Back in 2012, in a series of semesters at UT Austin, I went through all 90 boxes of the personal papers of the resigned General Edwin Walker stored at the Briscoe Center for US History. The contents were illuminating in their implications for the JFK Assassination.
Walker was the only US General to resign in the 20th century. As it turned out, Walker resigned because of his radical right-wing belief that JFK was a Communist -- a belief he took as written from John Birch Society (JBS) literature.
Though he resigned in 1961, he had alsot tried to resign in 1959, when Eisenhower was US President, because he believed (per the JBS) that Eisenhower was also a Communist. Eisenhower rejected General Walker’s resignation and gave him a command over 10,000 troops in Augsburg Germany, as a reward for successfully protecting black students as they attended Little Rock High School in Arkansas in the previous two years.
While in Augsburg, the hapless General Walker clashed with the US Army newspaper, the Overseas Weekly, which had begun spying on his alleged homosexuality (when that was a US Army court-martial offense).
Walker sued that newspaper in civil court and won – but the next issue of the Overseas Weekly slammed Walker as a card-carrying member of the JBS. That was no big deal in the US Army, but in Europe during the 1961 Cold War it was a major deal. The Joint Chiefs all agreed THAT VERY DAY that Walker had to be removed from his post IMMEDIATELY.
Eight months later General Walker would resign, making him the only US General to resign in the 20th century.
According to a 1976 radical right-wing publication, The DeGuello Report (allegedly by Robert DePugh) General Walker was forced to resign not because of his JBS membership but because the Overseas Weekly had produced ample evidence of his homosexuality. That would be the only reason that Walker was forced to leave WITHOUT HIS 30-YEAR ARMY PENSION.
The official records were sealed, so we don’t know the full facts. But, if true, then for the rest of his life Walker lied about losing his Army pension – claiming it was his ethical decision to cut all ties with JFK’s regime. Walker then started the lie that JFK had fired him from the Army for his patriotic beliefs – just as President Harry Truman had fired the patriotic General MacArthur.
Many people believed that lie, including Dallas billionaire HL Hunt, who had supported General Douglas MacArthur for US President in 1952. Hunt quickly financed Walker’s move into a two-story home in Dallas in late 1963, and financed Walker’s 1962 campaign to become Governor of Texas (as a possible springboard to the White House).
Walker lost that campaign to John Connally. Later in 1962 Walker risked his reputation by calling for “ten thousand strong from every state in the union” to descend on Oxford, Mississippi to protest James Meredith’s bid to be the first black student at Ole Miss University.
Walker broadcast at the time, that he “was on the wrong side at Little Rock,” and now could be “on the right side at Ole Miss.” Thousands came. JFK sent the national guard to meet them. It turned into a long riot in which hundreds were wounded and two were killed. Here is a valuable news report from the period, freely available on YouTube:
On the heels of the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK and RFK arguably over-reacted, and instead of imprisoning Walker as (they should have) they sent him to an insane asylum for a 90-day evaluation. Sending Walker to an insane asylum was a big mistake, I say. Americans don’t mix psychiatry with politics.
So, not only the right wing, but the liberals also protested loudly – even the ACLU – even Thomas Szasz. Walker was out in three days. American liberals were shocked by the Ole Miss riots, including the few Dallas liberals like George De Mohrenschildt, Volkmar Schmidt, Everett Glover, and Michael Paine.
In December 1962, Walker’s lawyer in Mississippi was Dallas University president Robert Morris, who changed the trial focus to whether or not Walker was insane. It was a winning strategy. In January 1963, the Grand Jury in Mississippi concluded that Walker was not insane and therefore innocent of all charges.
Liberals all over the US were stunned by this acquittal. In February 1963, George De Mohrenschildt, Volkmar Schmidt, Everett Glover, and Michael Paine met Lee Harvey Oswald (LHO) for the first time at De Mohrenschildt’s and Glover’s homes.
