Former JFK

 Former JFK Secret Service Protector Describes Shocking Security, Current Implications

By Andrew Kreig and Wayne Madsen

Abraham W. Bolden, Sr., the first African American to serve on the White House Secret Service details guarding a president, helped launch the new investigative podcast District Insiders with his powerful memories of President John F. Kennedy, left, including disturbing security threats foreshadowing JFK’s 1963 assassination.

Bolden, now 88 and living in Chicago (and shown at right in a file photo), described in rare detail several historically important interactions with JFK, Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) and such little-known intrigues as a planned 1963 assassination shooting targeting JFK in Chicago three weeks before a similar shooting killed in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

Bolden, loyal to JFK during a period when the president’s background and policies enraged some Americans, sought to alert his chain of command to security threats he had witnessed, including a volcanic temper tantrum by LBJ five months before JFK’s death. Authorities instead framed Bolden with perjured testimony on corruption charges in 1964 and promptly imprisoned him for six years.

President Joe Biden (shown in a file photo) last year pardoned Bolden on April 26 as one of just three to receive pardons in Biden’s first presidential clemency order.

The District Insider hosts, both investigative reporters long based in Washington, DC, recognized during the show Bolden’s remarkable courage and patriotism along with Biden’s boldness granting a pardon. Most officials and mainstream media since 1963 have ignored, downplayed or suppressed any suggestion conflicting with the FBI’s steadfast view first expressed soon after JFK’s murder in 1963 that former U.S. Marine Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK, acting alone.

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Watch and share the Bolden interview here via YouTube or by name search via such other sites as ITunes and Spotify. Wayne Madsen provides the introduction.

During the interview, Bolden shared in his first-ever detailed public description how he overheard through a closed door while guarding the Oval Office that an enraged LBJ (shown below in a file photo on a separate occasion) threatened and cursed the president and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (RFK), with language including “You bastards trying to send me to jail?” RFK is shown at right in a photo of a separate meeting at the White House with his brother and then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, a close ally and next-door neighbor of the the vice president.

Bolden, who had experienced pioneering job hires as a Black Pinkerton detective and Black Illinois State policeman before JFK personally recruited him to integrate the White House Secret Service, said he was so concerned that about LBJ’s outburst that he reported the remarks to a supervisor.

Only later, he said, did he understand from news accounts and historical researchers that the vice president was probably concerned about then-ongoing state and federal investigations of the corrupt cotton broker Billy Sol Estes (shown on a Time Magazine cover) and the mysterious shooting death on June 3 that month in Texas of Henry Marshall, right, the U.S. Department of Agriculture agent leading the Estes probe. Authorities ruled Marshall’s death from five shots from a bolt-action rifle plus carbon monocide poisoning as a suicide until Marshall’s family and a sympathetic U.S. marshall succeeded in more than two decades of advocacy in obtaining a 1985 court ruling of homicide, not suicide.

Estes, after serving a long prison sentence, filed an affidavit in 1984 with the Justice Department swearing that LBJ had recruited him to help arrange eight murders, including those of Marshall, LBJ’s estranged sister, Josefa Johnson (1961), her boyfriend John Kinser (1951) and JFK (1963).

U.S. Justice officials failed to prosecute in any of the cases. Bolden said he hesitated until now to discuss his overheard 1963 confrontation between LBJ, JFK and RFK because he wanted to ensure that explosive details could be sufficiently corroborated by others.

The new details are highly significant because, along with other parts of Bolden’s experiences, they tend to support scholars who argue that Johnson had means, motive and opportunity assist in the assassination or at least its cover-up despite a heavy focus by authorities and mainstream media on Oswald to the near-exclusion of other avenues of research. As further context, Johnson’s press secretary as vice president and then president, Bill Moyers (shown at left with Johnson in a 1963 photo at the White House), promptly after the assassination led efforts to focus authorities and the media solely on Oswald as the killer, 1963 documents now reveal.

The late James Wagenvoord, left, a former executive at Life Magazine and later author of 43 books, has said the magazine spiked immediately after the assassination a major investigative story documenting corruption by new president, Johnson, involving Estes and other notorious Johnson associates including Bobby Baker and Fred Korth.

