A secret service agent, whose job was to protect President John F. Kennedy, may have accidentally killed the president during a freak accident that has not been disclosed until now, according to Spartacus Educational, which is a free online encyclopedia with essays and other educational material on a wide variety of historical subjects principally British.

On November 22, 1973, George Hickey, the agent, was in a car behind President Kennedy’s limousine in the president’s motorcade in Dallas when he smelled gunpowder and heard a gun retort coming from the Texas School Book Depository. 

In an attempt to protect the president, Hickey rose to his feet with his AR-15 rifle, which he later claimed he did not fire. Seconds later, the car suddenly moved forward, and Hickey fell backward, shooting Kennedy in the head. The wound was fatal. The “so-called magic” struck President Kennedy in the neck.

Hickey became a member of the Secret Service, working for the White House in Washington. He served from 1963 to 1971.

Bonar Menninger is a Kansas City reporter and a leading proponent of the theory that Kennedy’s death was accidental. “But for that reason, in my mind, it’s extremely compelling — because it’s the only theory that hews tightly to the available evidence,” asserted Menninger.

Menninger is part of a small but vocal group of theorists who hold that after Lee Harvey Oswald rattled off multiple shots at the motorcade carrying Kennedy past the Texas School Book Depository, a Secret Service agent riding in a car immediately behind the presidential limousine grabbed his Colt AR-15 high-velocity rifle to return fire. 

“What we’re saying is that we believe it was a tragic accident in the heat of that moment,” a journalist told reporters in July, days before the U.S. premiere of “JFK: The Smoking Gun,” a cable television special based on his findings and Menninger’s book.



Hickey died in 2011, but before he died, he filed a libel suit against St. Martin’s Press, the publisher of Menninger’s book, “The Mortal Error: The Shot that Killed JFK.”

In 1995, a judge ruled that the statute of limitations had run out, and Hickey’s suit was dismissed.

I also lived next door to Bill Birch, the man who was NBC News’ cameraman in Dallas at the time of the assassination. He told my wife and me that a bullet went through the windshield of President Kennedy’s car.

Birch said government officials replaced the windshield and collected all photographs of the bullet hole.

Birch never heard an explanation as to the windshield’s hurried replacement. He died several years ago.

St. Martin’s Press later settled with Hickey to preclude an appeal of the dismissal, according to Menninger. The Warren Commission concluded in 1964 that Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President Kennedy and that he acted alone.