Volkmar Schmidt publicly admitted urging to LHO that Walker was as bad as Hitler. On April 10th, 1963, LHO tried to murder General Walker at his home in Dallas. He missed.
Fast forward eight months to the JFK Assassination. The Warren Commission (WC) had learned that General Walker and his business partner, Robert Alan Surrey, were the culprits behind both the common “WANTED FOR TREASON: JFK” handbill, and the “WELCOME, MR. KENNEDY” black-bordered Ad in the Dallas Morning News that morning. accusing JFK of supporting Communism.
So, General Walker appeared before the WC on July 23, 1964 and was questioned by Wesley Liebeler, assistant counsel of the President’s Commission. Walker was asked point blank about LHO and he denied any knowledge of LHO, saying:
Mr. LIEBELER. You never even heard of Oswald?
General WALKER. ...I have no information of Oswald’s name ever being mentioned in my house, and I had never heard of the name with regard to the individual we are referring to at any time since I have been in Dallas or any other time.
Mr. LIEBELER. You have never heard of any connection until the assassination?
General WALKER. Until his activities of November 22...
This is the testimony that I claim to prove is Walker’s glaring perjury. In my 2012 studies at UT Austin, in those 90 boxes of Walker’s personal papers, I found a letter that Walker wrote to Senator Frank Church on June 23, 1975. This was during the Church Committee hearings, leading up to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). In that letter, which I reproduced in the intro, Walker told Senator Church that he had actually learned about LHO back in April, 1963. Here’s the relevant text:
July 23, 1975
Dear Senator Church,
The Warren Commission found and concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald attempted to assassinate the undersigned at his home, at 9 pm, on April 10, 1963.
The initial and immediate investigation at the time of the incident reported two men at my home one with a gun, seen by an eye-witness – a neighbor.
Within days I was informed by a Lieutenant on the Dallas City Police Force that Oswald was in custody by 12 p.m. that night for questioning. He was released on higher authority than that in Dallas...
Yours sincerely,
Edwin A. Walker
Notice that Walker did not name the person whom he claimed had informed him about LHO in April 1963. Nor was this the first time that Walker told this lie.
This should remind us of the weekend after the JFK Assassination. Let’s go back in time to and review the famous German Newspaper. DEUTSCHE NATIONALZEITUNG, and its article from an interview given by the resigned General Walker in the early hours of November 23, 1963 (less than 24 hours after the JFK Assassination). Here’s the English version of its first paragarph:
THE STRANGE CASE OF OSWALD (November 29, 1963)
The murderer of Kennedy made an attempt on U.S. General Walker’s life early in the summer when General Walker was sitting in his study. The bullet missed Walker’s head only by inches. Oswald was seized but the following investigation – as it was reported to us – was stopped by US Attorney General Robert Kennedy. In the case that Oswald would have been imprisoned for many years...he would not have been able to commit the murder of John F. Kennedy, the brother of Robert Kennedy.
There again is the same lie – its very first time in print – that LHO was arrested by the DPD and released the very night of LHO’s attempted murder of General Walker. Again the source of the claim was secret. But this time Walker’s story added a new lie about RFK – that RFK had done this for his asset, LHO.
BTW, as soon as this article surfaced on Saturday 29, November 1963, the German equivalent of the FBI quickly arrested the editor of the newspaper, who quickly gave up the reporter, Herman Muench (alias Hasso Thorsten). Muench admitted to the German FBI that Walker was the source of the story.
Walker would repeat these lies for the rest of his life. In later versions, Walker would change the title of his anonymous informant. Two-and-a-half years later, in April 4, 1967, in his newsletter to the Friends of Walker, he published a bulletin writing of himself in the third person. Here’s his ending paragraph:
OSWALD – A KNOWN CRIMINAL
In fact, at 4011 [Turtle Creek Blvd], Walker says that witnesses in Dallas are ample and adequate to establish that Oswald was picked up by the law enforcement agency between 9 PM and 12 midnight, April 10, 1963, after the incident. He was released. (Walker, 1967)
Again, Walker repeated the twin lies: (1) that LHO was arrested tha tnight; and (2) that LHO was quickly released. Walker again refuses to name the alleged “witnesses”. The Dallas Police denied any truth to these allegations.