Wagenvoord said the already edited investigative story had been expected to run shortly after the Dallas trip but was killed to help the country adjust to as smooth as possible a transition after JFK’s murder and LBJ’s succession. Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department was helping Life Magazine’s reporters prepare the story and LBJ was well aware that the story was in the works and ready for the publication, Wagenvoord said at JFK assassination research conferences (including two moderated by District Insider co-host Andrew Kreig). JFK’s former staffer Evelyn Lincoln wrote in her memoirs that the projected Life Magazine story, capping several previous Life Magazine stories on LBJ’s money-making schemes and henchmen, would have provided grounds for the Kennedy’s to remove LBJ from JFK’s 1964 re-election ticket.

New Documentation, Old Document Suppression

The former Texas School Book Depository, now site of the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, is shown at the far left of the buildings in the above. The FBI beginning in late 1963 and then the Warren Commission in 1964 asserted that former U.S. Marine Lee Harvey Oswald fatally shot President Kennedy, acting alone, from a sixth floor window in the building. Among other evidence in the case not widely reported is that a Dallas policeman saw Oswald drinking a soda on the building’s second floor 90 seconds after the shooting and that a secretary had given him change for the vending machine shortly before that.  (Photo by the Justice Integrity Project, which has published a 50-part Readers Guide to the JFK Assassination, with links below).

In recent years, considerable corroboration has surfaced in documents, witness accounts and books.

For example, former Estes attorney Douglas Caddy of Houston published a memoir Being There that reproduces what Caddy (shown at left in a Justice Integrity Project photo) describes as correspondence he filed with the Justice Department in 1984 that confirmed Estes and LBJ complicity in the eight murders.

The book ascribed blame also to the late Texas political operative Malcom “”Mac” Wallace, right, an expert marksman who had received a suspended sentence from his murder conviction for the 1951 fatal shooting of John Kinser, a boyfriend of Lyndon Johnson’s sister, Josefa Johnson, who was also involved with Wallace.

Wallace, a former student body president at the University of Texas in the 1940s, later worked as a Texas defense industry lobbyist for LTV, a major defense contractor owned by LBJ’s friend David H. “D.H.” Byrd, a tycoon shown below at left. Byrd, co-founder of the Civil Air Patrol training program for teenagers nationally, owned the land in Dallas on the JFK parade route that housed the Texas School Book Depository (shown above). Oswald worked for a little over a month at the book warehouse in downtown Dallas before the assassination. Oswald had been been a member of a Civil Air Patrol unit in New Orleans before he joined the U.S. Marines at age 17 be miltary work that included his seldom-reported stint as a radar technician on the super-secret U-2 spy plane project.

JFK assassination researcher Robert Morrow is among those other researchers and other recent authors who have collected evidence supporting Bolden’s allegations, the Marshall murder and related fact patterns. Yet he questions whether Wallace was a participant in the Marshall murder, suggesting that a witness description seemed more like Estes than Wallace (who denied involvement before his death) and that the Estes track record as a conniver and liar undercuts even conclusions that some researchers might like to hear.

Whatever the case on that thread of mysteries surrounding the JFK assassination, there is no doubt that still-continuing government suppression of records blurs public understanding despite the clear mandate of the so-called JFK Records Act, passed unanimously by the U.S. House and Senate three decades ago and mandating the release of all JFK assassination records unless a president provides specific reasons to withhold any document.

Chicago and Tampa Plots Against JFK

Regarding Bolden’s disclosures in his District Insiders interview: He described also his role as an investigator of the seldom-reported assassination plot against JFK during his scheduled trip to Chicago on Nov. 2, 1963, which the White House cancelled that morning following detention of suspects in an alleged plot that shaped up much like the successful assassination on Nov. 22 at Dealey Plaza in Dallas. That plot is not widely known by the public even though suspects were detailed and certain news reporters, most notably from the Chicago Daily News, prepared news stories never published.

Somewhat similarly, federal agents investigated allegations of a similar plot against the president suspected as planned for Tampa and also before JFK’s scheduled trip to Dallas. Historian Lamar Waldron, left, and co-author Thom Hartmann described the Chicago and Tampa plots in multiple chapters of their book Ultimate Sacrifice (2005).

During the District Insiders interview of Bolden, co-host Wayne Madsen drew on his varied investigative career to describe why former Texas Gov. John Connally, who received multiple gunshot wounds while sitting in front of JFK during the Dallas motorcade (as portrayed above at center), always insisted that more than one shooter had been active. Madsen said he spoke years after the shootings with Connally for about 15 minutes and the former governor told him that as a veteran of World War II he knew perfectly well when multiple guns were firing.

