Walker, Edwin Anderson

(b. 10 November 1909 in Center Point, Texas; d. 31 October 1993 in Dallas, Texas), career U.S. Army officer who resigned his commission in 1961 after being accused of right-wing indoctrination of his troops.

Walker was one of two sons of George Pinckney Walker, a Texas rancher, and Charlotte Thornton, a homemaker. After completing high school at New Mexico Military Institute in 1927 he attended West Point, graduating in the bottom quarter of the class of 1931. Commissioned an artillery officer, he had reached the rank of captain by 1940 and earned a reputation as a “hell-for-leather” polo player. During World War II, Walker volunteered for the First Special Services Force, a commando unit that fought in the Aleutians, Italy, France, and Germany. By the end of the war he was a lieutenant colonel with a Silver Star, Bronze Star, and other decorations from the United States, France, Great Britain, and Norway.

Early in the cold war Soviet efforts to destabilize the governments of Greece and Turkey galvanized Walker’s opposition to communist expansion. Assigned to Korea in 1951, he chafed under the constraint of limited war, which he believed “hog-tied” the army. Despite a promotion to brigadier general, Walker left Korea harboring suspicion that subversive forces in his own government were responsible for the Korean stalemate.

A 1957 assignment as commander of the Arkansas Military District placed Walker, now a major general, in charge of the state’s reserve component. The posting seemed routine, but within months international attention was focused on his command. Arkansas governor Orval Faubus defied a federal court order to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School. President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the state national guard and placed it and troops from the 101st Airborne Division under Walker’s command. The general had reservations about forced integration and believed federalization of the Arkansas National Guard was unnecessary. Unable to persuade his superiors to modify their action, Walker carried out their directives, integrating Central High and maintaining order.

On 4 August 1959, with the integration crisis over, Walker submitted his resignation, claiming that a “5th column conspiracy … nullified the effectiveness of my ideas and principles.” The resignation was rejected, and Walker was assigned to command the Twenty-fourth Infantry Division in Germany. Between his tour in Korea and assignment to Germany the general embraced the far right, joining the John Birch Society in 1959.

The new commander of the Twenty-fourth Division used the troop information program to expound his anticommunist views and conspiracy theories. Overseas Weekly, a sensational publication aimed at military personnel serving abroad, accused Walker of indoctrinating troops with John Birch literature and calling prominent Americans “pink.” After President John F. Kennedy ordered an investigation, Walker was relieved of command on 17 April 1961. Two months later he was officially admonished for making derogatory remarks about prominent Americans and trying to influence the way his troops voted. On 1 November 1961 he resigned his commission, forgoing his military retirement pension to free himself from “the power of little men.”

Returning to Texas, Walker established a residence in Dallas, where his conservative views found support. Over the next few months he voiced his opinions in various forums and was featured on the cover of the 4 December 1961 Newsweel magazine. Alerting Americans to the dangers of communism, he identified New Dealers, Fair Dealers, and New Frontiersmen as part of a conspiracy to liquidate constitutional rights. In April 1962 Walker testified before a special Senate subcommittee investigating charges that the government was muzzling military officers. His testimony provided little support for his accusations and disappointed even his right-wing supporters. Against the advice of conservative senators Barry Goldwater and Strom Thurmond, Walker filed in the Democratic primary for governor of Texas in February 1962. His notoriety could not overcome his lack of financial backing and political experience, and he ran last in a six-man race on 5 May, receiving less than 10 percent of the vote.

In late September 1962 Walker traveled to Oxford, Mississippi, to encourage demonstrators attempting to block the enrollment of James Meredith, a black air force veteran, at the University of Mississippi. Although he disappointed vehement proponents of segregation by refusing to assume leadership of the protesters, Walker was arrested on 1 October and transported to a federal mental facility. Government charges of seditious conspiracy, insurrection, and rebellion were apparently based on an erroneous Associated Press story that Walker had led an attack on federal marshals. Released on bond on 7 October, he received a hero’s reception in Dallas. Later, after a grand jury failed to return an indictment, charges were dropped. Walker sued Associated Press for libel and won a $500,000 judgment, which was set aside by the U.S. Supreme Court because Walker was a “public figure” and the story had been written “without malice.”

On 10 April 1963 Walker narrowly escaped death when a bullet missed his head by inches. The assailant was not immediately apprehended, but during the Warren Commission’s hearings into the assassination of President Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald’s wife, Marina, testified that her husband had fired at Walker. The conservative Texan did not mourn the president’s death. In fact he refused to lower his flag to half-staff. He did, however, frequently fly it upside down to symbolize the distress he believed faced the nation.

Following Kennedy’s assassination Walker faded from public view. In 1976 he pleaded no contest to a charge of public lewdness for making sexual advances to an undercover policeman in a Dallas park. The passage of years did not diminish his conviction that communism posed an imminent peril. In an interview with a reporter from Texas Monthly in 1990, the eighty-one-year-old general remained as stridently anticommunist as he had been when he was relieved of command in 1961. In November 1993 the old soldier, who had never married, died of lung disease. He is buried at the Center Point Cemetery, near the Texas ranch his family had established in the nineteenth century.

In battle Walker repeatedly demonstrated his willingness to sacrifice his life for his country, but limited war, coexistence with communism, and the expansion of federal power were alien to him. He sacrificed his career rather than compromise his principles. When the army granted him a pension in 1982, it called Walker “a truly dedicated American soldier who firmly believed that insufficient action was being taken within the military establishment to combat the threat of communism.” The army’s assessment may be accurate, but Edwin A. Walker will be remembered for the right-wing activism that brought him notoriety in the early 1960s. If his behavior did not provide a model for the conspiracy-crazed generals in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 black comedy film Dr. Strangelove, it could have.

The Edwin A. Walker Papers are in the Barker Texas History Center, University of Texas, Austin. The general’s most comprehensive biography is Chris Cravens, “Edwin A. Walker and the Right Wing in Dallas, 1960-1966” (M.A. thesis, Southwest Texas State University, 1991), which provides details about Walker’s youth and army career not readily available elsewhere. A cover article, “’I Am a Walking Program,’ Says … the General,” News-weel (4 Dec. 1961) also summarizes his career, his beliefs, and the events that led to his resignation. Kent and Phoebe Courtney’s The Case of General Edwin A. Walter (1961) delves into his “Pro-Blue” program and the investigation that prompted his resignation. Published by the Conservative Society of America, the book makes no claim of objectivity. The liberal view of his conduct as commanding general of the Twenty-fourth Infantry Division is expounded in an undated document, “The Dismissal of Maj. Gen. Edwin A. Walker: A Special Report by Congressman Morris K. Udall.” A more evenhanded assessment is Franklyn A. Johnson, “Edwin A. Walker: Man on Horseback or Modern Major General?,” Vital Speeches of the Day (15 Feb. 1962). Facts on File (1961, 1962, and 1963) provides an overview of the general’s public activities during the three most contentious years of his life. R. A. Surrey, The Law of the Land (1963), released by Walker’s American Eagle Publishing Company, presents his account of his arrest and detention following the demonstration at the University of Mississippi in 1962, and Gary Cartwright’s “Old Soldier,” Texas Monthly (Feb. 1991), reviews his career and describes Walker’s physical condition and political outlook not long before his death. Obituaries are in the. Dallas Morning News (1 Nov. 1993) and New York Times (2 Nov. 1993).

Brad Agnew