Exclusive: Former Secret Service Agent Clint Hill Reveals Why JFK Didn't Want Jackie Kennedy Photographed in a Bikini
JFK did not want Jackie photographed in a bikini during their 1962 trip to Italy. To keep the press at bay, Secret Service agency Clint Hill allowed photographers access to the First Lady in a tasteful one-piece. (Photo: Bettmann Contributor)
He’s the Secret Service agent who became part of history on November 22, 1963, when he threw his body over President Kennedy and the first lady, hoping to spare their lives with his own.
While Clint Hill’s heroic actions were memorialized in the Zapruder film of the assassination, he was haunted by the President’s death for many years. “It was a failure on our part as agents and that ate at me for the rest of my life,” he says. “It still does.”
Forever associated with the Kennedys, Hill also had the extraordinary responsibility of serving four other presidents over a 17 year career. In his new memoir, Five Presidents, he shares a rare private glimpse of the men who occupied the Oval Office: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford.
JFK and Jackie Kennedy (Photo: Hy Peskin/Getty)
For all of JFK’s nonchalant charm, Hill reveals he was greatly concerned about Jackie’s public image and became surprisingly controlling in how she’d be photographed on a trip to Italy in 1962.
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“Before we went, he made sure I understood that he didn’t want any nightclub scenes, no scenes with glasses or bottles of wine on the table, and no bikini shots,” says Hill. "The only photos of Mrs. Kennedy in a bathing suit, other than long distance lens sometimes, were arranged by myself with the press. They said they’d back off if we could arrange for them to get a good photograph.”
Hill remembers how Dwight D. Eisenhower arrived at the Oval Office at 8 every morning, loved Westerns, and was a bit obsessed with golf.
“Golf was his main activity outside of work,” he says. “He tried to do it three times a week, more if possible, and golf takes about three hours so when we got back in the afternoon, the day would be pretty much shot.”
He recalls Lyndon B. Johnson’s unpredictability and how one Christmas Eve, when Air Force One made a pit stop for fuel in the Azores, LBJ shopped for Christmas gifts at the store on the Air Force base, wearing a raincoat over his pajamas at 1:30 in the morning.
Five Presidents by former Secret Service agent Clint Hill is out now. (Photo: Simon and Schuster)
Although he remains fond of Gerald Ford, who was casual and “down to earth,” Hill was troubled by Richard Nixon, whom he found secretive and reclusive. Before Ford could move into the White House following Nixon’s resignation, he stayed in his modest home in Alexandria, Virginia.
“For the first 10 days he was actually president, he had the same procedure he had when he was vice president,” says Hill. “He’d go out the front door in his pajamas and pick up the paper, go back in the house and have some coffee.”
Looking back, Hill, who also wrote Mrs. Kennedy and Me and Five Days in November about his time with the Kennedys, marvels at the proximity he had to some of the most powerful men in history.
“One thing they all have in common is a large ego,” he says. “Though Eisenhower had to be persuaded [to run] and Ford was thrust into the position after Nixon’s resignation. And they were all completely different. There was no similarity whatsoever.”
For more on Clint Hill and the five presidents he served, pick up a copy of this week’s PEOPLE.