Connally, shown at right on a 1979 Time Magazine cover, carried to his grave bullet fragments from the shooting that raise additional questions among scholars about the “lone gunman” theory of the shooting. 

Madsen announced also during the webcast that he is publishing this spring a book for schoolchildren that will feature Bolden as one of two dozen modern civil rights heroes who deserve wide recognition, even though those like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis are seeking to prevent school boards from allowing books and other teaching that might make White parents and their children uncomfortable with historical events. 

JFK’s Initiative To Integrate White House Protections

Bolden recapped during his interview his preparation for his pioneering law enforcement and security jobs. He then shared the powerful story of JFK’s quick instincts to recuit Bolden to break the color barrier that had always existed in the Secret Service protective details for presidents. 

Bolden, born in 1935 in East St. Louis, Illinois, graduated cum laude from Lincoln University with a b.a. in music composition. Later, as documented in his memoir The Echo from Dealey Plaza (2008), he became the first African-American detective with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, which traces its roots to President Abraham Lincoln’s security chief Alan Pinkerton.

Bolden then became a highway patrolman with the Illinois State Police and joined the U.S. Department of Treasury’s Secret Service in October 1960, based in Chicago. Like many Secret Service agents in a force he estimated as about 300 agents nationwide, much smaller than today, he spent much of his worktime investigating counterfeiting rings.

One day in April 1961, he was assigned to guard a basement washroom during a JFK speech at Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center. Unexpectedly, the president and his entourage stopped by. Even more unexpectedly, the president took the time to ask Bolden’s name and background and to encourage him to join the president’s protective detail in Washington, D.C.

Later, JFK introduced him one time to others as “the Jackie Robinson of the Secret Service,” a comment so touching that Bolden recalls as almost prompting him to break down in tears. 

Bolden felt motivated after the assassination to speak to superiors and if possible the Warren Commission led by Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, right, to share observations he felt would be helpful to inquiries. Instead, he was accused on May 12, 1964 of attempting to sell a government investigative file on counterfeiting to a chief suspect, Joseph Spagnoli, Jr., for $50,000. 

Bolden denied the charges during a press conference at his home and said he had been framed because he had planned to inform the commission “about the laxity and non-chalant attitude of Secret Service agents handling the President.”

Secret Service Director James Rowley, shown in the adjoining photo with JFK but reportedly a political ally of Johnson, took a hostile viewpoint towards Bolden in public statements in 1964. 

The jury in Bolden’s first trial remained hung even though the presiding judge, U.S. District Judge J. Sam Perry, had issued an “Allen charge” expressing his opinion that the defendant was guilty. The judge, a native of Alabama and its segregated society who had been active in Chicago’s Democratic politics before nomination to the federal bench, promptly scheduled a new trial three weeks later.

A jury formed entirely of Whites despite Bolden’s deep concern promptly convicted him. Perry sentenced Bolden to six years in prison, a remarkably speedy disposition of a case higly reliant on the word of a counterfeiter against an award-winning law enforcer.

The judge and a federal appellate court refused to order a new trial even though the counterfeiter Spagnoli confessed in court in 1965 that he had lied about Bolden under pressure from prosecutors who wanted that conviction. The system nonetheless forced Bolden to finish his six year sentence, part of which was in solitary confinement and with required ingestion of drugs that he tried to spit out secretly to maintain his health.

A review of the gross irregularities in the trial and imprisonment leaves no doubt that the prosecution, marred by lost transcripts and other such problems, was highly improper and doubtless prompted by concerns involving race, cover-up and similar improper considerations.

Following Bolden’s release, he worked 35 years as a factory quality control supervisor. In 2008, he published The Echo from Dealey Plaza.

Major newspapers and leading researchers favorably treated his memoir and tended to concur in his important findings, including revelations in this month’s District Insiders interview.

For example: Barr McClellan, author of  Blood, Money and Power (2011) based in part on McClellan’s work as an attorney for Johnson from 1966 to 1971, is among the researchers who have pursued such important strands of Bolden’s revelations as the murder Henry Marshall, the Agriculture Department investigator of Billy Sol Estes.

Among other important researchers and authors on these points during recent years have been James Douglass, James Tague, Lamar Waldron, Phil Nelson and Vincent Palamara, the latter being the leading expert on the Secret Service performance during the assassination period.

