Customer Reviews

The Echo from Dealey Plaza: The true story of the first African American on the White House Secret Service detail and his quest for justice after the assassination of JFK

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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.

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!

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

BUY THIS BOOK AND READ IT. THAT IS ALL I CAN SAY. IT'S A PAGE TURNER. A REAL EYE OPENER. THE INJUSTICE THAT WAS DONE TO ABE BOLDEN WAS A DISGRACE.

HOWEVER, IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE JFK ASSASINATION THAT WAS PLANNED BY POSSIBLY HIS OWN VICE PRESIDENT, SOME TEXAS OIL BARON RACIST BILLIONAIRES, ROGUE AGENTS OF THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY, CERTAIN POWERFUL MAFIA BOSSES AND ROGUE FBI MEMBERS, IT IS EASY TO SEE WHY A GOOD GUY LIKE SECRET SERVICE AGENT BOLDEN GOT FRAMED AND ILLEGALLY SENT TO PRISON BY A CORRUPT FEDERAL JUDGE, CORRUPT FEDERAL PROSECUTOR AND CORRUPT SECRET SERVICE SUPERVISORS, IT IS NO WONDER BOLDEN WAS NAILED TO THE CROSS FOR HIS INTEGRITY AND HONESTLY FOR EXPOSING THE SECRET SERVICE'S INEPT ABILITY AT PROTECTING PRESIDENT JOHN KENNEDY.

KENNEDY APPOINTED BOLDEN TO BE THE FIRST BLACK SECRET SERVICE AGENT ON THE WHITE HOUSE DETAIL, SOMETHING THAT ENRAGED SOME OF THE OLDER WHITE SECRET SERVICE AGENTS ON THAT DETAIL WHO WERE FROM THE SOUTH AND TAUNTED BOLDEN WITH RACIST SLURS.

THE FACT THAT JFK HIRED A BLACK TO PROTECT HIM ENRAGED SOME OF THOSE GOOD OLE BOY REDNECK AGENTS WHOSE LACK OF SECURITY FOR JFK WAS IN PART DUE TO THE SECRET SERVICE'S LEGENDARY BOOZING AND WOMANIZING. SOME OF THOSE GOOD OLE BOYS IN THE SECRET SERVICE RESENTED BOLDEN BEING APPOINTED TO THE WHITE HOUSE SECURITY DETAIL BY A PROGRESSIVE PRESIDENT LIKE KENNEDY WHO WAS TRYING TO RAISE THE STANDARD OF LIVING FOR BLACKS.

THE CORRUPT WARREN COMMISSION WHO COVERED UP THE TRUTH BEHIND THE VAST CONSPIRACY OF JFK'S ASSASINATION WERE THE ONES WHO SHOULD HAVE BEEN THROWN IN JAIL NOT ABE BOLDEN.

I SENT EMAILS TO SPIKE LEE AT FORTY ACRES AND A MULE FILM PRODUCTION AND ALSO TO OPHRAH WINFREY AT HARPO PRODUCTIONS TO GET THIS BOOK TURNED INTO A FILM SO EVERYONE CAN SEE HOW CORRUPT OUR GOVERNMENT WAS IN THE 1960'S. MAYBE WILL SMITH OR DENZEL WASHINGTON CAN HAVE THIS STORY TURNED INTO A MOVIE. LET THE TRUTH BE KNOWN. IT WILL SET US FREE. GOD BLESS ABE BOLDEN AND PRESIDENT KENNEDY!

THE SECRET SERVICE AND THE U.S. JUSTICE DEPARTMENT OWE BOLDEN NOT ONLY A PUBLIC APOLOGY BUT ALSO RETROACTIVE BACK PAY AND AN HONORARY RETIREMENT WITH FULL BENEFITS AT THE HIGHTEST RANK OF THAT AGENCY. BOLDEN'S UNJUST CONVICTION SHOULD BE THROWN OUT AND HIS RECORD MADE CLEAN. ARE THERE NO HONEST POLITICIANS LEFT ANYMORE? WERE THERE ANY TO BEGIN WITH? PRESIDENT BARAK OBAMA, ARE YOU LISTENING? I WILL BE HAPPY TO SEND YOU BOLDEN'S BOOK IF YOU WOULD PERSONALLY LOOK INTO THIS MATTER AND RESTORE THIS MAN'S PUBLIC IMAGE. HE DESERVES IT.

