doesn’t know if there was “something I could have done” to protect president
The Secret Service agent who jumped onto President John F. Kennedy’s car after he was shot in 1963 has just two words that he wants people to remember: “I tried.”
Clint Hill’s 1975 interview with 60 Minutes correspondent Mike Wallace helped the former agent come to terms with the assassination of JFK, he told “60 Minutes: A Second Look” host and CBS News correspondent Seth Doane. Wallace was the first person Hill spoke with in detail publicly about the horrific events of Nov. 22, 1963.
Images from that day show Hill climbing atop the presidential limousine to protect first lady Jacqueline Kennedy. Hill blamed himself for JFK’s death at the time of his interview with Wallace, saying that if only he’d reacted “five-tenths of a second faster,” the president would be alive.
Doane asked if Hill, now 92, still blames himself.
“Well, maybe there was something I could have done,” Hill said. “I don’t know anymore.”
Hill on working to come to terms with the Kennedy assassination
Hill was 43 and recently retired when he did his 1975 interview with Wallace. Twenty years after that, Wallace wrote to Hill and asked for another interview. Hill wrote a letter back to Wallace.
Photo by CBS via Getty Images
“My interview with you on 60 Minutes in 1975 turned into much more of an emotional experience than I thought possible,” Hill wrote at the time. “It did turn out to be a cathartic experience for me and helped me release feelings that had been pent up for a long time.”
Hill told Doane that he thinks if it hadn’t been for his interview with Wallace, he “would have just lingered in a horrible situation and never come out of it, probably.”
To this day, Hill said he still hasn’t completely forgiven himself.
“My dad drilled into me that when you’re given an assignment to do, you do it ’till it’s fully finished,” Hill told Doane. “I had an assignment to keep the president and Mrs. Kennedy alive. I only kept one of them alive. One died on my watch.”
Hill gets hundreds of letters after 60 Minutes interview
Hundreds of viewers sent in mail after Hill’s interview with 60 Minutes. Those letters were passed on to Hill. Until five years ago, he didn’t remember those letters. But when he was preparing to sell his home in 2019, Hill’s wife, Lisa McCubbin Hill, said they should short through old belongings.
They found a battered black trunk in the garage with 17 years of presidential knick knacks, a stack of framed photos, and hundreds of letters. The couple brought around 25 of the letters along with them when they moved to California. There was one in particular that Hill wanted to read to “60 Minutes: A Second Look.”
“It is a day I shall never forget, nor shall I forget the people so deeply involved in the events of that day. And as I watched you on 60 Minutes, I wanted to reach out and wrap you in my arms to offer some comfort,” Hill read from the letter. “But no one who suffered that tremendous loss that day can even feel comfort, and I know you feel that.”
“It offered me, like she said, I wish she could wrap her arms around me and get my thoughts to go away about that day,” he said. “And I do, too. They never will.”
Never been broadcast: What “no other reporter would have asked” Hill
The new episode of “60 Minutes: A Second Look” included audio from Hill’s interview with Wallace that had never before been broadcast. While the “Secret Service Agent #9” broadcast in 1975 lasted just 16 minutes, 60 Minutes podcast producer Julie Holstein worked with CBS News archivists to find hours of film recorded during the production of the story.
Holstein found a recording of Wallace asking Hill a question that she says “no other reporter would have asked” Hill in 1975.
“What do you do about, about some of the private occasions when they want nobody else to know what’s going on? If they’re, whether it’s in the White House or whether it’s in a hotel out of town, or…and you know, you know what I’m talking about and you know who I’m talking about,” Wallace said in recordings from the archives.
Gwen Hill, Clint Hill’s first wife, who died in 2021, can be heard clearing her throat. Clint Hill wiggles around. His mic scratched his chest.
“Nobody knows about those occasions,” Hill said in the 1975 recording.
Wallace pressed Hill: “You do. How do you manage it?”
Hill responded with a laugh: “Very carefully.”
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Claudia Sheinbaum took office Tuesday as Mexico’s first female president in the nation’s more than 200 years of independence.
The 62-year-old former Mexico City mayor and lifelong leftist campaigned on a promise of continuity and of protecting and expanding the signature initiatives of her mentor, former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
In the four months between her election and inauguration she held that line, backing López Obrador on issues big and small. But Sheinbaum is a very different person; she likes data and doesn’t have López Obrador’s backslapping personal touch.