Palamara’s 493-page study, Survivor’s Guilt: The Secret Service and the Failure to Protect President Kennedy, is based on first-hand accounts of more than 70 former agents, including Bolden. Palamara portrays Bolden as one of the agents geuninely seeking to protect the president and hold accountable those who fell short, at best, in their duties.

Looking Ahead

We, the co-hosts of District Insider, encourage listeners and this column’s readers to follow up this story’s revelations in the spirit of Bolden’s actions, which also parallel what we know of President Kennedy’s. JFK knew from such matters as the Chicago plot and from other sources that his life was endangered by his speaking trips. But he proceeded anyway. Texas opponents distributed the above  “Wanted for Treason” handbill during his visit, which was preceeded by a full-page newspaper ad in the Dallas Morning News, shown at right, with a similarly hostile tone. Dealey Plaza, where JFK was killed, is named for a former publisher of the Dallas Morning News, which through the years has helped suppress research questions about the assassination while also helping local interests benefit from the tourism prompted by enduring interest if not admiration for the JFK presidency.

Particularly in this 60th anniversary year of the murder and continuing controversies about such current topics as civil rights cutbacks and continuing mysteries as the disappeared Secret Service text messages during the Jan. 6 insurrection against Vice President Michael Pence and Congress, we see several ways to pursue civic truths and justice in relatively easy steps, as follows: 

• First, please “Like” and “Share” this column and/or any version of the Bolden interview you may see on YouTube or by searching such other platfords as Apple and Spotify where it can be found via a name search for District Insiders. Please add your own insights or other comments also if warrented.
• Second, we encourage you to consider reading his powerful memoir, , The Echo from Dealey Plaza, and possibly arranging for him to speak via Zoom to a suitable group. At 88, he is ailing with a painful back condition that prevents traveling but retains considerable knowledge as a living witness to history. Arrangements may be made via a speaker manager.
• We encourage also interest in our forthcoming District Insiders episodes that will feature experts on other timely topics with enduring importance. The sessions are free but your click on the Subscribe button ensures alert to future sessions.
• Distict Insiders co-host Wayne Madsen, left, this spring is publishing A Woke Coloring Book: Re-Adding Color to a Whitewashed History, his 23rd book and his first for schoolchildren. The coloring book features biographies of some two dozen civil rights heroes, including Bolden, that children can colorize with crayons. The book was inspired by the autocratic actions of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to use allied government officials and their like-minded allies elsewhere around the United States to reduce or eliminate discussion in schools of what they regard as uncomfortable aspects of American history. Information about the book will be available on Amazon.com soon.

•  Ranging more widely and into JFK research, we note the beginning of a significant research conference Thursday, April 13, focused on the assassinations of President Kennedy, his brother, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Medger Evers. The event (portrayed above) is located in Memphis and lasts until Sunday mornng. Most activities are available for viewing via Zoom as well as in person. The event is organized by The JFK Historical Group, a scholarly group chaired by history professor David Denton and based at Olney College in Olney, IL, where he teaches. Details are here.
• Citizens Against Political Assassinations (CAPA), the research group founded and led by famed forensic pathologist Cyril H. Wecht, M.D., J.D., is planning for its annual JFK research conference to be held in November in conjunction with a major 60th anniversary research program on the JFK death to be held at the Wecht Institute at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, where Dr. Wecht, now 92, has long been active as a medical examiner, medical school professor, author, lawyer and consultant over the course of his career. Although details of the programs are not yet scheduled your bookmark of the program provides an alert when details arise.
• As a related matter, CAPA is monitoring and if necessary will oppose efforts by some in Dallas who want to reconstruct Dealey Plaza in ways that appear to destroy or obscure the original layout at the time of the JFK assassination, thus fostering tourism but obscuring physical landmarks at the crime scene that illustrate why a majority of the American public has never supported the “lone gunman” theory, according to students of relevant polling. Those who want to participate should contact District Insiders co-host Andrew Kreig, appointed by CAPA to co-chair its Dealey Plaza research effort on the issue. No formal proposal has been submitted to the city, we have been told. But we continue to monitor the possibility that the proposal will suddenly arise. The picket fence atop the grassy knoll, shown at left with an X spot painted by researcher Robert Groden on the spot where JFK was fatally shot, has long been regarded as especially vulnerable for destruction even though the area is designated as historic. The X mark, which through the years has often been erased by the city and repainted by Groden, is about 90 feet away from the waist-high picket fence that some reseachers believe was the launch site for the fatal bullet for JFK. A Dallas Morning News feature story last October by its archectual critic on his proposed renovation shows replacement of the fence area with a mall concourse. CAPA is being told that no formal plan exists for renovation. But common sense dictates that vigilance but volunteers is merited when the historical stakes are high. 

