Secret Service Agent Abe Bolden Talks About the Chicago Plot
He recounts how he helped break up a plan to kill JFK in early November 1963
From the new show, District Insiders, co-hosted by Andrew Kreig.
Bolden, now 88 and living in Chicago describes in rare detail historically important interactions with President Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon Johnson, as well as an assassination plot targeting JFK in Chicago three weeks before Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.
Bolden says his experience as the first African-American Secret Service agent was “horrific” until a chance meeting with JFK in Chicago in April 1961 led to his assignment in the White House. “I was awestruck,” he recalls. “When he told my wife I had met the president of the United States, she said, ‘You’re lying Abe.’”
Bolden, loyal to JFK during a period when the president’s policies enraged some Americans, sought to alert his chain of command to security threats he had witnessed. For his independence, Bolden was framed on corruption charges in 1964 and spent six years in jail.
Bolden told his life story in 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 (Crown, 2009).
In April 2022, President Biden pardoned Bolden.
See “Former JFK Secret Service Agent Describes Shocking Lapses, Current Implications.”
For me, the Chicago plot more than anything else throws a wrench into the idea that Oswald was being set up for months (say from April 1963) as the patsy for the assassination. A lot of accounts have Oswald being elaborately framed for months.
I’ve always found Bolden’s story to be highly credible, and that implies the decision to do the hit in Dallas (using Oswald as the fall guy) may only have materialized three weeks before the event, if that. Because assuming the Chicago plot was not designed to be aborted, which makes little sense to me, then the original patsy was supposed to be Thomas Arthur Vallee.
Does anyone else have the same sense about this? I think the Chicago plot was real, but then what was Oswald being used for from April to early November 1963? Or was the Chicago plot only intended as a “test run”? Cuban snipers were reputedly involved. Richard Carr was both a Mafia “made man” and a member of the Chicago PD. He was reportedly in Dallas on assassination day.
I wonder if the SS deleted their records in part because Bolden was on the record saying Kennedy’s life was at risk.