FORT SMITH — A Secret Service agent who saw President John F. Kennedy lose his life watched hundreds of volunteers Saturday at the Fort Smith National Cemetery honor those who risked their lives for their country.
Former Secret Service Agent Clint Hill spoke at a ceremony Saturday morning after hundreds of volunteers placed Christmas wreaths on all 13,500 graves in the fourth year of what has become a Fort Smith tradition called Christmas Honors.
The national cemetery is one of the few in the nationthat places wreaths on all of the graves. The national cemetery at Fayetteville is another, cemetery Director Craig LaChance said.
“It’s a pretty humbling feeling to come out here, for me to see the way the community takes the cemetery as its own,” LaChance said. “You don’t have that in some places, unfortunately.”
At 9:30 a.m., the signal was given, and hundreds of volunteers scooped up the wreaths and began laying them on the graves. With so many people participating, the task was done in just a few minutes.
Among those layingwreaths was Hill, who headed first lady Jacqueline Kennedy’s protection detail and who was in Dallas on the day President Kennedy was assassinated.
He was the one who bolted from the Secret Service car and jumped onto the president’s limousine after the fatal shots were fired, riding with the mortally wounded president and his wife to Parkland Hospital.
Hill was in Fort Smith promoting his new book, Mrs. Kennedy and Me, and delivered a program Friday evening - along with coauthor Lisa McCubbin at theFort Smith Convention Center - about his experiences with the Kennedys.
Hill said he laid a wreath Saturday on the grave of a young private “and it was an honor to do so.”
“It’s wonderful to watch the community come together to transform the cemetery from what it was to what it looks like now,” he said. “It’s a tribute to all the veterans at Christmastime. It’s really fantastic.”
Phil Merry, a city director and president of Gallagher-Merry Insurance, said he came up with the idea for Christmas Honors on Labor Day weekend of 2009 as he sat eating a cheeseburger at the grave of his wife’s grandfather, World War I Sgt. Riley Donoho, in the national cemetery.
He said he was looking at the rows of white gravestones and remembered seeing wreaths at Arlington National Cemetery, but not on all the stones. Later, on the Internet, he saw that the cemetery at Washington, D.C., had about 5,000 wreaths that were rotated around the cemetery each year.
“That didn’t feel right,” he said.
While some thought that his project was overly ambitious, he said, he organized a committee of enthusiastic volunteers who raised thousands of dollars and recruited corporate sponsors like Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Baldor Electric Co. in Fort Smith to help. The idea took hold as hundreds of people donated their time and money.
Preparing the wreaths took a lot of time and work, Christmas Honors committee member Claude Legris said. On Friday, hundreds showed up at the Fort Smith Convention Center to prepare the wreaths, made of artificial pine branches and red velvetlike bows bought at a deep discount from Wal-Mart, Legris said. After they are taken out of storage at the Baldor plant, the scores of boxes are unloaded.
Legris said he noticed that more young people are getting involved in the project. The majority of volunteers constructing and fluffing the wreaths and replacing the bows were from grade schools, junior and senior high schools, and colleges.
“We’re very delighted to see that kind of involvement from the next generation of patriots,” Legris said.
About 500 people attended Hill’s program Friday night, which was delivered in a question-and-answer format.
Hill entered the Secret Service during the Eisenhower administration. When Kennedy was elected president, Hill said, he hoped he would be assigned to protect the president because he wanted to be “where the action was.”
But he was assigned, instead, to guard Mrs. Kennedy. That news, he said, “was like someone kicked me in the gut,” because he recalled the Eisenhower years whereMamie Eisenhower attended lots of fashion shows and tea parties.
To make matters worse, Mrs. Kennedy was eight months’ pregnant when the president took office. Hill recalled pacing the floor of the hospital like an expectant father while Mrs. Kennedy was in labor and was one of the first people to see the baby, John Kennedy Jr.
After the birth, though, he learned that Mrs. Kennedy did not want to hang around Washington, D.C. She traveled often during her years in the White House, and he was at her side on trips to France, Italy, Greece, India, Pakistan, Ireland, Costa Rica, Mexico and Germany.
He drew laughs from the audience while relating the time a dignitary in Pakistan gave Mrs. Kennedy, who loved to ride, a beautiful horse. As she beamed with joy at the gift, Hill said, his thoughts were, “How am I going to get this damn horse back to Washington?”
While she was pregnant during her husband’s first presidential campaign, Hill said, she was determined to help her husband any way she could. In November 1963, she decided to accompany him on his important trip to Texas. Hill explained that to win the South, Kennedy needed to make good showings in Florida and Texas.
The itinerary was to go to Houston and San Antonio on Nov. 21 and then on to Fort Worth, Dallas and Austin the next day, Nov. 22.
On the 22nd, the Kennedys attended a breakfast in Fort Worth, then flew, rather than drove, to Dallas. They flew, which took longer, Hill said, because they needed a campaign photo taken of them walking down the steps of Air Force One.
Hill recalled that the crowd was dense in downtown Dallas, and it was a tight fit for the motorcade to get through the throng that spilled into the street as it made its way to the Trade Mart for a luncheon. Approaching Dealey Plaza, the motorcade had to make two awkward turns because of road work - a rightturn onto Houston Street and then a left onto Elm Street at the Texas School Book Depository.
The sharp turn onto Elm required the large, heavy Lincoln limousine to slow down, Hill said. As it motored along Elm, he said, he was the front agent standing on the running board in the car just behind the president’s limousine.
He was on the left, Mrs. Kennedy’s side, and scanning the crowd to his left when the first shot sounded. He said that because he was looking to his left, he turned to look at the president while the other agents had been looking straight ahead and turned to the right toward the sound of the shot.
That way, he said, he was the only one looking at the president when the first shot hit him. He saw Kennedy put his hands to his throat. He leaped from the running board and began running to the president’s car. He began to climb on the back of the car when the second shot hit the president in the head. Mrs. Kennedy crawled onto the trunk lid to gather parts of her husband’s skull and brains. As he pushed her back into her seat, the president slumped into her lap, Hill said. The whole scene took six seconds, he said.
Hill took the position just behind the back seat, sheltering the president and Mrs. Kennedy, expecting more gunshots to follow as the limousine driver began to speed up. The Lincoln was going 80 mph, so fast that Hill’s sunglasses were blown from hisface.
At Parkland Hospital, Hill said, Secret Service agents carried from the car John Connally, the unconscious Texas governor who also was shot and wounded, but Mrs. Kennedy would not let go of her husband. Realizing that she did not want people to see her husband’s horrible head wound, he said, he removed his jacket and placed it over the president’s head. Mrs. Kennedy immediately let go of her husband, and Kennedy was lifted from the car.
Later, Hill said, he telephoned the White House to inform officials of the shooting. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the president’s brother, got on the line and asked how bad it was. Hill said he didn’t want to tell Robert Kennedy that his brother was dead, so he told him, “It’s asbad as it can get.”
He told his rapt Fort Smith audience about the frantic and sad trip back to Washington and the four days that he called “the end of the age of innocence.”
Hill went on to serve three more presidents - Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. He said that when he kept busy, he felt all right. But toward the end of his career, which ended in 1975, he got a desk job and depression set in.
For the five years after his retirement, he said, he was deeply depressed and lived on alcohol and cigarettes. Finally, a doctor told him that he had to do something about the depression or he would die.
Hill began to talk about the trauma he endured, and then wrote about it. He called his book about his experiences with the Kennedys cathartic.
“So, now, I’m over it,” he said ending the program.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 15 on 12/09/2012