Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [284]
Merletti next requested an audience with Attorney General Janet Reno and Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder. In high-level meetings attended by a slew of Justice Department lawyers, Merletti dimmed the lights and gave a highly classified PowerPoint presentation about the dangers presented if Secret Service agents were pushed away from a president for any reason—including lack of trust. Over three thousand threats were directed at the president of the United States each year; the Secret Service had to investigate and guard against them all. Ten of the last eleven presidents had been the subjects of assassination attempts. In each case, proximity of the agents was critical.
The most powerful aspect of Merletti’s presentation, according to those in attendance, was rarely seen footage regarding the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas, and Kennedy’s trip the previous week to Tampa. In photos of the Florida trip, dated November 18, 1963, one could observe sharp images of Secret Service agents kneeling on the rear bumper of the president’s limousine, scanning the crowd and buildings, maintaining a location within an arm’s length of President Kennedy’s position in the backseat.
In the haunting film clips that Merletti now showed of President Kennedy being shot in Dallas, the Secret Service agents were missing from the car’s bumper. Only Agent Clint Hill knew all of the tragic details, and he since had gone into seclusion and did not speak publicly about that day.
Yet the story was well known within the Secret Service. Lew Merletti took a chance and reached out to Hill, who had settled in Northern Virginia, seeking Hill’s guidance on the Starr matter. Agent Hill, a handsome man with deep furrows of mental stress on his face, had retired early from the service as a result of neurological and psychological problems. The former agent did not hesitate to share his views with the director; he still remembered those events of November 1963 too vividly.
Hill technically had been assigned to protect First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, who was riding in the left rear seat of the presidential limousine. The crowds were so large that spectators were “swarming up on top of the car.” To deal with the cluster around the motorcade, the driver “ran the [limo] closer to the left-hand side of the street… to keep the people away from the president.” Agent Hill’s sixth sense was telegraphing that something was wrong. Yet just after the Tampa trip, President Kennedy had directed all Secret Service agents to stay off the running board on the rear bumper, complaining that it created the appearance to the public that there was “somebody or something between them and him.”
Disobeying the president’s orders, Agent Hill had climbed onto the left side of the bumper, scanning the crowds and buildings, and then jumped off, returning to the follow-up car. The motorcade turned left. In an instant that would forever haunt him, Hill heard a shot ring out from behind, followed by the echo of two more gunshots.
By the time Agent Hill could scramble onto the back of the limousine, Mrs. Kennedy was crawling onto the trunk in her pink suit. Even as she hoisted Hill up, the agent knew it was too late. “It was a bloody mess,” he recalled decades later, his voice cracking. “I mean—the president’s head, the third shot hit him in the head just above the right ear, kind of. Took out a piece of his skull about the size of my palm and scooped out a whole mass of brain matter. Now, that stuff was all over the car, inside the car. Blood, white brain matter, portions of bone and skull. And everybody was covered with it.” The former agent, becoming unglued as he recounted the story even forty years later, took a deep breath and continued: “What I meant by telling Lew [Merletti] about that scene … Here was the president of the United States, who we were sworn to protect. And we failed. At least those of us who were assigned that day to