Abraham Bolden and JFK Secret Service Protection

As a Secret Service officer, Bolden traveled with President Kennedy but became disenchanted with the assignment when his fellow agents used racial slurs in his presence and engaged in a pattern of conduct that, in Bolden’s opinion, endangered the president.

After the 1963 assassination Bolden told colleagues he planned to discuss security lapses. He was then indicted and convicted on corruption charges after two trials marred by such gross irregularities as a chief witness admitting he had perjured himself at the demand of a prosecutor.

Originally sentenced to a six-year term, Bolden was imprisoned more than three years, including solitary confinement limiting his access to media and lawyers. Now 80, he speaks by Skype because age and infirmity makes travel impossible from his Chicago home.

Bolden’s well-received memoir in 2008, The Echo from Dealey Plaza, recounted his experiences in compelling fashion since JFK’s murder at a downtown Dallas plaza, and the implications for current times.

Researcher Vincent Palamara featured Bolden prominently in Survivor’s Guilt, Palamara’s comprehensive study published in 2013 of all surviving Secret Service officers relevant to the Kennedy death.

Bolden’s courage and unmerited ordeal have been positively portrayed in several other recent books and opinion pieces. These include the comprehensive books JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by James Douglass and Ultimate Sacrifice by Lamar Waldron with Thom Hartmann. Hartmann published a Huffington Post column in 2009 about Bolden, After 45 Years, a Civil Rights Hero Waits for Justice.

Biographical profiles on Bolden have been published by Spartacus Educational, Wikipedia and by special site, Abraham Bolden, created by the Secret Service historian Palamara.

About District Insiders Co-Hosts

Wayne Madsen, below left, is an investigative journalist, author and syndicated columnist based for many years in Washington, DC. A former US Navy officer, Madsen has written 22 books on various topics, most relating to national security and world affairs. He edits WayneMadsenReport.com, an investigative news website. His next book (with publication expected this spring) will be A Woke Coloring Book for schoolchildren describing the oft-suppressed or neglected life stories (especially now in Florida) of historically important patriots and professionals of color, including Abraham Bolden.

Contacts for “District Insiders” hosts for guests, interviews, lectures, questions:

• • Andrew Kreig, Andrew [at] justice-integrity.org
  • Wayne Madsen, wmadsen777 [at] aol.com

  About Abraham Bolden and “The Echo from Dealey Plaza”: Publisher’s Description

From the first African American assigned to the presidential Secret Service detail comes a gripping and unforgettable true story of bravery and patriotism in the face of bitter hatred and unthinkable corruption. Abraham Bolden was a young Secret Service agent in Chicago when he was asked by John F. Kennedy himself to join the White House Secret Service detail. For Bolden, it was a dream come true —and an encouraging sign of the charismatic president’s vision for a new America.

Bolden had earned his advancement by being the first African American detective to be employed by the historic Pinkerton Agency. He then became an Illinois state patrolman and a member of the U.S. Secret Service in October 1960.

But his dream turned sour when Bolden found himself regularly subjected to open hostility and blatant racism. He was taunted, mocked, and disparaged but remained strong, and he did not allow himself to become discouraged. More of a concern was the White House team’s irresponsible approach to security. Both prior to and following JFK’s assassination, Bolden sought to expose and address the inappropriate behavior and negligence of these agents, only to find himself the victim of a sinister conspiracy that resulted in his conviction and imprisonment on a trumped-up bribery charge.

A compelling memoir substantiated by recently declassified government documents, The Echo from Dealey Plaza is the story of the terrible price paid by one man for his commitment to truth and justice, as well as a shocking new perspective on the circumstances surrounding the death of a beloved president. Details: www.EchoFromDealeyPlaza.com

  JFK Assassination Readers Guide

To help researchers of President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination and its current implications, the Justice Integrity Project began publishing a Reader’s Guide in 2013 to coincide with the shooting’s 50th anniversary providing lists of important books, films, archives and commentaries reflecting all significant points of view. .