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90 of 104 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Every American should read this, April 21, 2008
Abraham Bolden joined the Secret Service in October, 1960 and was working out of the Chicago office providing security for an April, 1961 visit by President Kennedy to Chicago. After meeting Bolden during the course of the visit, Kennedy invited Bolden to permanently join the prestigious White House Security Detail. Bolden joins the detail and goes to Washington DC in June, 1960 for a 30-day trial period during which he encounters intense racism from other White House Secret Service agents that leads him to request to return to the Chicago office. During his July, 1961 exit interview with U.E. Baughmann, head of the Secret Service, Bolden described several of the incidents of racism, a lack of training, (Bolden was asked to use an AR-15 rifle but never received training on the weapon) and also mentioned names, dates, and places of agents who were drunking on duty. Baughmann notes this info, agrees that it was unacceptable, and states that he will take it up with his replacement, James J. Rowley, before he retires in a few days. Rowley was at that time the head of the White House Protective Detail and it is his group that Bolden is criticizing. Bolden goes back to Chicago and works on counterfeiting cases and Rowley becomes head of the Secret Service.
Bolden is working in the Chicago office when Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963. One week before, on November 17, Bolden was asked to fly to Washington DC to take a new assignment as an undercover agent for the Internal Revenue Service. As a part of this job, Bolden would get a new name, birth certificate, marriage certificate, employment records, and all references to his former identity would be erased. Bolden is uncomfortable, says he needs to think it over, and goes back to Chicago. A week later, Kennedy is assassinated and Bolden sees repeated suspicious activities by Secret Service personnel. Bolden is the night duty agent for Chicago on November 24 when he receives a call from the Agent Sorrels in the Dallas office asking that the Chicago office begin investigating a guy named John Hurd who was identified by suspected assassin Lee Harvey Oswald during interrogation at Dallas Police Headquarters. The Chicago agents dutifully investigate for several days and turn up information on a suspect. The Agent in Charge of the Chicago Office, Maurice Martineau, then demands that they stop investigating and turn over every scrap of paper to him personally, whereupon every on Hurd stops...forever. Another suspicious activity occurs when one of the Secret Service agents in Dallas loses his official identification at a strip club on the night before the assassination. The day of the assassination, several police officers report encountering a Secret Service agent with official credentials on the grassy knoll...where no agent was supposed to be. Rather than investigating this, the Secret Service requests that every agent turn in their identification and new identification books are issued in which the front cover says "The Treasury Department" instead of "Treasure Department." Yet another suspicious event occurs when a cuban gun runner for the CIA named Homer S. Echevarria is investigated by the Chicago for having two rifles equipped with sniper scopes in a rooming house along the route of a planned Kennedy visit to Chicago in October, 1963. After Kennedy is killed, SAIC Martineau tells agents to stop investigating Echevarria and personally collects every scrap of paper connected with Echevarria. Then Martineau warns agents to never discuss the case with anyone and to forget that it had ever existed.
Bolden is outspoken in his criticism of the Secret Service regarding the assassination of Kennedy and decides to bypass the Secret Service and contact the then-new Warren Commission investigating the assassination. He attempts to call Warren Commission lawyer J. Lee Rankin on May 17, 1964 from a coffee shop pay phone while on a training assignment in Washington DC but is unsuccessful. Little does he know that he is under surveillance. The next day he is asked to return to Chicago where he is accused by a convicted petty criminal of attempting to sell an investigation file for $50,000. A weird court trial follows in which every witness against Bolden is a convicted felon. Bolden is found guilty and serves six years in federal prisons. After finally being released, he settles down to obscurity and works for private industry for 30 years before finally deciding to write his story. The Secret Service was never investigated after the Kennedy assassination and continues to provide security for presidents and other important public officials to this very day. There is much evidence to suggest Secret Service complicity in the Kennedy killing and Bolden's account provides an important insider view of the Secret Service on November 22, 1963 that further undermines confidence in the integrity of the Secret Service at a time when President Kennedy put his life in its hands. Bolden is a Christian man of integrity who has paid an enormous personal price for speaking out then and now. He deserves to be heard.
