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Brave Former Law Enforcer Abraham Bolden Once Scorned, Now Honored
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 (and shown at right in a file photo), 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 to target JFK in Chicago three weeks before a similar shooting killed the president 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 1961 temper tantrum by LBJ two years before JFK's death. Authorities instead framed Bolden with perjured testimony on corruption charges in 1964 and promptly imprisoned him with a six-year sentence.
In 2022, President Joe Biden (shown in a file photo) pardoned Bolden on April 26 as one of just three to receive pardons in Biden's first presidential clemency order.
The District Insiders hosts, both investigative reporters long based in Washington, DC, recognized during the show Bolden's remarkable courage and patriotism along with Biden’s boldness in granting a pardon. Most officials and mainstream media since 1963 have ignored, downplayed or otherwise suppressed any suggestion conflicting with the FBI’s steadfast contention, first expressed soon after JFK's murder in 1963, that former U.S. Marine Lee Harvey Oswald, shown at left, killed JFK, acting alone. Rarely mentioned in standard accounts is Oswald's documented history of serving in the Marines with a high-level security clearance for work as a radar technician on the U-2 spy plane operation and also learning how to speak fluent Russian while serving in the Marines during the height of the Cold War.
Current implications of such experiences and relationships are worth exploring even today regarding key figures and such organizations as the Secret Service. The public, for example, has not been able so far 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. The Washington Post published a recent update on that, Probe widens into federal watchdog over missing Jan. 6 Secret Service texts, amplified in an appendix to this column.
- Spotify: https://sptfy.com/N8eC
- Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/district-insiders/id1679198072
- Podbean: https://districtinsiders.podbean.com
Co-host Wayne Madsen provided the introduction to the show. During the interview, Bolden shared in his first-ever detailed public description how he overheard through a closed door while guarding the Oval Office in June 1961 that an 
enraged LBJ (shown below in a file photo on a separate occasion) 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?” RFK is shown at right in a photo of a separate meeting at the White House with his brother and then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, an ally and close neighbor of the vice president.
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 history researchers that the vice president was probably concerned about then-ongoing state and federal investigations of the corrupt cotton broker Billy Sol Estes and the mysterious shooting death on June 3 that month in Texas of Henry Marshall, right, 
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 monoxide poisoning as a suicide until Marshall’s family and a sympathetic U.S. marshal 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 discuss his overheard 1961 confrontation between LBJ, JFK and RFK because he wanted to ensure that explosive details could be sufficiently corroborated by others.
The new details are highly significant because, along with other parts of Bolden's experiences, they tend to support scholars who argue that Johnson had means, motive and opportunity to assist if not enable the assassination or at least its cover-up despite a heavy focus by authorities and mainstream media on Oswald to the near-exclusion of other avenues of research. As further context, Johnson's press secretary as vice president and then president, Bill Moyers (shown at left with Johnson in a 1963 photo at the White House), promptly after the assassination led efforts to focus authorities and the media solely on Oswald as the killer, 1963 documents now reveal.
The late James Wagenvoord, left, a former executive at Life Magazine and later author of 43 books, has said the magazine spiked immediately after the assassination a major investigative story documenting corruption by the incoming president, Lyndon Johnson, involving Estes and other Johnson associates, including Bobby Baker and Fred Korth.
Wagenvoord said the already edited investigative story had been expected to run shortly after the Dallas trip but was killed to help the country adjust as smoothly as possible to a transition after JFK's murder and LBJ's succession. Robert Kennedy's Justice Department was helping Life Magazine's reporters prepare the story and LBJ, as the primary target, was well aware that the story was in the works and ready for publication, according to Wagenvoord in speaking at two research conferences of Citizens Against Political Assassinations (CAPA) that were moderated by District Insider co-host and CAPA board member Andrew Kreig). JFK's former secretary Evelyn Lincoln wrote in her memoirs that the projected Life Magazine story, capping previous Life Magazine stories on LBJ's money-making schemes and henchmen, would have provided grounds for the Kennedys to remove LBJ from JFK's 1964 re-election ticket.
Wednesday, Dec. 21, 2022. 
Rather first published the column in his near-daily column "Steady," which he so named to urge readers to stay balanced during our troubled times. This editor is a subscriber to the columns, which are published in collaboration with Elliot Kirschner and benefit from Rather's experience and blunt, colorful style. 
audiences must overcome to understand documents about the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy (JFK) mandated for release this month under a 1992 law.
Archives and Records Administration (NARA).
Integrity Project, seeks in this guest essay to persuade readers in the column below to support strongly Ukraine's defensive war against Russian invaders. Must Read Alaska and Alaska Watchman, two conservative Alaska-based publications, first published the column. The author, a consulting engineer and civic activist, was in the Soviet Union during the Soviet coup d’état against Mikhail Gorbachev in August, 1991.
skyrocket. Outrage is also warranted as Biden demands defense of Ukraine’s borders while he opens our own to massive illegal immigration. His son Hunter Biden’s sleaze with his suspicious Ukrainian gas company Burisma “no-show job” also is a justifiable cause for outrage.
But in pounding away on these points, things go off the rails when the rhetoric turns to, “There is no U.S. interest in Ukraine,” “Ukraine is a corrupt, undemocratic failed state,” concepts espoused by Fox News and Tucker Carlson. 
Trump Attorney General William Barr, right, named Durham in 2019 to investigate Trump’s allegations that Democrats working with FBI personnel smeared his 2016 campaign and several advisors with false theories of “collusion” with Russians.
Meanwhile, Newsweek published “Durham Blasted by Experts After New Acquittal: ‘Laughed Out of Court Twice'” by Aila Slisco, who reported mockery of Durham elsewhere in the legal community for not fulfilling Trump’s prediction that the prosecutor would prove “the crime of the century” in a massive conspiracy. Below is a sample of comments from that article:
Laurence Tribe, professor emeritus of constitutional law at Harvard University, told Newsweek that the acquittal was evidence Durham’s “groundless mission has now failed yet again, putting yet another dismal marker on William Barr’s shameful record as Trump’s henchman and the worst Attorney General in our nation’s history.”
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