THE SECRET SERVICE AGENT HAUNTED BY JFK'S SHOOTING

Clint Hill flung himself on to the president's limousine in a desperate attempt to block any further bullets on that fateful day in Dallas 60 years ago, and spent decades wrestling with lingering feelings of guilt and shame

- David Smith

I THAS BECOME A CLICHE THAT EVERYONE OF A CERTAIN AGE COULD TELL YOU where they were when they heard President John F Kennedy was dead. Clint Hill spent decades trying to forget.

The Secret Service agent was in the Dallas motorcade as a member of the First Lady's detail when Kennedy was assassinated on 22 November 1963. Hill leaped on to the back of the presidential limousine to use his body to shield the Kennedys from any additional shots.

For a long time he remained silent, stalked by guilt and gnawed by doubts that he could have done more to save the president. He drank himself into depression before turning his life around. In recent years he has published memoirs, taken part in public forums and, at 91, is the most prominent living link to the day that, in his telling, America lost its innocence.

But 60 years on, Hill fears that the last surviving witnesses will take the truth of the assassination to their graves. In an age of division, disinformation and internet fuelled movements such as QAnon, conspiracy theories about who killed Kennedy and why are thriving as never before.

"It concerns me a great deal," says Hill, who addresses the issue in the afterword of a new edition of his book, Five Days in November, "because there aren't many of us left - very, very few - and eventually, the way things have been going, those conspiracy theories are going to win out and take over, and then you won't have any factual information about what happened on November 22nd, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, and that's a shame.

"It should be documented, it should be factual, not conspiratorial, and that's why I wrote the book because I wanted to make sure everybody who wants to has an opportunity to get the facts about November 22nd, 1963, and not be just part of a conspiratorial theoretical group."