JFK Whodunnit? And who is Abraham Bolden?

We are fascinated because there were more people that stood to benefit from JFK's death than could fill Madison Square Garden. Equal numbers of fair minded people are convinced alternatively that Lee Oswald acted alone or that he did not. Yet nearly all people have a sure sense that not all has been explained.

Who stood to benefit from JFK's demise? Within the US, the Mafia did. RFK's hearings on the Mafia embarrassed many. One (Carlos Marcello) was briefly deported. J Edgar Hoover denied the Mafia existed for 50 years and shared the Mafia's distaste for RFK; he felt the hearings signified that he would not get reappointed as director. Lyndon Johnson felt the Kennedys blocked his ascension to be President. The right wing Dallas millionaires all disliked the civil rights legislation. Cuba/Castro had endured the Bay of Pigs and feared another invasion. The USSR, knowing that Cuban nuclear weapons were under local control, knew better than anyone how close the world had come to nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis and thought JFK was a loose cannon and unpredictable. Israel deceived JFK about its nuclear ambitions which JFK wanted to quash, but which Israel was determined to pursue.

Once JFK was killed, Carlos Marcello returned to the US, Hoover served several more terms, and LBJ became President. LBJ turned the nation's focus from Cuba to Vietnam. Israel built over 200 nuclear devices between 1963-1973 under the benign neglect of Presidents Johnson and Nixon.

In Ultimate Sacrifice, Lamar Waldron makes a compelling case that the Mafia dunnit. He argues that Jack Ruby's finishing off Oswald both proves mob involvement and that therewas a conspiracy of at least 2 . After the murder, the FBI prematurely announced that Oswald "acted alone" and thereby limited investigation.

Forget all the red herrings: the grassy knoll, the magic bullet, etc. Concentrate on what is known. The proof of a conspiracy is that there were two failed attempts at assassinating JFK in the weeks leading up to Dallas. Each was planned for a car procession with a tall building and multiple gunmen. The first attempt happened in Chicago, the second in Tampa. Dallas was the third chance, and probably last chance for the mob to get JFK. The Secret Service knew all about the first two attempts. Had the public known at the time, they would never have accepted Hoover's statement, immediately after the shooting, that one did it and he did it alone. However, they never knew.

Abraham Bolden knew. Bolden happened to be the first black Secret Service agent, and he had been briefed on the Chicago attempt, and was prepared to testify before the Warren Commission. The day he went to testify before Warren, he was arrested and charged with counterfeiting. Two Mafioso, including one he had previously arrested, testified against him, and he spent decades seeking a pardon. Remember that name-- Bolden will be famous by the end of the year.

The crux of the book is that the government was not all in on the conspiracy to kill JFK as presented by Oliver Stone and others. However, the government did participate en masse in a conspiracy after the murder to prevent the truth from coming to light. The FBI stopped investigating-- on Hoover's orders-- once the announcement was made that Oswald acted alone.

Waldrop contends that JFK had a secret plot to invade Cuba by December 1, but that plot was infiltrated and known to the Mafia. RFK (who personally directed his brother's botched autopsy by a telephone connection at Walter Reed Hospital) and other confidantes wanted to protect that plot and did not allow JFK's murder investigation to go in directions that might expose the plot. Because different forces all wanted to cover up different aspects of the plot in different ways for unique reasons, the truth died. The plot to invade Cuba was not known to the Warren investigators nor to the Sprague investigators in the 1970's. However, Abe Bolden, the first African American Secret Service agent who took the fall as the patsy of the Mafia, still is alive and is going to tell his tale.

http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780307407375