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

By Abraham Bolden

Harmony. 306 pp. $25.95

In the vast literature of the John F. Kennedy assassination, Abraham
Bolden has long been a footnote of interest mainly to conspiracy
theorists. Now, after four decades and hundreds of books probing
assassination arcana, the first black agent assigned to guard a
president has written his memoir. "The Echo From Dealey Plaza"
contains no new information about the assassination, but it is a
shocking story of injustice.

This much is certain: Bolden was personally appointed by Kennedy in
1961. During the agent's lone month on White House duty, JFK proudly
called him "the Jackie Robinson of the Secret Service." Having risen
from humble roots in East St. Louis to graduate with honors from
Lincoln University in Missouri, Bolden stood in awe of the young
president. Though he glosses over Kennedy's mixed record on civil
rights, his memoir's fleeting glimpse of the Kennedy clan is charming
and heartfelt.

Yet after a month protecting Kennedy, Bolden was sent back to Chicago,
where he spent the next three years investigating counterfeiters. He
was nowhere near Dealey Plaza in Dallas during what Don DeLillo called
"the seven seconds that broke the back of the American Century." Nor
did he, as one conspiracy buff has claimed, ever hear Lee Harvey
Oswald shout, "Ruby hired me!" So what caused the "echo"?

Bolden's brief White House duty left him certain that the Secret
Service was slacking. While in Hyannis Port, Mass., he had seen agents
drinking on the job. Back in Chicago, he saw them drop leads on
possible assassins. Bolden also heard stories about Secret Service
agents drinking heavily in Dallas the night before the assassination.
Armed with these accusations, Bolden was preparing to contact the
Warren Commission when he was arrested in May 1964. Overnight, his
life turned from a Jackie Robinson story to something out of Kafka.

Despite having a spotless record, Bolden found himself charged with
selling government information to a suspect. Convicted on testimony
from the shadiest of characters, he was denied appeals even when a key
trial witness confessed to perjury. Bolden remains certain the
frame-up stemmed from his widely known criticism of the Secret Service
and his attempts to contact the Warren Commission. Readers, however,
might suspect a racial vendetta by some fellow agents rather than a
conspiracy related to the assassination.

By his own account, Bolden had no shortage of enemies at the Secret
Service. These ranged from outright racists to bullying bosses who
hated him for not being a "team player." In one all-too-resonant
incident, he looked up from his desk in Chicago one afternoon to see a
noose hanging from the ceiling. But while it is possible, perhaps even
probable, that Bolden was silenced to keep him from leveling a
j'accuse, the jury is still out.

Bolden clearly is innocent of the charge for which he spent more than
three years in jail. But just as he hired a lawyer to defend him in
court, he should have hired a ghostwriter to state his case in print.
His story, replete with conniving characters, a scandalously biased
judge and endless innuendo, would make a great made-for-TV movie.
Alas, most of "The Echo From Dealey Plaza" reads like an affidavit.
Each character talks like every other character, and complex events
are recounted in sequence with little attempt to sort them out. Only
when Bolden comes to his ordeal in prison does he make the reader feel
his fury:

"You hear people talk about the walls closing in on them. Before
spending just a few hours in that cell, I had thought it was just a
handy expression. . . . The impulse to scream out, to pound my fists
against the steel cage, rose inside me, but eventually it passed. With
my eyes tightly closed and my arms folded against my chest, I recited
verse after verse of scripture, as I had learned to do as a child in
East St. Louis, until finally I fell asleep."

Bolden suffered greatly at the hands of American jurisprudence, and
his memoir helps set the record straight. More than 40 years after his
nightmare, he cannot be blamed for merely laying out the basics and
punctuating them with understated outrage. He never claims to be a
professional writer, just a proud American deeply wronged. But some
editor should have enlivened his plodding prose and drab dialogue.
With such treatment, "The Echo From Dealey Plaza" might have been the
strong indictment Bolden intended. Instead, it is a rather faint echo
of the crimes in question.

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