Five Presidents: My Extraordinary Journey With Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford

by Hill, Clint

  “I don’t want to see photos of her at luncheons with eight different wines in full view or jet-set types lolling around in bikinis,” he told me. “Do what you can to remind her to be aware of that. And above all, no nightclub pictures.”

  I wrote in detail about the three weeks we spent in Ravello, Italy, in Mrs. Kennedy and Me, and although there were some run-ins with the infamous Italian paparazzi and a surreptitious visit to a nightclub in Positano—oh, and yes that crazy night in Capri with Princess Irene Galitzine—we managed to avoid any nightclub pictures in the press.

  Ever since I received the Top Secret telegrams in Pakistan that put me in charge of the First Lady’s Detail, I had been the sole agent protecting Mrs. Kennedy. Although I received the temporary assistance of Agent Paul Rundle when needed, I realized that I desperately needed someone to work with me full-time. During the trip to Italy, I observed how well Paul Landis, one of the agents on the Children’s Detail, interacted with Mrs. Kennedy and Caroline, and I asked him to be my assistant. He readily accepted, and then we brought in another young agent from Florida named Tommy Wells to fill the open spot on John and Caroline’s protective detail. The transition took place at the beginning of October 1962—two weeks before President Kennedy would face his biggest challenge yet.

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  The Cuban Missile Crisis

  The morning of October 16, 1962, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy showed up at the White House and was taken upstairs to meet with President Kennedy in his bedroom. This was highly unusual.

  It wasn’t until later that I learned the reason for Bundy’s early morning visit: a U-2 spy plane had taken aerial photographs of Cuban military bases, which showed nuclear missiles installed on launchpads, and there was evidence the intermediate-range missiles were being brought to Cuba on Soviet ships. Premier Khrushchev had just turned up the heat in the Cold War, ninety miles from the coast of Florida, and the ramifications were terrifying.

  Upon learning of the missile sites, President Kennedy immediately organized a high-level, confidential group of advisors that consisted of the regular National Security Council members as well as several other men whom he believed could add valuable insight into the decision-making process—including his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Designated the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, the group came to be known simply as “ExComm.” Not wanting to incite fear in the American public, nor let the Soviets know we were aware of the missiles in Cuba, it was decided that the president should maintain his schedule as if everything were normal. He would continue to make public appearances, travel, and attend social functions, while the ExComm met in the Cabinet Room of the White House. The president would attend the meetings and be briefed in between his previously scheduled events.

  The Secret Service had well-established plans to protect the president, his family, and key members of the government in the event of an emergency or a major catastrophe. Whether we would go to the bomb shelter on site at the White House or relocate to an undisclosed site outside the metropolitan area would be determined by the threat and our location at the time.

  During the next few days the situation was very tense. The president continued to try to maintain his previously scheduled trips and appointments to make everything appear normal, while quietly popping into and out of the Cabinet Room where the ExComm was secretly meeting.

  On Saturday, October 20, I was in Middleburg with Mrs. Kennedy and the children when Mrs. Kennedy came to me and said, “Mr. Hill, the president just called and he is on his way back from Chicago. He wants the children and me to return to the White House. Will you arrange for a helicopter?”

  Additional photos and analysis had concluded that the Soviets were readying fighter jets and bombers and assembling cruise missile launchers. Additionally, there was evidence that SS-5 missiles were being assembled, which were capable of reaching anywhere in the continental United States. President Kennedy decided it was time to alert the American public that we were facing a chilling crisis, and he had to make a final decision on military options.

  I was at the White House when, on the evening of Monday, October 22, President Kennedy addressed the nation from the Oval Office and somberly laid out the indisputable evidence that had been gathered over the past six days. In the seventeen-minute address, he gave Khrushchev an ultimatum to “halt and eliminate this clandestine, reckless, and provocative threat to world peace and to stable relations between our two nations,” or the United States would, justifiably, take military action.

  Looking directly into the cameras, the president stated, “I have directed the Armed Forces to prepare for any eventualities; and I trust that in the interest of both the Cuban people and the Soviet technicians at the sites, the hazards to all concerned in continuing this threat will be recognized.”

  He outlined the immediate steps the United States was taking, including a strict “quarantine”—essentially a blockade—on all ships containing cargoes of offensive weapons, as well as a request for an emergency meeting of the Security Council of the United Nations.

  In closing, he said, “My fellow citizens, let no one doubt that this is a difficult and dangerous effort on which we have set out . . . but the greatest danger of all would be to do nothing. The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards, as all paths are—but it is the one most consistent with our character and courage as a nation and our commitments around the world. The cost of freedom is always high—and Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose is the path of surrender or submission.

  “Our goal is not the victory of might but the vindication of right—not peace at the expense of freedom but both peace and freedom, here in this hemisphere and, we hope, around the world. God willing, that goal will be achieved.”

