Untitled Document
In April 1961, John F.
Kennedy came to Chicago to pay tribute to Mayor Richard Daley, who just a
few months earlier had delivered Illinois to the Democrat in the
presidential race. Abraham Bolden, then a rookie agent assigned to
the Chicago field office of the Secret Service, remembers his chance
encounter with the new president. “Has there ever been a Negro agent on the
Secret Service White House detail?” Bolden recalls the president
asking. “Not to my knowledge, Mr. President,”
Bolden responded. “Would you like to be the first?”
“Yes sir, Mr. President,” Bolden said,
not bothering to hide his enthusiasm. One of six children, born in East St. Louis to a
good-natured mother and a stern father who worked two jobs, Bolden was
offered an opportunity to become, as the president said, “the Jackie
Robinson” of the White House protection detail. Bolden reported for his first shift of White House
duty at midnight on June 5, 1961. He came with high hopes; he left disillusioned.
No stranger to racial
prejudice, Bolden was prepared to confront bigotry from some of his new
colleagues. However, he admits that he was somewhat taken aback
by how quickly and openly fellow agents made their racist feelings known
— especially “in the White House of John Kennedy, the man who
never missed a chance to demand publicly and forcefully that racism and
bigotry be eliminated throughout America,” he writes in his recently
released memoir, The Echo from Dealey Plaza. “I suppose the Secret Service manual
didn’t cover this kind of thing.”
But what surprised Bolden most was the slapdash
attitude toward security by the very men who’d sworn to take a bullet
for the president. Bolden writes how many agents were more concerned with
carousing, womanizing, and drinking, often while still on duty, than with
protecting Kennedy. Bolden declined an invitation to remain at the White
House after his month-long probationary period ended. He chose instead to
return to Chicago with his three children and wife, Barbara, his unwavering
source of strength, whose features he describes as a cross between those of
Jackie Kennedy and jazz singer and actress Lena Horne. In his exit interview, Bolden told a senior Secret
Service official about the many confrontations he had with white agents, as
well as his perception of the detail’s lackadaisical approach to
guarding the president. One month later Bolden was back in the Chicago field
office, where he investigated counterfeiting operations, mostly on the
South Side, and was regarded by his superiors as the office’s top
agent. He shared with other agents his concern that the White House
detail’s lax security put the president’s safety in jeopardy. By the fall of 1963, reports had begun circulating
throughout the service about threats on the president’s life from
what Bolden describes as “Cuban dissidents” and
“right-wing Southerners.”
Kennedy had planned to visit Chicago for a football
game in early November, but the trip was called off when a woman who ran a
boardinghouse on the North Side found a pair of high-powered rifles
equipped with scopes in a room being rented to two men she described as
Hispanic. Days later, on Nov. 22, 1963, Kennedy was killed in Dallas. In May 1964, Bolden flew to Washington, D.C., for
training. He planned to contact members of the Warren Commission, known
formally as the President’s Commission on the Assassination of
President Kennedy, to offer his testimony on events he witnessed during his
brief stint in the White House. He never got his chance to testify. Bolden was rushed
back to Chicago, where he was promptly arrested and accused of trying to
sell a Secret Service file for $50,000 to a man who was under investigation
for running a counterfeiting ring.
Bolden, 29 years old at the time, believed that the
agency was trying to stop him from blowing the whistle — a move, he
knew, that could destroy the Secret Service. After two trials — the first ended with a hung
jury — Bolden was convicted and sent to prison. The counterfeiter,
the agency’s star witness, later recanted, saying during his own
criminal trial that a U.S. attorney had coerced him into lying in
Bolden’s case. When pressed by a panel of judges about the
counterfeiter’s claim that the attorney had suborned his perjured
testimony, the government prosecutor took the Fifth.
Nevertheless, Bolden went on to serve a sentence of
three years and three months in federal penitentiaries in Indiana, Kansas,
and Missouri, including a short stint in a psychiatric ward for exhibiting
what prison officials described as “paranoid behavior.”
