The crisp, short days and the multicolored leaves fluttering down mark a time of year that for me always means two things, one happy, one sad.

The happy one is our family’s annual Thanksgiving dinner, for 19 this year. The sad one, the anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, made more melancholy this year by the passing of two of the last living links to that day.

As a young Associated Press reporter, I helped write about some of that weekend’s shocking events. But I really learned what it was like from Clint Hill, the valiant Secret Service agent who threw himself over Jackie Kennedy when Lee Harvey Oswald fired those fatal shots in Dallas, and Sid Davis, the last living reporter at Lyndon B. Johnson’s swearing-in on Air Force One.

Hill, who took decades to come to terms with t

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