'Mrs. Kennedy and Me': A Secret Service agent shares his memories

Secret Service agent Clint Hill shares 8 memories of his time with Jacqueline Kennedy in his new book, 'Mrs. Kennedy and Me.'

7. Onassis leaves agents on shore

Aristotle Onassis's yacht the Christina By George Onassis

At one point, Jacqueline Kennedy went on a cruise on Onassis's yacht with several other public figures. Hill had gone onshore to arrange security and was supposed to get picked up by the yacht again, but when the boat was heading towards him, steered by Onassis, it suddenly turned abruptly and started going quickly down the coast. Hill got into a car with another staff member and drove quickly along the water, following the boat, until they reached a dock and Onassis stopped the boat. "Onassis pulled the boat to the dock... and glared at me," Hill wrote. "We had outsmarted him and he did not like it one bit."

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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