Mexico now waits to see if she will step out of his shadow.
Manuel Velasquez / Getty Images
Sheinbaum’s background is in science. She has a Ph.D. in energy engineering. Her brother is a physicist. In a 2023 interview with The Associated Press, Sheinbaum said, “I believe in science.”
Observers say that grounding showed itself in Sheinbaum’s actions as mayor during the COVID-19 pandemic, when her city of some 9 million people took a different approach from what López Obrador espoused at the national level.
Sheinbaum set limits on businesses’ hours and capacity when the virus was rapidly spreading and expanded its testing regimen. She also publicly wore masks and urged social distancing.
She comes from an older, more solidly left tradition that predates López Obrador’s nationalistic, populist movement.
Colombia’s President, Gustavo Petro, dropped a bit of a bombshell before Sheinbaum’s inauguration, telling reporters she had been a sympathizer of Colombia’s leftist guerrilla group, M-19 – the group that Petro himself once belonged to – and that she helped out exiled rebel fighters when they passed through Mexico. “A lot of Mexicans came to help us, and among them was Claudia.”
While Sheinbaum’s office did not immediately respond to queries about Petro’s comments, the idea is not improbable: Sheinbaum comes from a far more traditionally ‘leftist’ background than López Obrador, and has herself said she belonged to a number of leftist youth groups during her university years, at a time when they would have supported rebel groups in Central America and South America.
Her parents were leading activists in Mexico’s 1968 student movement, which ended tragically in a government massacre of hundreds of student demonstrators in Mexico City’s Tlatelolco plaza just days before the Summer Olympics opened there that year.
Sheinbaum is also the first president with a Jewish background in the largely Catholic country.
Sheinbaum led wire to wire and won convincingly in June with almost 60% of the vote, about double the number of her nearest competitor, Xóchitl Gálvez.
As López Obrador’s chosen successor, she enjoyed the boost of the high popularity he maintained throughout his six years in office.
The opposition’s coalition led by Gálvez struggled to gain traction, while support for the governing party carried over to Congress, where voters gave Morena and its allies margins that allowed it to pass important constitutional changes before López Obrador left office.
Before passage of a controversial constitutional overhaul of Mexico’s judiciary that will make all judges stand for election, Sheinbaum stood with López Obrador who had pushed it.
Felix Marquez/picture alliance via Getty Images
Sheinbaum said “the reforms to the judicial system will not affect our commercial relations, nor private Mexican investments, nor foreign ones. Rather the opposite, there will be a greater and better rule of law and democracy for everyone.”
Shortly after, when López Obrador’s proposal to put the National Guard under military command was being considered, Sheinbaum defended it against critics. She said it would not militarize the country and that the National Guard would respect human rights.
And just days before she took office, Sheinbaum stood with López Obrador in his long-running diplomatic spat with Spain. She defended her decision to not invite Spain’s King Felipe VI to her inauguration, saying in part that the king had failed to apologize for Spain’s conquest of Mexico as López Obrador had demanded years earlier.
Sheinbaum’s victory came 70 years after women won the right to vote in Mexico.
The race really came down to two women, Sheinbaum and Gálvez, but Mexico’s prevailing machismo still pushed both women to explain why they thought they could be president.
Since 2018, Mexico’s Congress has had a 50-50 gender split, in part due to gender quotas set for party candidates. Still, Sheinbaum inherits a country with soaring levels of violence against women. Barely 24 hours after Sheinbaum’s election victory, the female mayor of a town in western Mexico, Yolanda Sanchez Figueroa, was gunned down on a public road, according to local media. The Michoacan attorney general’s office said that the mayor’s bodyguard was also killed.
There are also still many parts of the country, especially rural Indigenous areas where men hold all the power. And some 2.5 million women toil in domestic work where despite reforms they continue to face low pay, abuse by employers, long hours and unstable working conditions.
Mexico’s Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that national laws prohibiting abortions are unconstitutional and violate women’s rights.
Although the Mexican ruling orders the removal of abortion from the federal penal code and requires federal health institutions to offer the procedure to anyone who requests it, further state-by-state legal work is pending to remove all penalties.
Feminists say that simply electing a woman as president does not guarantee she will govern with a gender perspective. Both Sheinbaum and López Obrador have been criticized before for appearing to lack empathy toward women protesting against gender violence.
