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Just offering:
From Dugald McConnell and Brian Todd, CNN
November 22, 2010 2:33 a.m. EST
Just days before the assassination, Blaine writes, Kennedy chafed at the close proximity of his protective detail. During a motorcade in Tampa, Florida, he asked them not to ride on his limousine.
"Have the Ivy League charlatans drop back to the follow-up car," the president told one of the agents. "We've got an election coming up. The whole point is for me to be accessible to the people."
But Hill and Blaine dismiss the notion that Kennedy's instructions in Tampa jeopardized his security in Dallas. Photos of the motorcade show, regardless of what the president said, Hill was riding on the back of the car during an earlier part of the route.
By the time the motorcade reached the stretch of roadway where the assassination occurred, however, agents could no longer ride on the fenders, Blaine says.
"We were going into a freeway, and that's where you take the speeds up to 60 and 70 miles an hour. So we would not have had any agents there anyway," he said.
Some of the agents see the book as a chance to counter some of the conspiracy theorists who have never accepted that it was Lee Harvey Oswald who shot the president, and that he acted alone.
"There's no question in my mind he was the assassin," Hill says. "I was there. I know what happened."
Blaine reveals for the first time that on the very same day that Kennedy was killed, newly sworn in President Lyndon Johnson was almost shot as well -- accidentally. Just hours after Johnson was sworn in aboard Air Force One, Blaine was guarding his home, after going 40 hours without sleep.
"It was about 2:15 in the morning at The Elms, which was Johnson's residence before he became president. I heard all of a sudden a person approaching," Blaine says. He raised his gun and put his finger on the trigger -- only to see Johnson round the corner.
"He turned white, he turned around and walked in, and that was the last that was ever said of it," Blaine says
