Edwin Walker was born Kerr County, Texas, on November 10, 1909. He graduated from the New Mexico Military Institute in 1927. This was followed by attendance at West Point Academy (1927 to 1931). During the Second World War Walker commanded a joint Canadian-American commando team in Italy.
In 1947 Walker helped the monarchists defeat Communist insurgents during the Greek Civil War. Walker also saw action in the Korean War. On his return to the United States he became commander of the Arkansas Military District in Little Rock.
On 3rd September 1957, the governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, used the National Guard to stop black children from attending the local high school in Little Rock. Woodrow Mann, the reforming mayor of the city, disagreed with this decision and on 4th September telegraphed President Dwight Eisenhower and asked him to send federal troops to Little Rock.
On 24th September, 1957, President Dwight Eisenhower, went on television and told the American people: "At a time when we face grave situations abroad because of the hatred that communism bears towards a system of government based on human rights, it would be difficult to exaggerate the harm that is being done to the prestige and influence and indeed to the safety of our nation and the world. Our enemies are gloating over this incident and using it everywhere to misrepresent our whole nation. We are portrayed as a violator of those standards which the peoples of the world united to proclaim in the Charter of the United Nations."
After trying for eighteen days to persuade Orval Faubus to obey the ruling of the Supreme Court, Eisenhower decided to order paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division, to protect black children going to Little Rock Central High School. The white population of Little Rock were furious that they were being forced to integrate their school and Faubus described the federal troops as an army of occupation.
Elizabeth Eckford and the other eight African American students that entered the school (Carlotta Walls, Jefferson Thomas, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Pattillo, Ernest Green, Terrance Roberts, Gloria Ray and Minnijean Brown) suffered physical violence and constant racial abuse. Parents of four of the children lost their jobs because they had insisted in sending them to a white school. Woodrow Mann and his family received death threats and Klu Klux Klan crosses were burnt on his front lawn.
Walker, a supporter of the John Birch Society, was totally opposed to school desegragation. However, as commander of the Arkansas Military District he was forced to implement the orders of Dwight Eisenhower.
In October 1959 Major General Walker was appointed commander of the 24th Infantry Division in Europe and stationed in Augsburg, Germany. In April 1961 Walker was accused of indoctrinating his troops with right-wing literature from the John Birch Society. With the agreement of President John F. Kennedy, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara relieved Walker of his command and announced an investigation into the affair. Kennedy was accused of trying to suppress the anti-Communist feelings of the military. Walker resigned from the army in protest about the way he had been treated.
In September 1961 Walker organized the protests against the enrollment of James Meredith at the University of Mississippi. Another incident the following year resulted in two reporters being killed. Attorney General Robert Kennedy responded by issuing a warrant for Walker's arrest on the charges of seditious conspiracy, insurrection, and rebellion.
Walker now became a leading figure in the fight against what he considered to be the liberal establishment. Based in Dallas, he gave many speeches around the country denouncing communism and liberalism. In February 1962 Walker stood for governor of Texas. Although he gained the support of Barry Goldwater, Walker finished last and John Connally went on to be governor.
On 10th April, 1963, Walker was victim of an assassination attempt while he sat at a desk in his Dallas home. It was later claimed that Lee Harvey Oswald had taken the shot at Walker. Marina Oswald reported that she "asked him what happened, and he said that he just tried to shoot General Walker. I asked him who General Walker was. I mean how dare you to go and claim somebody's life, and he said "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?." Because he told me... he was something equal to what he called him a fascist."
Film on Edwin Walker
However, there was a witness to the shooting. Kirk Coleman saw two men making their escape, one stopped to place something in the back of his Ford sedan, then they both drove off in different cars. As Oswald could not drive this has raised serious doubts if he could have been involved in this attempt on Walker's life.
Afer the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a photograph of Walker's home was found among Oswald's possessions. When the photograph was turned over to the Warren Commission by the FBI, a hole had been pushed through it right in the spot where the license plate on the car had been, making the car unidentifiable (it did not belong to Walker). Another photograph, taken by the Dallas police, showed Oswald's possessions laid out on the floor of police headquarters. This included the photograph of Walker's home, without the hole obscuring the license plate.
Edwin Walker died in Dallas on 31st October 1993. The Major General Edwin A. Walker Society was started in 1999 as a "closed, anti-Communist association of active duty and retired officers and noncommissioned officers who have taken upon themselves the mission of combating the communistic forces of Cultural Marxism, multiculturalism, the United Nations and Boshevist influences in the military".
We believe the American system of government, a Constitutional Republic, is the finest yet developed by man.
We believe the traditional moral values of our Judeo-Christian heritage form the cornerstone of Western Civilization, and that the family is the basic and most vital unit of society.
We believe the free market system, competitive capitalism, and private enterprise afford the widest opportunity and highest standard of living for all.
We believe in the dignity of the individual. The Society welcomes and enjoys the participation in its ranks of individuals from every walk of life and from all ethnic, racial, and religious backgrounds. Judging others only by character and ability - as we wish to be judged ourselves - our common bond is a love for liberty and our rejection of totalitarianism under any label.
We believe that the rights of the individual are endowed by his Creator, not by governments; that the proper function of government should be limited to the protection of the rights to life, liberty, and property; and that individual rights are inseparably linked to individual responsibility.
We believe in patriotism based on principle, not on pragmatism, personality, or partisan politics.
To begin with, General Walker had a perfect motive for wanting to kill President Kennedy whom he regarded as his
sworn enemy. He had been forced to go into retirement in 1961 after the President had learned that Walker was systematically indoctrinating the troops under his command, in Germany, with Birchite propaganda.
And in September 1962, when Federal troops swarmed into Mississippi to stop the race riots at Oxford University, General Walker had been arrested as a ringleader, charged with sedition and subsequently committed - briefly - to a psychiatric institution.
When Adiai Stevenson visited Dallas, on October 24, 1963, he was spat upon and assaulted by Walker's cohorts parading as the 'National Indignation Convention'. Walker and his like-minded aide. Colonel L. Robert Castorr, also made inflammatory speeches against the Kennedy Administration at meetings of anti-Castro Cuban groups in the Dallas area.
On the eve of the Kennedy visit to Dallas, General Walker really outdid himself. In front of his home at 4011 Turtle Creek, he flew his three flags upside down - an international distress signal. After the assassination, and in defiance of the half-staff mourning period that had been proclaimed, Walker promptly flew all of his flags right side up again - at full staff.
Walker also had printed 5,000 copies of a handbill marked 'Wanted for Treason' which, in the words of the Warren Report, 'bore a reproduction of a front and profile photograph of the President and set forth a series of inflammatory charges against him.'
These handbills, openly describing President Kennedy as a traitor, were made to resemble the 'Wanted for Murder' poster the FBI uses in its hunt for the Ten Most Wanted' criminals. This similarity is of itself full of dire meaning, for the men thus profiled in an FBI poster are considered highly dangerous thugs who at the first sign of resistance will be gunned down mercilessly.
