| Edwin Anderson Walker | |
|---|---|
Colonel Edwin A. Walker |
|
| Born | November 10, 1909 Center Point, Texas |
| Died | October 31, 1993 (aged 83) |
| Allegiance | United States of America |
| Service/branch | United States Army |
| Years of service | 1931 - 1961 |
| Rank | Major General |
| Commands held | 24th Infantry Division |
| Battles/wars | World War II Korean War |
Major General Edwin Anderson Walker (November 10, 1909 – October 31, 1993) was a highly decorated United States Army general who fought in World War Two alongside George Patton. He was known for his ultra-conservative political views and was criticized by President Eisenhower for promoting a personal political stand while in uniform. He was publicly and formally admonished by President Kennedy for insulting Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry Truman in print. He is also known for being an attempted assassination target of Lee Harvey Oswald on April 10, 1963. From the period of the JFK assassination forward, General Walker wrote and spoke publicly about the fact that the same assassin who killed JFK also shot at him in the "April Crime".
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Edwin "Ted" Walker was born in Center Point, Texas and graduated from the New Mexico Military Institute in 1927. He then attended the United States Military Academy, where he graduated in 1931.[1] During World War II, Walker commanded a subunit of the Canadian-American First Special Service Force in the invasion of Anzio, Italy in January 1944. In August 1944, Walker succeeded Robert T. Frederick as the unit's commanding officer. The FSSF landed on the Hyeres Islands off of the French Riviera, taking out a strong German garrison.
Walker again saw combat in the Korean War, commanding the Third Infantry Division's 7th Infantry Regiment and was senior advisor to the Republic of Korea Army I Corps. He next became the commander of the Arkansas Military district in Little Rock, Arkansas. During his years in Arkansas, he implemented an order from President Eisenhower in 1957 to quell civil disturbances during the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock. In 1959, General Walker was sent to Germany to command the 24th Infantry Division.
In 1961, Walker became involved in controversy when he initiated a mandatory, anti-Communist indoctrination program for troops called "Pro Blue" (where the Free World troops were colored blue on maps)[2] and was accused of distributing right-wing literature to the soldiers of his division, supplied to him by evangelist Billy James Hargis.[3]
He was also quoted by a newspaper, the Overseas Weekly, as saying that Harry S. Truman, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Dean Acheson were "definitely pink." Additionally, a number of soldiers had complained that Walker was instructing them as to whom to cast their votes for in the next election, with all of the candidates the general named being arch-conservative Republicans. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara relieved Walker of his command while an inquiry was conducted, and in October Walker was reassigned to Hawaii to become assistant chief of staff for training and operations in the Pacific. Instead, Walker resigned from the Army on November 2, 1961. Said Walker: "It will be my purpose now, as a civilian, to attempt to do what I have found it no longer possible to do in uniform."[4]
As a commanding officer in Germany, Major General Edwin Walker embarked upon his political career in 1961, by distributing reading material to his troops as part of his Pro-Blue indoctrination program. This reading material included books by the John Birch Society, which followed the Senator Joseph McCarthy belief that Communists had infiltrated the US Government. Because of this political content, the Pentagon criticized Walker in private, while President Kennedy criticized Walker in public. Walker said he felt he was being forced out of the Army, so in protest, and choosing a political career over his 30-year military career, Walker did not retire but resigned his post, thereby forfeiting his officer's pension.
As a civilian in 1961, Walker first pursued a career of speaking out on politics, along with extreme right-wing evangelist, Billy James Hargis, for several months, to enthusiastic crowds all over the United States. His message of anti-Communism was popular, but because he also pressed the McCarthyist belief that Communists were inside the United States government, he mainly attracted the extremists among the American right-wing. Yet his home base was Dallas, Texas, which was generally a right-wing city, and he received considerable support from the citizens of Dallas. So, to pursue his political career, Walker chose to run for Governor of Texas.
In February 1962, Walker entered the race but finished last among six candidates in a Democratic primary election that was won in a runoff election by John B. Connally, Jr. Other contenders were the sitting Governor Price Daniel, highway commissioner Marshall Formby of Plainview, Attorney General Will Wilson, and Houston lawyer Don Yarborough, the favorite of liberals and organized labor. After winning the nomination in a close vote over Yarborough, Connally defeated Republican Jack Cox, an oil equipment executive, also from Houston, who ran stronger than past nominees of his party.[5]
Walker organized protests in September 1962 against the use of federal troops to enforce the enrollment of African-American James Meredith at the racially segregated University of Mississippi. His public statement on September 29:
This is Edwin A. Walker. I am in Mississippi beside Gov. Ross Barnett. I call for a national protest against the conspiracy from within. Rally to the cause of freedom in righteous indignation, violent vocal protest, and bitter silence under the flag of Mississippi at the use of Federal troops. This today is a disgrace to the nation in 'dire peril,' a disgrace beyond the capacity of anyone except its enemies. This is the conspiracy of the crucifixion by anti-Christ conspirators of the Supreme Court in their denial of prayer and their betrayal of a nation.[6]
After a violent, 15-hour riot broke out on the campus, on September 30, in which two people were killed and six federal marshals were shot, Walker was arrested on four federal charges, including sedition and insurrection against the United States. He was temporarily held in a mental institution on orders from President Kennedy's brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy.[7]
Walker posted bond and returned home to Dallas, where he was greeted by a crowd of 200 supporters.[8] After a federal grand jury adjourned in January 1963 without indicting him, the charges were dropped. Because the dismissal of the charges was without prejudice, the charges could have been reinstated within five years.[9]
That same year Bob Jones University invited Walker to speak to its student body.[10]
According to the Warren Commission, around this time, Walker got Lee Harvey Oswald's attention. Oswald's wife Marina said that Oswald, a self-proclaimed Marxist,[11] considered Walker a "fascist" and the leader of a "fascist organization."[12] A front page story on Walker in the October 7, 1962, issue of the Worker, a Communist Party newspaper to which Oswald subscribed, warned "the Kennedy administration and the American people of the need for action against [Walker] and his allies." Five days after the front page news on January 22, 1963 that Walker's federal charges had been dropped,[13] Oswald ordered a revolver by mail, using the alias "A.J. Hidell."[14]
In February 1963, Walker was making news by joining forces with evangelist Billy James Hargis in an anti-Communist tour called "Operation Midnight Ride".[15] In a speech Walker made on March 5, reported in the Dallas Times Herald, he called on the United States military to "liquidate the scourge that has descended upon the island of Cuba."[16] Seven days later, Oswald ordered by mail a Carcano rifle, using the alias "A. Hidell."[17]
According to the Warren Commission, Oswald began to put Walker under surveillance, taking pictures of Walker's Dallas home on the weekend of March 9–10.[18] He planned the assassination for April 10. Oswald's wife Marina said that he chose a Wednesday evening because the neighborhood would be relatively crowded because of services in a church adjacent to Walker's home and he would not stand out and could mingle with the crowds if necessary to make his escape. He left a note in Russian for his wife Marina with instructions should he be caught.[19] Walker was sitting at a desk in his dining room when Oswald fired at him from less than a hundred feet (30 m) away. The bullet struck the wooden frame of the window, which deflected its path. Walker was injured in the forearm by fragments.
