The presentation beginning below includes an hourlong video recording of an interview, HERE, with pioneering former Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden. — MCM
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Former JFK secret agent describes shocking lapses, 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, 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.
The District Insider hosts, both investigative reporters long based in Washington, D.C., 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 otherwise 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, shown at left, killed JFK, acting alone.
Current implications of such secrecy are important as well. Neither investigators nor the public, for example, have been able to get clear-cut answers about Secret Service operations — and massive missing text messages — during the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol that endangered the lives of Vice President Mike Pence, members of Congress and Capitol staff, including police officers.
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 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?”
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 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, 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 . . . READ MORE . . .