The man John F. Kennedy called “the Jackie Robinson” of the Secret Service finally got to testify before a Congressional committee Tuesday — alleging fellow agents were often drunk on the job and there was a so-called “Chicago plot” to kill the president before his 1963 assassination in Dallas.
His head bowed, Abraham Bolden, 90, spoke with difficulty into a microphone when he addressed the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform by Zoom from his home in Chicago. The committee is probing the assassination of the president.
But the audio cut off immediately as Bolden began to speak, effectively muting his testimony on the live stream.
“On June 6, 1961, I walked into history,” said Bolden, according to a transcript obtained by The Post. “I was assigned to the White House detail in Washington, DC to assist in protecting the life of the president. And I never met a more human and fair-minded person than President Kennedy.”
The Trump administration released tens of thousands of previously classified documents with respect to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, his younger brother Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
In the past, Bolden claimed government agents discredited him by arresting him on trumped up charges of bribery in order to prevent him from speaking to the federal Warren Commission, headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren to investigate the shooting in Dallas on November 22, 1963.
In addition to Bolden, the committee heard from Don Curtis, a physician at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas who was on the team that tried to save the president’s life.
In his opening statement he said that the Warren Commission did not interview him or the other doctors, and that the bullet wounds he observed on Kennedy were not consistent with the version of a lone gunman that the Warren Commission reported.
Four other witnesses also gave testimony during the second hearing of the Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, chaired by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), which begins Tuesday.
Douglas Horne, a former Assassination Records Review staff member, said medical records and autopsy photos are missing as are other key documents.
Bolden, a former highway patrolman and Chicago-based Secret Service agent, was the first black member of the Secret Service, personally hired by Kennedy to be part of his presidential detail.
He met the former president during the former president’s stop in Chicago in 1961 while he was guarding a basement restroom at the McCormick Place banquet hall.
“He was serious about giving everyone equal opportunity,” Bolden said of Kennedy in a 2008 TV interview. “He never walked by me once that he didn’t strike up a conversation.”
In his 2008 book, “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,” Bolden wrote about the racism he encountered from other agents on the president’s team, claiming they were often drunk on the job.
In his testimony Tuesday, he spoke about overhearing an angry 1963 meeting between Kennedy and his vice president Lyndon Johnson in the Oval Office in which Johnson accused Kennedy of dropping him from his run for president the following year, warning the president to “‘better stop f—king with me.’”
“He was redder than a sack of beets,” Bolden said, referring to Johnson when he stormed out of the Oval Office.
He also outlined a report he heard at a staff meeting about threats to kill Kennedy with “a high-powered rifle” at an Army-Air Force footbal game in Chicago on November 2, nearly three weeks before he was killed.
“Information that I had revealed was that some Cuban exiles were trying to assassinate the president when he came to Chicago,” Bolden said, adding that he knew from one of the agency’s weekly meetings that there had been threats against the president at the campaign stop in Dallas where was shot dead.
“That information came to me every Wednesday morning when we got a rundown in what was happening in all the other districts,” said Bolden in the interview.
In 1964, Bolden was fired from the Secret Service after being charged with trying to sell government secrets for a $50,000 bribe. He denied the allegations, saying that he was framed for trying to expose corruption within the agency.
Although his first trial ended in a hung jury, Bolden was convicted at his second trial and sentenced to 15 years, even after some witnesses had said they had been pressured into lying to prosecutors. At the time, the father of three gave piano recitals to raise money for his legal defense
Bolden served 39 months in federal prison, with a two-and-a-half year probation. During his time in prison, Mark Lane, an attorney who wrote a bombshell book in 1966 –“Rush to Judgment” — that alleged that Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, could not have acted alone, came to visit him in prison, he said.
Bolden said that while he was in prison, he was drugged by guards and transferred to the “psychiatry division” so that he wouldn’t talk. “They tried to fill me with drugs,” he said.
He was pardoned by President Biden in 2022.
“Very often, as you people know, justice takes a long time,” he told the committee, adding that he was grateful to Biden for the pardon. “Carry on, my brothers and sisters. Carry on this investigation. I truly thank you for giving me a chance to tell my story day because not too many years from now, the only thing in my pockets will be dirt. But the truth cannot die.”
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