The Black History of the White House (33 page)

White reaction against extending civil rights to black people was aggressive and violent. Whites in the South constantly threatened, frequently attacked, and sometimes murdered civil rights organizers. In a particularly brutal case, earlier in 1963 the black community in Birmingham, Alabama, had been terrorized by the police, the Ku Klux Klan, and organized mobs that attacked men, women, children, and the leaders of the local movement. On May 2, 600 children marched for civil rights in Birmingham. Local white authorities attacked them with police dogs and fire hoses and arrested hundreds. The situation became even more barbaric when on Sunday morning, September 15, members of the Ku Klux Klan planted a bomb at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. The timed explosion was one of the worst terrorist atrocities of the period, and killed four young black girls—Denise McNair, eleven years old; Addie Mae Collins, fourteen; Cynthia Wesley, fourteen; and Carol Robertson, fourteen.
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The bombing was followed by acts of arson and shootings in other parts of the city during which racist whites killed two more black children.
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Across the region these types of attacks were common,
occurring on a daily basis. The KKK was active in every state in the South, as were other racist groups and individuals prepared to kill anyone who dared to challenge the region's white supremacy power structure.

Murder was also on the mind of some of those who opposed Kennedy. Documents released in 1992 reveal that the FBI had discovered a plot to assassinate Kennedy during an Army-Navy football game that the president planned to attend in Chicago in early November 1963. The FBI informed the Secret Service in Chicago, and an investigation was launched. Kennedy ended up canceling the trip, although it remains unclear whether or not this was due to security concerns. Meanwhile, reportedly the group of two to four Cuban suspects somehow got away without being arrested.
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Bolden became frustrated at the way the office had handled the case and let his feelings be known. An additional plot to kill Kennedy was discovered in Tampa, Florida, and again an investigation was begun.
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On November 22, 1963, Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas. Information about both the Chicago and the Tampa plots would be hidden from investigators in the period immediately after the assassination.

Bolden had been aware of the earlier plots and felt they were directly relevant to the investigation of President Kennedy's murder. He also wanted investigators to know that some Secret Service agents had behaved in a compromised manner that may have contributed to the security failure—through their unprofessional drinking and partying while on duty or their open antagonism toward the president. Undeterred after his superiors in Chicago discouraged him from pursuing the matter further, he decided to independently report what he knew to the Warren Commission, the body established by Congress to officially investigate the assassination.

Bolden seriously misjudged the forces lined up against him. Although he had not made direct contact with the Commission yet, he had planned to secretly give testimony while in Washington, D.C. for a training; however, he was arrested on the first day of training and charged with discussing taking a bribe from one of his former arrestees. This felony charge would lead to his eventual conviction and dismissal from the agency, and, of course, prevented him from testifying before the Warren Commission.

When at the end of his trial the jury appeared that it was deadlocked, Judge J. Sam Perry, incredibly, informed the jurors that Bolden was guilty. He stated, “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I will now exercise a prerogative that I have as a judge that I seldom exercise. I will express to you and comment upon the evidence. In my opinion, the evidence sustains a verdict of guilty on counts one, two, and three of the indictment. Now, with that in mind, ladies and gentlemen, you may now retire and reconsider the evidence in light of this court's instructions.”
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Judge Perry's highly prejudicial intervention and other improprieties failed to work. One lone juror continued to hold out against the other eleven who had voted guilty, and eventually a mistrial was declared. Stunningly, the second trial was assigned to the same judge, and this time the jury came back with a conviction. On June 29, 1966, two U.S. marshals arrived at Bolden's home. He was taken first to Cook County jail and then transferred to the Terre Haute prison. He would spend three years there, at Fort Leavenworth, and at other facilities before being released on parole on September 25, 1969.

Over time, Bolden's charge of a frame-up became increasingly credible. There were two main witnesses against him. One was Frank Jones, whom Bolden had once arrested in a counterfeiting case. The other was Joseph Spagnoli, who later recanted his story. It also appeared that one of the U.S. attorneys, Richard
T. Sikes, knew that Spagnoli's story was false, because he had put him up to it.
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There is more than one way to interpret Bolden's experiences. At one level, Bolden's tribulations could have been the consequence of an agency's embarrassment at being unable to faithfully execute the mission with which it was tasked: to protect the president of the United States at all costs. Assertions from an agent that incompetence and bigotry were factors in the Secret Service's actions would have had a ring of authenticity and needed to be quashed at all costs. Given the agency was still all white and that many of the agents held openly racist views, railroading Bolden would have been simple. Willfully making false accusations to discredit and destroy outspoken blacks was part of the U.S. government's covert COINTELPRO (counterintelligence) operations during the 1960s, and taking Bolden out of play in this manner would have been consistent with the policies of the times.