What makes this book get more chilling as you read through it is that nothing unusual or unbelievable has to happen to see how this government agent is sacrificed to protect the reputation of institution he served, the Secret Service.

It shows how one government institution would let the assassins get away to cover it's own hide (reviewer: Maybe the assassins understood this and used it to their advantage). Bolden tells how powerful people in the U.S. government are not above using tactics the Soviet Union was accused of using to silence a whistleblower. It shows why other potential whistleblowers never come forward - they know all too well the price they would pay - and nobody would ever know about it.

What leaves this reader forever uneasy after reading this book is the knowledge that it really happened - this is not fiction.

I remember it like it was yesterday. On September 27, 1964 the Warren Commission released it's long awaited report on the facts surrounding the assasination of President John F. Kennedy less than a year earlier. I was only 13 at the time but after hearing the details of the Warren Commission Report I somehow knew even at that tender age that something was just not right. Over the years I have read an assortment of books on this topic and so it was with great anticipation that I latched on to a copy of "The Echo From Dealey Plaza". The chilling story told by author Abraham Bolden who was a Secret Service agent at the time of the President's assassination only serves to confirm what so many of us have suspected all these many years. Indeed, something was greatly amiss in Dallas on Friday, November 22, 1963.

Abraham Bolden was the first African-American to serve in the Secret Service. He had graduated cum laude from Lincoln University in Jefferson City, MO with a B.A. in music composition. After his marriage to Barbara he went to work for the Pinkerton Detective Agency in nearby St. Louis. Bolden found that he enjoyed this type of work and a year later he found himself working in the Criminal Investigative Division of the Illinois State Police. A couple of years later he heard that the Secret Service was looking for agents. He was not terribly surprised to find that at that time there had never ever been a black Secret Service agent. Nevertheless he decided to submit an application and was astonished to learn that he had been accepted into the agency. The year was 1960. Abraham Bolden worked out of the Secret Service office in Chicago. In the spring of 1961 President Kennedy came to town and Abraham had the privilege of meeting him. As a result of that brief encounter Abraham Bolden would be offered an opportunity he deemed much too good to pass up--a chance to serve on the White House detail in Washington D.C.! What Abraham quickly discovered during his brief stint in Washington was that the agency was rife with racism. He also observed many other types of deplorable behavior by some of the agents he worked with. In his opinion, many of these agents were derelict in the performance of their duties, so much so that he feared for the life of the President. Because of all this Bolden opted to turn down a permanent assignment in Washington and chose to return to Chicago where he continued to serve with distinction, primarily in the area of counterfeiting investigations. But the laxity displayed by those agents continued to gnaw at him and he continued to observe behavior by some of his colleagues that made him extremely uncomfortable. Suffice to say that Abraham Bolden was not at all surprised when he learned that President Kennedy had been gunned down in Dallas. Both before and after the assassination Holden made his concerns known to some of his bosses in the Secret Service. His bosses came to the conclusion that Abraham knew far too much and would have to be dealt with. What happened to Abraham Bolden as a result of all this is the primary focus of "The Echo from Dealey Plaza". It is not a pretty picture.

The next several years would prove to be a nightmare for Abraham Bolden. He was brought up on a trumped up charge of bribery and forced to endure two trials that most objective observers would consider to be a mockery of justice. Once he was convicted and had exhausted all appeals Abraham would be sent to federal prison. "The Echo from Dealey Plaza" offers a detailed account of the legal proceedings that would ultimately find Bolden "guilty as charged". You will meet all of the key players in this sorry saga and relive along with the author the hellish details of the trials. Finally, you will follow Abraham Bolden into the federal prison system and discover what life in these facilities is really like. As far as I know "The Echo From Dealey Plaza" is the first and only book that Abraham Bolden has ever written. It turns out that he is a very gifted writer indeed. I could not put this one down. Highly recommended!

This was a difficult book to read. I seethed with anger at each injustice inflicted upon Bolden: the grotesque racism, the frame-up orchestrated by the Secret Service, the perjured testimony, the arrogant and biased trial judge, and the list could go on. And while Bolden endures it all, returns to his family, and has a successful post-prison career, his persecutors never have to face justice. Indeed, as late as 1994, there is evidence of a continued cover-up: Trial transcripts mysteriously disappear when Bolden requests them from the National Archives. Even knowing in advance that these things happen did not prepare me for the visceral shock of experiencing the injustice through Bolden's eyes.