Bolden was paroled in 1969, three months shy of the
completion of his full sentence, and returned to civilian life. He held
supervisory positions in quality control for two industrial-products
companies before retiring in 2001. He has always maintained his innocence,
petitioning the Justice Department for a pardon in 1974 and twice appealing
his case to the Supreme Court.
The high court declined to hear Bolden’s case
in 1966, despite Justice William O. Douglas’ issuing a brief
indicating that the court should hear the case because of
“substantial violations” of Bolden’s constitutional
rights. The Supreme Court again denied his petition in 1997.
Bolden, now 73,
describes the story he outlines in The Echo
from Dealey Plaza as “rather
tragic.”
“Here I was, an idealistic young man, trying to
advance as far as I could in government service. I would have liked to have
stayed in government service and been promoted to possibly some supervisory
position or gone off into another government field such as diplomatic
services. It was very disappointing that these things did not occur,”
Bolden tells Illinois Times. He adds that he no longer harbors ill will toward any
of the people who helped put him behind bars. “I’ve pretty much gotten over the
resentment,” Bolden says. “It’s more now a question of
informing the public of how they affected me.”
Even though his troubles followed his departure from
the White House, Bolden isn’t convinced that things would have turned
out another way — for himself or Kennedy — had he remained.
“Because I was steadfast against some of the
conduct that some of the agents were engaged in, I probably would have
alienated more agents than I did by leaving. I was highly critical of the
agents and how they were disorganized in their efforts to protect President
John F. Kennedy,” Bolden says. Nor did he bother to alert Kennedy directly.
“Well, you know, the president was engaged in so many worldwide
activities at that time, I thought it would be best not to approach the
president with some complaint like that,” he says. “I’d
rather go through the chain of command. I didn’t think that the
proper avenue would be to walk right into the president’s office and
make such a complaint.”
Bolden’s wife, Barbara, died unexpectedly in
2005. She did live long enough to read the finished version of Echo, which took him two years
to write. Bolden says the process — in particular, reliving his
confinement in the prison mental ward and looking back on the day Kennedy
was murdered while riding in a motorcade in Dallas’ Dealey Plaza
— was extremely emotional.
“Going back was a little bit more emotional
than the actual event,” Bolden says. His natural even temperament, combined with his
numerous years of law enforcement training, enabled Bolden to hold his
anger in check as a young man, he explains. “I made a conscious effort,” he says.
“It called for a lot of thinking and reflection and reasoning and I
had to note at all times where I was and what was I trying to
accomplish.”
Bolden believes that the
nation as a whole has made some advances over the past 40 years in terms of
improving race relations.
“We’re moving toward a new day. A new
development is coming, especially among the young people. They really want
to see a change and I believe that it’s going to get better. And I
just think and hope and pray that things do get better and that all people
who are oppressed in this country can have equal opportunity in rights and
justice as all American citizens,” he says.
The same might not be said of his former employer,
however. In 2000, 10 African-American Secret Service agents
filed a lawsuit against the Treasury Department, which had oversight of the
service before that authority was transferred to the Department of Homeland
Security in 2003.
According to court documents, the plaintiffs assert
that with respect to black special agents the Secret Service has
“engaged in a pattern and practice” of racial discrimination in
promotions, offering career-enhancing opportunities, transfers, undercover
assignments (one complainant submits that black agents are presumed able to
communicate in “street talk”), hiring, testing, awards,
bonuses, and performance evaluations. They also allege a hostile work environment.
Forty-eight more black agents have joined the class-action suit, which is
pending in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Bolden, who still lives in Chicago, is not a party to
the suit. “I don’t know what their manual says now
in regard to the discrimination issue,” he says. “But it looks like they’re still on the
same road.”
Contact R.L. Nave at rnave@illinoistimes.com
This article appears in Mar 13-19, 2008.