This is all the more likely given that Bolden's information, unbeknownst to him, was entangled in much larger international intrigues emanating from the White House. In what was termed “Operation AmWorld,” President Kennedy and his brother, the U.S. attorney general, had formed covert plans for the overthrow of the Castro government, to take place on December 1, 1963. For close to forty years, Operation AmWorld had been kept secret from the media, the public, Bolden, and, most directly, from multiple Congressional investigations (and the Warren Commission) that have been conducted into the Kennedy assassination. In a September 30, 1963, memo titled “Plan for a Coup in Cuba,” written by Army Secretary Cyrus Vance, the Kennedy brothers had laid out plans for Cuban President Fidel Castro and his brother Raúl to be “neutralized” in a “palace coup.” The coup leaders would then present themselves
as a provisional government and declare martial law. The provisional government would also, if needed, “request” military assistance from the United States, justifying a U.S. invasion. The coup was to be lead by Juan Almeida, a hero of the revolution and then Commander of the Cuban Army, who was in communication with the Kennedys. Hartmann reports that Fidel Castro only discovered Almeida's role almost thirty years later. Almeida briefly disappeared, then returned to public life, and his death on September 11, 2008, was a national day of mourning and honor. His dealings with the Kennedys, according to historian Thom Hartmann, have never been made public in Cuba.
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Bolden had no way of knowing that exposing the Chicago assassination attempt would have likely triggered an investigation that would have led to uncovering the Kennedys' covert plans to overthrow Castro. The existence of Operation AmWorld was revealed for the first time in 1999, disclosed in the millions of pages of newly declassified documents released under the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act.
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Lamar Waldron, Thom Hartmann, and other researchers have argued that due to the need to keep Operation AmWorld secret, given its potential for escalating the Cold War or generating another missile crisis, Bolden became a sacrificed pawn. His story of Cuban assassins in Chicago was linked to international issues too politically volatile to be made public.

“The files released after Congress passed the JFK Act unanimously in 1992 show the massive amount of information that had been withheld from at least five Congressional investigations,” write Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann.
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“Even worse, the Final Report of the JFK Board created by Congress shows that crucial files about attempts against JFK—the cases Bolden worked on—were destroyed by the Secret Service in
1995. And, a report by the government oversight group OMB Watch says that “well over one million CIA records” related to JFK's era remain unreleased, perhaps until the mandatory release date of 2017.”
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It is difficult not to conclude that race played a major role in what happened to Bolden, the lone black man in an all-white agency. This likely made it easier for his colleagues to avoid offering him support and assistance. Indeed, what has happened to other black Secret Service agents after Bolden only strengthens his story of racism and conspiracy within the agency.

In 2000, the group Black Agents of the Secret Service (BASS), which grew to represent more than 250 black agents, filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of ten of them accusing the agency of racism. They declared that the Secret Service has “discriminated against African-American Special Agents, from at least January 1974 forward, in its personnel policies, practices, and procedures.”
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In 2004, after four years of delays by the Secret Service and the Bush administration, Black Agents of the Secret Service filed a Writ of Mandamus in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to force the court to expedite their case. They contended that the Bush administration had purposely allowed the case to languish.
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With the Writ, the group asked the federal appeals court to intercede and compel the federal district court to take action. They alleged that “the Bush Administration and the Secret Service have used the judicial process to prevent a discussion of this case on its merits,” including not calling a “single witness” or producing “a single document.” “The refusal to address the merits of the Black Agents' case is shameful,” said BASS president and Special Agent Reginald G. Moore. He stated further, “For the future of the Secret Service, we must have a hearing on the merits of more than 20 years of racial discrimination and a remedy
that dissolves the ‘Good Ol' Boy' network, which has worked so often to disadvantage black agents.”
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A plaintiff in the case, Moore had worked on President Clinton's security detail as well as that of Presidents Carter, George H. W. Bush, and Ford.
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Moore claims that he had been passed over to head the Service's Joint Operation Center, for which he had been the acting head, and which oversees security for the White House. The position was given to a white agent who had never even been on a presidential protection detail or ever worked at the Joint Operations Center. In other instances, Moore states that positions that he applied for were given to less-qualified relatives of Service directors. Camilla Simms, another plaintiff, spoke of a racially hostile atmosphere that was also beset by problematic gender bias. After she complained about the defacing of a picture of a black woman by several white agents on a calendar that was given out to all agents, she was ostracized.
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The 2004 Writ of Mandamus pleading states:

Over four years have passed since the government filed its motion to dismiss and the Petitioners filed their motion for class certification. Petitioners have waited patiently, but they are suffering prejudice. They have not been allowed to depose any fact witnesses, analyze any personnel databases, or conduct any discovery whatsoever. In the meanwhile, the Secret Service admits that it has not in the past and will not in the future preserve electronic mail evidence relevant to the present action. Petitioners have no way to determine if the Secret Service is complying with its responsibility to preserve other documents relevant to the case.
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One factor complicating the case is that Black Agents of
the Secret Service contend, with more than a little evidence, that the original judge in the case has a substantial conflict of interest. In a long footnote in the Writ, it was stated: