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

Conspiracy theories haunt the Kennedy assassination; Bolden offers a new one, concerning discrimination and evidence suppression. Becoming, in JFK's words, the “Jackie Robinson of the Secret Service,” Bolden joined the White House detail in 1961. Already beset by racism (he once found a noose suspended over his desk), his idealism is further shattered by “the drinking and carousing” of other agents. Soon after the assassination, he receives orders that hint at “an effort to withhold, or at least to the color, the truth.” He discovers that evidence is being kept from the Warren Commission and when he takes action, finds himself charged with “conspiracy to sell a secret government file” and sentenced to six years in prison, where both solitary confinement and the psychiatric ward await. That there was a conspiracy to silence him seems unarguable, but Bolden's prose is flat; so is his dialogue. This story is more enthralling than Bolden's telling of it, but the reader who sticks with it will enter a world of duplicitous charges and disappearing documents fit for a movie thriller. (Mar.)