A police detective, D.E. McElroy, commented that "Whoever shot at the general was playing for keeps. The sniper wasn't trying to scare him. He was shooting to kill." Marina Oswald stated later that she had seen Oswald burn most of his plans in the bathtub, though she hid the note he left her in a cookbook, with the intention of bringing it to the police should Oswald again attempt to kill Walker or anyone else. Marina later quoted her husband as saying, "Well, what would you say if somebody got rid of Hitler at the right time? So if you don't know about General Walker, how can you speak up on his behalf?"[20]
Before the Kennedy assassination, Dallas police had no suspects in the Walker shooting,[21] but Oswald's involvement was suspected within hours of his arrest following the assassination.[22] (The note Oswald left for Marina on the night of the attempt was not found until early December 1963.)[23][24][25] The bullet was too badly damaged to run conclusive ballistics tests, but neutron activation tests later determined that it was "extremely likely" the bullet was a Carcano bullet manufactured by the Western Cartridge Company, the same ammunition used in the Kennedy assassination.[26]
Oswald later wrote to Arnold Johnson of the Communist Party USA, that on the evening of October 23, 1963 he had attended an "ultra right" meeting headed by General Walker.[27]
According to FBI documents, at 7am on 11/23/1963, less than 24 hours after the assassination of JFK, Edwin Walker was in contact with a German newspaper editor named Helmut Muench. In their conversation, Walker told Muench that Lee Harvey Oswald, who was in prison for killing JFK, was the same man who had tried to kill him, Walker, on April 10, 1963. This story was printed in the German newspaper (the Deutsche NationalZeitung) on 11/29/1963. Walker was asked to testify for the Warren Commission, and in March, 1964, attorney Wesley Liebeler asked Walker how he learned that Lee Harvey Oswald had been his shooter by 11/23/1963, when Marina Oswald did not reveal that to anybody before December, 1963. Walker declined to answer the question, and nothing more was said about it.[28]
Angered by negative publicity he was receiving for his conservative political views, Walker began to file libel lawsuits against various media outlets. One of these suits was in response to coverage of his participation in the University of Mississippi riot, specifically that he had "led a charge of students against federal marshals" and that he had "assumed command of the crowd."[29] A Texas trial court in 1964 found the statements false and defamatory.[30] The decision was appealed, as Associated Press v. Walker, all the way to the United States Supreme Court,[31] but the Court ruled against Walker and found that although the statements may have been false, the Associated Press was not guilty of reckless disregard in their reporting about Walker. The Court, which had previously said that public officials could not recover damages unless they could prove actual malice, extended this to public figures as well.
By resigning instead of retiring, Walker was unable to draw a pension from the Army. He made statements at the time to the Dallas Morning News that he had "refused" to take his pension. However, he had made several previous requests for his pension dating back to 1973. The Army restored his pension rights in 1982.[32]
Walker, then 66, was arrested on June 23, 1976 for public lewdness in a restroom at a Dallas park and accused of fondling an undercover policeman.[33][34][35] He was arrested again in Dallas for public lewdness on March 16, 1977.[36][37] He pled no contest to one of the two misdemeanor charges, was given a suspended, 30-day jail sentence, and fined $1,000.[38]
He died of lung cancer at his home in Dallas in 1993.[39]
Walker (along with Air Force General Curtis LeMay) was cited [40][41] as inspiration for the Air Force General James Mattoon Scott character in the film Seven Days in May; in fact, Walker himself is mentioned by name in the film. While General Scott is portrayed by Burt Lancaster as smooth and formidable in the film, Walker was usually seen as abrasive and strident.[42]
A comparison can be seen in the film clips with Lancaster as Scott at [1] against Walker as himself at [2].
When Walker testified before Mississippi Senator John Stennis's subcommittee investigating "the muzzling of the military" in 1962, Walker testified,
Alaskan Senator Bob Bartlett then asked,
Walker then replied,
William F. Buckley, Jr. had considered Walker a potential leader of the Right but gave up on Walker in this period.[43]
Walker is also cited [44] as inspiration for General Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove
Walker is portrayed by Cameron Mitchell as a supporting character in the 1985 film Prince Jack. The movie includes a dramatization of Lee Harvey Oswald's attempt to shoot him from Walker's perspective.