Nevertheless, this is a necessary book. It is well-written, and it moves quickly. People need to know what happened to a man who dared to speak out about the dirty secrets of the Secret Service. People need to see how our justice system can be perverted, how our constitutional rights can be ignored, when the powerful need to protect themselves. We can be grateful that Bolden has given us this slice of history. With the PATRIOT Act and the continued persecution of whistle-blowers, it is as relevant as ever.

I felt like I was actually living the experience with Mr. Bolden. His determination and unwavering resolve to rise above the racial pressures he encountered makes him a hero in my eyesight. Given the delicate issues his situation touched on its a wonder he wasn't killed. What little faith I had in our judicial system is completely gone.

This is an amazing story of injustice, racism, a corrupted justice system, and dogged, courageous persistence to clear his name. Abraham Bolden was clearly his own worst enemy, if only because he wasn't shy about pointing out the shortcomings of his colleagues and bosses. Most of us would shake our heads and pass on by. Not Bolden. If Secret Service agents came to work drunk, he spoke up about it. If they let security relax on President Kennedy's White House detail, he told his superiors. That's not a strategy to warm the hearts of co-workers, but this was the Secret Service, and the President's life was at stake. Bolden took his protective mission to heart. The obvious and blunt racism of his colleagues is surprising forty years later but typical of the sixties. After a stint with the First Family on Nantucket Bay, Bolden writes that his shift supervisor, Harvey Henderson, a good-ol'-boy Southerner, commented to him, "You're a nigger. You were born a nigger, and when you die, you'll still be a nigger. You will always be nothing but a nigger. So act like one!" If that doesn't stagger your perceptions about the Secret Service, nothing would. Imagine trying to do your job with that kind of attitude hovering over you. Transferred back to Chicago, his home base, after a month on the White House detail, Bolden's troubles continued and eventually culminate in charges, conviction, and imprisonment. As he presents the case against him, the corruption, racist conspiracy to destroy him, and the fumbling, blockheaded pursuit of the case by authorities eventually overpower and convict him. It is justice pursued in the most invidious fashion for the most insidious motives. The man is black. Get him. Yet, after all that he and his family endure, Bolden emerges years later undefeated. And that is what makes him a man admired. This is one heck of a story! And the horrifying thing is, it's true.

I wanted the hardbound, which amazon.com does not have. So I ordered this book from a bookstore and I could not put it down. I literally read it in a day. Mr. Bolden was, and is an honorable man. His story is so compelling and shocking that it is truly unforgivable that he has not been pardoned (look at the low lifes like North and Libby who have been, as well as many other guilty government spook like men).

Mr.Bolden was unjustly charged and found guilty by a biased and racist "federal judge" and served nearly six years in the prime of his life for trying to tell the truth. He warned many "superiors" in the government of the lax and arrogrant attitude of fellow agents, many who drank on the job and simply ignored protocol about protecting President Kennedy. He was framed and railroaded by the Secret Service and the Federal Judicial system for trying to tell the "Johnson Commission" what he knew about the riff-raff guarding President Kennedy.

Though the story is not DIRECTLY related to the conspiracy, there is some information regarding the activities of the Secret Service which will shock those who have not studied the assassination in depth. For example, following the murder of JFK, all agents were issued new security IDs and the old ones were destroyed. Why? Missing Secret Service IDs were "lost" prior to that miserable day in Dallas almost 48 years ago. Several men who were not agents had Secret Service credentials when confronted by honest Dallas policemen following the shooting. Inside the Book Depository Building and on the Grassy Knoll for example.

I would strongly encourage people to read Abraham Bolden's Story. DO NOT waste your time and money on Gerald Blaine's rediculous new book about the Secret Service. If you want to know about what the Agency was like in the early 1960's, the racism, the drunkenness and the cavalier attitude towards President Kennedy, read this book.

Presdident Obama, PARDON Mr. Bolden today. It is a stain on America what the system did to Abraham Bolden for doing his job and doing it right.

Five Stars!!

Stephen Courts