  THE EXCOMM WAS meeting daily, sometimes twice a day, and the president was in and out of the Situation Room for immediate updates. At the same time, the Secret Service was on heightened alert for whatever might happen. We were braced for an evacuation of key personnel by helicopter and knew exactly who would go in which helicopters. We all knew that in the event a nuclear attack was imminent, there would be people scrambling to get aboard the helicopters. If people who were not authorized tried to get on, as an absolute last resort, we would have no choice but to shoot them. It was a sickening thought, but this was the reality of the situation we faced.

  On the following Friday, October 26, word came that Khrushchev had agreed to keep his ships out of the quarantine zone for forty-eight hours. That morning, Mrs. Kennedy decided to take Caroline and John to Glen Ora, and advised me that the president would be joining them the following day.

  As it turned out, the president did not come to Glen Ora on Saturday, and I was about as tense as I’d ever been. All of the agents were on high alert, fully expecting that at any moment the word would come for us to evacuate immediately. You didn’t want to think about what might happen, but you had to go over every possible scenario in your mind to be prepared. It was excruciating. The worst part for all the agents was that we could not discuss the situation with our own families, and if something happened—if there were a nuclear attack—we would go with the president and his family to an underground facility, and our families would most likely perish. It was truly unthinkable.

  On Sunday morning, President Kennedy arrived in Glen Ora, and when I saw him step out of the helicopter smiling broadly, I knew everything was going to be all right. Khrushchev had agreed to dismantle the missiles in Cuba, and the Russian ships carrying nuclear materials had turned around. President Kennedy had redeemed himself after the Bay of Pigs disaster and was in high spirits. But most important, he had won Khrushchev’s respect, and the two of them had averted nuclear war.

  ONE IMPORTANT PIECE of the Cuban Missile Crisis was the quiet negotiations for the release of the Bay of Pigs prisoners. President Kennedy had vowed that the United States would not invade the island of Cuba, an
d in return Fidel Castro had agreed to release the 1,113 men who had been held captive in Cuba since the failed invasion twenty months earlier, for the ransom of $53 million in food and medical supplies.

  On December 29, 1962, we flew to the Orange Bowl in Miami so that President and Mrs. Kennedy could publicly honor all the Bay of Pigs survivors who had just been freed. Forty thousand people filled the Orange Bowl stadium to welcome home the brave freedom fighters, all of whom were dressed in their khaki uniforms—many of them missing arms and/or legs. The ceremony was fraught with emotion as President Kennedy was presented with the brigade’s war-torn flag, which had flown during the three-day battle at the Bay of Pigs.

  As he graciously accepted the flag, President Kennedy stepped up to the microphone and boldly proclaimed, “I can assure you that this flag will be returned to this brigade in a free Havana.”

  The stadium erupted into a thunderous roar.

  Then Mrs. Kennedy stepped to the microphone and spoke, without notes, in fluent Spanish. There was barely a dry eye in the arena as she concluded her brief remarks, and again the audience roared with applause. At the conclusion of the program, President and Mrs. Kennedy got into a white convertible, and as the car slowly drove out of the stadium, they stood and waved to the exuberant crowd. Finally, the president could put the failed invasion behind him and move forward with a renewed sense of purpose as he entered the third year of his presidency.

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  1963: Great Expectations

  Being physically fit was something that was important to President Kennedy, and shortly after he was elected he published an article in Sports Illustrated titled “The Soft American,” in which he noted how the television set and the use of cars to travel everywhere, along with a myriad of other modern conveniences, had resulted in a generation of people who were not used to strenuous physical activity. He realized there would be many disadvantages to the country if our population became obese.

  In January 1963, after coming upon a 1908 executive order in which President Theodore Roosevelt set forth rules for Marine officers to be able to complete a fifty-mile hike in less than twenty hours, President Kennedy sent a memo to Marine Corps Commandant David Shoup suggesting that a similar fifty-mile challenge would be a good test for present-day officers. When President Kennedy announced that he would put his White House staff to the fifty-mile test as well, it kick-started a national fitness campaign that eventually developed into the President’s Council on Physical Fitness.

  In late February 1963, we were in Palm Beach for the weekend. I had returned to my room at Woody’s Motel on the evening of Friday, February 22, when Mrs. Kennedy called me with a special request.

  She informed me that the president’s brother-in-law, Prince Stash Radziwill, and Chuck Spalding were taking on the challenge of the fifty-mile hike by walking on the newly completed Sunshine Parkway—a north-south highway running from Miami to Fort Pierce along the east side of Florida that was not yet fully operational. Because the president and Mrs. Kennedy would be going out to visit the two men periodically, she surmised, there would have to be an agent advancing the situation.

  “The president and I would like you to be the one to go with them,” she said. “They’re starting tonight at midnight.”

  It was one of those things that, at the time, I had no idea what I was getting into, but when the first lady made a request on behalf of the president, it wasn’t in my nature to question it. So I got dressed in some casual clothes, put on the only shoes I had with me—my Florsheim dress shoes—and contacted the Army sergeant who was assigned to me to drive Mrs. Kennedy. I told him I needed him, the station wagon—which was fitted with radio equipment so I could stay in touch with the Palm Beach base and the Secret Service command post—and a big cooler with ice.

