Clint Hill - Mrs. Kennedy and Me - An Intimate Memoir

“Mrs. Kennedy’s sister, Princess Radziwill, will accompany her on the trip,” Behn said, “and the tentative schedule I’ve been given has them traveling the entire month of March: four days in Rome, seventeen days in India, five days in Pakistan, and three days in London. But you know as well as I do, that schedule will change.”

I laughed. “Jerry, with Mrs. Kennedy nothing is ever carved in stone.”

He smiled. “Yes, I’m well aware that she prefers things to be—shall we say—unstructured?”

“Yes, you could say that,” I said, with a smile.

“But listen, Clint, whatever resources you need, just let me know,” Behn said. “I know it’s not going to be easy.”

It was an ambitious itinerary—and the first time an American first lady had ever visited India or Pakistan. In both countries, Mrs. Kennedy would visit a number of different cities, and each one had to be advanced. There was no way Agent Jeffries and I could adequately protect Mrs. Kennedy on our own, so I selected a team of agents from the President’s Detail and other field offices, choosing men with whom I’d worked before on trips like this, and on whom I knew I could depend.

Based on my past experience in that part of the world, I knew there was a good chance some of us were going to get sick, so I assigned two-agent teams at each location to do the advances. The itinerary was so complex that the teams of agents would need to leapfrog from one city to another, without a break. Advancing Mrs. Kennedy’s trip to India would be the most challenging assignment of my career thus far.

So it was that on February 16, 1962, I and fourteen other Secret Service agents boarded a Pan Am flight at New York City’s Idlewild Airport headed to New Delhi. It would take us nearly two days to get there, with stops in London, Frankfurt, Munich, Istanbul, Beirut, and Tehran.

For the guys who hadn’t been on Eisenhower’s India trip, New Delhi was an eye-opening experience. The U.S. Embassy security officer met us at the airport with a bunch of cars and drivers to take us to our hotel. As we drove through the streets of New Delhi, I watched the expressions on the faces of my colleagues as they saw what we were going to be dealing with.

Sharing the road with trucks and cars were horse-drawn carts, stray cows, pigs, goats, rickshaws, tractors, and every so often, a camel strutting along, all seemingly oblivious to the traffic around them. Darting in and out of this chaos, were people on bicycles. Everywhere you looked there were bicycles. And there wasn’t just one person to a bicycle. More often than not, there would be two, three, or even four people pressed together, balancing with their legs dangling as the driver pedaled with all his might to propel the bike with the extra weight.

Along the side of the road, vendors with street carts were selling fruits, vegetables, clothing, pots and pans, fabrics, tires, and sandals. People were cooking over open fires, as small, naked children with protruding bellies wandered amid stray animals and mounds of garbage. The dust and dirt created smog that made your eyes tear, while burning cow patties and elephant dung gave off an almost unbearable stench. Dotted throughout this slumlike environment were bright splashes of turquoise and pink and yellow as women in flowing saris and veils carried huge baskets of grass or clay pots of water on their heads. It was like we were in the middle of a traveling circus.

Everywhere I looked, I thought of what Mrs. Kennedy would think, how she would react, and most important, what we were going to have to do to protect her in this unsanitary and unpredictable environment. She was scheduled to arrive on March 1, eleven days later, and we still didn’t have the final itinerary. Pakistan had its own set of problems, and I was going to have to fly to Karachi as soon as we got the India portion squared away.

I pulled out a notepad and jotted down thoughts as they came to me: purified water, imported fruits, soap, medical supplies, gloves. Mrs. Kennedy wore gloves to church and often to formal banquets, but here I thought she could wear them not just for fashion, but also to keep her hands clean. She would need plenty of gloves.

I had worked with the State Department to arrange hotel rooms at the elegant Ashoka Hotel in the diplomatic section of New Delhi for the duration of our stay there. The rooms were luxurious, and due to the favorable exchange rate between the dollar and the Indian rupee, were well within our per diem, which had recently been increased to sixteen dollars per day.

Colonel Gordon Parks from the White House Communications Agency (WHCA)—we called it “Waca”—had come with us to set up a secure telephone and radio system so that we could communicate directly with the White House. It never ceased to amaze me how, even in a third-world country like India, he could pull out a stainless steel case filled with wires and electronics, piece it all together, and voilà !—we had a phone line to the White House. While this was normal procedure when the president traveled, it was highly unusual for a first lady’s solo trip. But there was a specific reason WHCA came along.

Shortly before I left on the trip, President Kennedy had called me into his office.

“Clint,” he said—he always called me Clint—“I want you to stay in touch with Jerry Behn’s office and Tish, and make sure any changes Ken Galbraith wants, you clear with us before they’re put on the schedule. He’s trying to make this jaunt to India last forever, and I don’t want Mrs. Kennedy overscheduled.”

So, shortly after checking in, while Gordon was setting up the secure phone connection in a hotel room at the Ashoka, my first order of business was to meet with Ambassador Galbraith at the U.S. Embassy.

I had heard that Galbraith was extremely tall, but still, when he approached me with his lanky, six-foot, seven-inch frame, I was somewhat taken aback. He had to bend down to shake my hand, and I felt like I needed to stand on my tiptoes to look him eye to eye.

“Welcome to India, Mr. Hill,” he said with a kind smile. His voice was gravelly, and somewhat high-pitched for a man. “We are all very excited for Mrs. Kennedy’s visit.” He laughed and added, “It has been the talk of the country for three months now.”

“I can assure you, she is very much looking forward to this trip, Ambassador.”

As it turned out, when he showed me his plans for Mrs. Kennedy, nothing was the way it had been presented to me when I left Washington two days earlier. I quickly understood the problem President Kennedy had predicted. Ambassador Galbraith wanted Mrs. Kennedy to be able to see as much of the country as possible during her stay, and he had her crisscrossing from New Delhi to Calcutta to Bombay and all the way down to Bangalore and Hyderabad, up at 7:00 every morning and going nonstop until midnight.

The ambassador was so enthusiastic, I almost felt sorry for him. This was somewhat ironic since besides towering over me physically, the ambassador was also intellectually intimidating. He was a renowned economist and one of President Kennedy’s most trusted political advisors, and here I was in the middle of these negotiations. One wrong move would not only be the end of my career, but could easily turn this trip into a full-blown international disaster.

“Why don’t we plan to meet every afternoon, say around five o’clock at my residence,” Galbraith said at the end of the meeting. “That way we can brief each other and handle any problems before they arise.”

“That sounds great, Ambassador. I’ll see you tomorrow at five.”

The meeting had gone well, and I liked Ambassador Galbraith. He really had the best of intentions and wanted nothing more than to show Mrs. Kennedy the India he had come to know and love. But if he had his way, she would be trekking from one end of India to the other for six weeks. I had to get on the phone to Washington right away.