Secret Service Agent Jerry Blaine - We carried terrible guilt about that day

Jerry Blaine: I had interacted with him but it was Vice President -- when you have a change of administration like that, you have, altogether, a new personality, and the presidents don't change but the agents do. And naturally, there was a difference between President Johnson and President Kennedy. And the agents that served President Kennedy, we just sort of have to swallow our day and go on and continue working, and we continued to work, and we still didn't get any extra resources so our workload increased and we didn't have people to trauma council with us anything else. We just had to carry on. It was a very traumatic event for everybody. And we never talked about the assassination until we had a reunion in 2010, and we've decided it was time to talk and that discussion took place -- it was filmed at a documentary called The Kennedy Detail taken from the book, and the questions were taken from the book. It was the first time we were able to resolve, as a group, what happened. We carried terrible guilt about that because there were not many professions where you can be 100% failure and we all felt that we were 100% failure even though we only had five people with the president at any one time, and about all we could do was to cover him and evacuate him. It's a lot different today; we have 34 agents on the detail and I would say the White House probably has about 300 plus agents on the detail. So, you can kind of see the difference between our day and today. The rest of us, we felt sorry for the agents, and we respected the trauma that they went through but they had never had an opportunity to talk about it and there are still a couple of agents who cannot talk about it. But for agents like Clint Hill and Paul Landis and the agents that were there and observed and witnessed it, it was a very tough journey out. And yes, today, they've resolved the thing. They've looked at every issue and found out there was nothing they could have done to save President Kennedy. And that was just tragic because we admired the family very much and it was just like losing a member of your family.