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Since its first presentation nearly 11 years ago, the Herald-Star Speaker Series has brought some powerful presentations into our area.
That's why it's not unusual to see the names of those who have appeared as part of the series continue to turn up in news stories.
A couple of those have come to mind during the past few weeks, and they involved the first two speakers in the series, Clint Hill and Tony Mendez.
Hill, the former Secret Service agent who was in charge of first lady Jacqueline Kennedy's protection detail, was the inaugural speaker in the series. He and co-author Lisa McCubbin took the stage inside the Steubenville High School auditorium on Nov. 14, 2012, to discuss the book they had recently released -- "Mrs. Kennedy and Me" -- and to reflect on the events of Nov. 22, 1963, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
It was a dynamic presentation that could be told only by someone who actually lived through the event. And few people were closer to the late president or his wife that day as their motorcade wound through downtown Dallas toward Dealey Plaza. Hill is the agent who is draped across the back of the presidential limousine in the famous photograph that was taken just moments after Kennedy had been mortally wounded.
Hill's name popped up in stories around the country earlier this month when a fellow agent who was assigned to the first lady detail -- Paul Landis -- started to promote the book he has written about the assassination.
In "The Final Witness: A Kennedy Secret Service Agent Breaks His Silence After 60 Years," Landis writes that he found a bullet that was largely undamaged in the car and placed it on Kennedy's gurney in the hospital. It's a story that raises more questions about "The Magic Bullet Theory" shared in the Warren Report on the assassination, which considered that the bullet had been found on the gurney of then-Texas Gov. John Connally.
Connally was a Democrat at the time -- he became a Republican in 1973 -- and was riding in the car with the Kennedys and suffered serious injuries during the shooting.
Throw in the new information shared by Landis and then consider that he never was interviewed by the Warren Commission, and you have another interesting tidbit and more fodder for the long list of conspiracy theories that continue to grow around the assassination, which, officially, was accomplished by Lee Harvey Oswald.
If, that is, the Landis account about the bullet is accurate, and you can count Hill among the skeptics.
"Because, if you check all of the evidence, all of the statements, all of the things that happened, they don't add up," Hill told NBC News. "It doesn't make sense to me, that he tried to put it on the president's gurney."
Landis, who is 88 and lives in the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights, disagrees with his former colleague.
"I really don't know -- that's Clint's theory, that's his thoughts," Landis told NBC. "We never really talked to each other after the assassination about the events. We worked together for the next seven months. I really can't answer what his thinking is or why."
If nothing else, all of the new speculation will certainly help sell copies of "The Final Witness," which is expected to be released on Oct . 10.
Mendez, meanwhile, a former CIA agent, delivered another exciting first-person account on the same stage just about five months later -- April 9, 2013.
That's when he and his wife, Jonna, herself a former agent, provided another view of an incredible event that only an insider can offer.
The subject was much different -- it was how Mendez put together the rescue from Iran of the six American diplomats who had escaped when the U.S. embassy in Tehran was overrun in November 1979.
It was a mission the CIA's master of disguise had detailed in the book he co-wrote with Matt Baglio, "Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled off the Most Audacious Rescue in History." That story was dramatized in the 2012 film "Argo," in which Mendez was portrayed by Ben Afflack.
Mendez, who died on Jan. 19, 2019, at the age of 78, orchestrated an operation that required the creation of a fake scenario in which the Americans would receive fake Canadian documentation and take on the personas of a crew that was working on a science fiction movie -- "Argo," which carried the tagline of "A cosmic conflagration." That cover allowed the "house guests," as they were called, to safely fly out of Tehran on a commercial airliner.
One of the key guys to pulling the operation off was only identified by Mendez as "Julio."
No one knew for sure who he was until a few weeks ago, when longtime agent Ed Johnson allowed his identity to become known.
Johnson, who is finally talking about the Canadian Caper, offered details in an episode of "The Langley Files," the CIA's own podcast.
Among the details he offered were a couple of, well, let's call them coincidences, that he, the diplomats and Mendez came upon on Jan. 27, 1980, as they walked through security at the airport and boarded a Swiss Air airliner.
Among them: The plane had been christened with the name Aargau, which is a region in Switzerland. Second, Johnson said he picked up a copy of the Herald Tribune and began to work the crossword puzzle. One of the clues, he said, was "Jason's companions." The answer, of course, was the Argonauts.
Johnson and the hosts of the podcast reassured each other this wasn't a case of CIA officers planting clues -- it was nothing more than an incredible coincidence.
Hill, who is now 91, and McCubbin, who became his wife on Dec. 4, 2021, have written several books together, including "Five Presidents: My Extraordinary Journey with Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford;" "Five Days in November" and "My Travels with Mrs. Kennedy." They still speak and are interviewed frequently.
Their stories, like those shared by all of our speakers, have allowed us to look at world events from a different perspective, and continue to offer insights into history.
(Gallabrese, a resident of Steubenville, is executive editor of the Herald-Star and The Weirton Daily Times)