Title: Five Days in
November
Author: Clint Hill
with Lisa McCubbin
Genre: Memoir
973.922092
Read by: Jeremy Bobb
Publisher/Date: Simon and Schuster Audio/2013
Dates listened to: 7/8/17 – 7/10/17
CDs/Hours: 3/3.75
When Secret Service Agent Clint Hill published his memoir it
had been fifty years since the assassination of John F. Kennedy, our country’s
35th president. Hill,
personal agent for Jacqueline Kennedy, witnessed the shooting from the vehicle
following the presidential limousine. He
made a valiant effort to protect the President and Mrs. Kennedy but two of the
three shots took our president’s life that fateful day.
A story that has taken Agent Hill fifty years to tell takes
us through those five days in November and we watch the nearly three year-old
John Kennedy Jr.’s pleas to come to Texas with his parents. We witness the rapturous crowds of mixed ages
and races that greeted the Kennedys at every stop in Texas. We stand beside a shaken Lyndon Johnson as he
is quickly sworn in as the next president.
We experience the first lady’s courage when she insists on walking in
her husband’s funeral procession through the streets of Washington, D. C. If she
could bear it, then we could, too. She
was a role model for the rest of us so that we, too, may go on with our lives.
I still choke up at the memory of that day. I was a senior in high school, sitting in Mr.
Magden’s History class. I later read the
Warren Commission’s report of the events of the day and now I got to re-live it
again, this time with more details that showed how the first family lived.
Hill tells us poignantly, “President John F. Kennedy
understood that the power of America lies not in its politics, whether you are
red or blue, but in its resilience and unified vision of freedom and liberty. One thing I know for sure is that he would
not have wanted his legacy fifty years later to be a debate about the details
of his death. Rather he would want
people to focus on the values and ideals on which he so passionately believed
so that for all Americans our best days lie ahead.”
“A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives
on.” President John F. Kennedy
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