  It turned out that Prince Radziwill and Chuck Spalding had been practicing for this hike for months, and a wager of $1,000 was involved. The president had bet his buddies that they were not in good enough shape to do what Americans were doing all across the country. It was quite an adventure, which I detailed in Mrs. Kennedy and Me, and fortunately, professional photographer Mark Shaw, who had been with Life magazine, came along to photograph the hike for posterity. We finished the hike in about twenty hours, and a few weeks later, Mark gave each of us a leather-bound photo album filled with photos from “That Palm Beach 50.”

  One of my favorites is a photo taken when President Kennedy paid us a visit just as Chuck and Stash had decided to lie down for a short break, and the president was ribbing me for allowing them to rest.

  Another special memory is when we returned to Palm Beach and President Kennedy invited me to join them for a celebratory drink of champagne, and presented me with a medallion—handmade out of purple construction paper attached to a ribbon of yellow crepe paper.

  “For Dazzle. February 23, 1963. The Order of the Pace Maker, He whom the Secret Service will follow into the Battle of the Sunshine Highway. Signed John F. Kennedy.”

  I still have that simple paper medal. It is one of my most treasured possessions.

  SHORTLY BEFORE THE fifty-mile-hike adventure, Mrs. Kennedy had confided in me that she was pregnant. She wanted to keep it private for as long as possible, but finally, on April 15, after celebrating Easter in Palm Beach, a public announcement was made that the president and his wife were expecting their third child, due in late August. This would be only the second baby born to a sitting U.S. president—the last time was in 1893, when Grover Cleveland’s wife had a baby girl—and the public’s excitement was enormous. Because Mrs. Kennedy had previously had two miscarriages and had delivered a stillborn baby, she informed me that she wouldn’t be accompanying the president on any more trips until the baby was born, and would be curtailing her social and athletic activities.

  Meanwhile, President Kennedy was dealing with a number of issues that all seemed to be coming to a head at the same time. Communist forces in Laos and Vietnam were gaining ground, while Haiti’s dictator president François Duvalier had declared martial law and was threatening to overthrow the neighboring Dominican Republic. President Kennedy was committed to helping those nations defend themselves from the spread of Communism.

  In our own country, civil rights leaders were growing impatient with President Kennedy’s slow response to their movement and were taking matters into their own hands by organizing protests against segregation in the South. Nowhere was the tension greater than in Birmingham, Alabama, where Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had organized a series of marches. The entire nation was horrified when television film crews captured images of firefighters using fire hoses to blast the peaceful protestors—most of whom were teenagers—and send them into lines of police with German shepherd attack dogs. President Kennedy sent U.S. Army units trained in riot control to the area, which infuriated Alabama’s segregationist governor, George Wallace, who accused the president of overstepping his authority.

  In the midst of the turmoil throughout the world, there was one thing that had captivated the attention of all Americans—something President Kennedy had strived to make a priority—and that was the race to space. When the Soviets launched the satellite Sputnik in 1957, it was seen as a major victory in the Cold War, to which President Eisenhower responded by creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the development of Project Mercury. Shortly after President Kennedy took office, he convinced Congress to dramatically increase funding to NASA, with the intention that “this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.” Many had scoffed at the notion that this was achievable, but less than a year later, on February 20, 1962, John Glenn Jr. became the first American to orbit earth. Within the following year, astronauts Scott Carpenter and Walter Schirra Jr. had also orbited the earth, and on May 16, 1963, astronaut Gordon Cooper splashed into the Pacific Ocean, having just orbited our planet more times than any human
being yet. It was a shining moment amid the hatred and violence that seemed to be everywhere you turned, and five days later Major Cooper was honored with a parade down Pennsylvania Avenue and a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden. On the portico, in the back of the crowd, Paul Landis and I stood close to Mrs. Kennedy, who was watching the ceremony with two-year-old John in her arms, trying to avoid the attention of the press.

  Speaking off-the-cuff, President Kennedy paid tribute to the distinguished group of astronauts who had participated in Project Mercury, noting that they had, “in this rather settled society, demonstrated that there are great frontiers still to be crossed, and in flying through space have carried with them the wishes, the prayers, the hopes, and the pride of 180 million of their fellow countrymen.”

  His remarks were brief but sincere, and at the last moment he broke into a smile, adding, “You have given the United States a great day, and a great lift!” His vision for putting a man on the moon was moving forward, and with all the turmoil in the world, this was indeed a welcome positive accomplishment.

  MAY 29, 1963, was President Kennedy’s forty-sixth birthday—and it is one of those days that has remained vivid in my memory. At the end of the workday, at around 5:45, President Kennedy walked down to the Navy Mess, where a small group of his staff and Mrs. Kennedy were waiting with a cake. When the president walked in, we yelled, “Surprise!” and as soon as somebody handed him a glass of champagne, we all started singing “Happy Birthday.”