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60 of 71 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fantastic book from a former Secret Service hero, March 4, 2008
As the leading civilian authority on the U.S. Secret Service (and one who has interviewed and/ or corresponded with over 70 former agents, including, on quite a few occasions, the author), I highly recommend this seminal work from former Secret Service hero Abraham Bolden. The book is very well written and gripping in its narrative. Whether one views the JFK assassination as the work of one man (who beat the conspirators to the punch) or the work of a deadly conspiracy, Bolden's book holds up in any case, for it is the tale of injustice done to him, as well as the detailing of prior threats to President Kennedy's life.
As one who has studied the Secret Service and President Kennedy's life and death in great detail, I find this book fascinating and indispensable. What more can I say? Get this asap!
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39 of 47 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Kafkaesque Trip Through the American Gulag, August 9, 2008
Abe Bolden, a seasoned and decorated law enforcement officer and the first Black to serve on the Presidential detail (handpicked by JFK himself) as a member of the Secret Service, experienced a staggering fall from grace, due in large part to "guilty knowledge" he had that bore on the possible conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. Having been alerted by uncommonly vicious backroom verbal attacks against Kennedy (and racist attacks against himself) by his colleagues and the very men sworn to protect JFK, Bolden's antenna were on full alert as he witnessed event-after-event that could only be interpreted as "purposeful laxity" in both the run up to JFK's cancelled visit to Chicago (where an assassination attempt was foiled) and the President's fatal visit to Dallas (where it succeeded).
Bolden, as a seasoned agent, was deep inside the Secret Service's inner loop as an "eye" and "ear" witness to all of the behind the scene maneuverings that resulted in both the failure to apprehend the suspects who conspired unsuccessfully to kill JFK in Chicago a couple of weeks before Dallas, and then as witness to his colleague's laxity during the President's fatal visit to Texas, where they apparently succeeded.
Once it became clear that Bolden was not going to "be a team player" in the cover-up of possible Secret Service complicity in the assassination, things turned very bad for him indeed. Unable to silence him on the outside, Bolden was then framed by his colleagues in an elaborate setup that apparently had the support of the judge who presided over his "railroading" through the U.S. Criminal Court system. After a lengthy sequence of trials that went all the way to the Supreme Court, he eventually landed in a series of increasingly brutal and isolated U.S. jails, work camps, and prisons, ultimately ending in the prison psychiatric ward on heavy and regular doses of psychotropic drugs.
In what can only be considered an epic miscarriage of justice that one would think could never occur in the U.S. -- highlighted by the admitted perjury and recantation of the key witness against him (a low level mobster and snitch affiliated with the Sam Giancana outfit (also implicated in the JFK assassination) named Joseph Spagnoli), combined with the ruthless bias of a federal Judge (J. Sam Perry) bent on prosecuting him at all cost, Bolden used up his savings, his good graces, his reputation, and apparently his nine lives before he was summarily sentenced to six years for having allegedly sold a criminal file to his accuser for $50,000.
The real saga of this tale is not just that justice failed at every turn through a lengthy series of Court battles, but that it was an obvious and blatant "frame-up" from start to finish. Once Bolden was caught-up in the American legal grinding machine, there was nothing anyone could or would do to overturn his situation. Like in Kafka's novel "The Trial" as Bolden moved deeper and deeper into the bowels of the U.S. prison system, almost inexorably, laws were stretched, procedures twisted, and documents disappeared just enough to continue his progression towards, and to ensure, the already pre-determined outcome of either silencing him or changing his mental state so that he would eventually end his campaign to tell what he knew.
Apparently six years in prison and years of heavy medication seems to have succeeded in silencing him, because in this book, which was written after his release, Bolden (beyond telling us about an "all alerts bulletin" for someone with the name "Hurd" immediately after JFK was shot, and the fact that a prime suspect in the Chicago attempt, named Echeverria, just disappeared from the radar screen) Bolden still has not given us a full accounting of, or any additional insights into what he actually knew.
That this travesty could occur in the U.S. against a citizen with an impeccable Law Enforcement record, with not even an eyebrow raised, is just further confirmation that we still live in the post-JFK assassination era, an era that continues to be chilling in ways that we as a nation cannot be very proud of.
Four Stars
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