Next year, his personal papers show, Walker wrote in his Friends of Walker newsletter in 1968 again of himself in the third person, this time on the occasion of the RFK Assassination. We skip to the end of the article.
THE US SENATE AND ITS SENATOR KENNEDY. I am neither shocked nor surprised…
If authority, in the hands of the Attorney General and the Justice Department, had not seen fit to free Oswald and his associates in the attempted assassination of Edwin A. Walker – there is no reason to doubt that President John F. Kennedy and Senator Robert F. Kennedy would be alive today. There are bullet holes in a room of this house, my private residence, that testify to this fact. (Walker, 1968)
Here again we see Walker claim that RFK had released LHO on the night of the Walker shooting. This paranoid delusion was never-ending for Walker. There’s more. Walker always suspected DPD Chief Jesse Curry of complicity with the allegedly Communist regime in Washington DC. So he rejected Curry’s cash offer to endorse Curry’s elementary book on the JFK Assassination. In his bulletin, Walker wrote:
CHIEF CURRY’S BOO-BOO, The significance of Marina’s December role – her story of the April crime – served the purposes of the “Open Case,” the Warren Report, the Curry book, and all official agencies regarding the November assassination, which was... exposure of a government that had been compromised by her and her husband, Lee, with their “Loner” connections and their protection by two chiefs of state. (Walker, 1969)
The “two chiefs of state” Walker alluded to there, whom Walker alleged protected their asset, LHO, were none other than JFK and RFK. Here again we see the Walker delusion that RFK had released LHO from prison on the night of the Walker shooting. There’s even more.
Here is an untitled draft of a two-page bulletin to the Friends of Walker mailing list, dated July 24, 1977. The draft has a short interesting paragraph of Walker worrying about the open case of his April 1963 shooting:
For seven months, since April 10th [until November 22, 1963], I had waited to hear some word from some city or county law enforcement agency. There was no word. I knew that Federal agents knew who had fired a bullet through the window at me for political reasons. (Walker, 1977)
One sentence stands out: “I knew that Federal agents knew who had fired a bullet through the window at me..." In this sentence, the source of the claim about his shooter was no longer a DPD Lieutenant (as in his 1975 letter to Senator Church) but a “Federal agent.”
The closest Federal agent to Walker that we know of was local Dallas FBI agent James Hosty, whose FBI assignment was to keep track of General Walker (not LHO). The final point is, that Walker in all these statements flatly contradicted his sworn WC testimony.
Was all this a paranoid fantasy? Or, was Walker deliberately protecting his source? I say the latter, though in his attempt at secrecy, it is likely that Walker filtered the facts to convey only the key point, namely, that some official in Dallas knew conclusively that LHO was his shooter back in April 1963, and had told this to Walker “within days” of the shooting.
How many days? The answer was suggested in 1992 by Dick Russell in his famous book, “The Man Who Knew Too Much”. The shooting was on Wednesday, April 10, 1963. WC witnesses Igor and Natasha Voshinin told Dick Russell that very early on Easter Sunday, April 14, 1963, their good friend George De Mohrenschildt came over for coffee, visibly upset.
George told them that he had seen a high powered rifle at LHO’s apartment the night before, and was sure that LHO had been Walker’s shooter only four days earlier. They urged George to tell the FBI, but he refused – he was on his way to Haiti. As soon as he left, Natasha called the FBI and told them what George had said.
There’s the first clue. If Natasha told somebody in the FBI that LHO was Walker’s shooter, and if the FBI called Walker immediately (as they should have) then Walker learned about LHO’s guilt only four days after the shooting. Just as he said in his letter to Senator Church. So the time frame matches.
But the Dallas FBI always insisted that they had no such record of that. This leads me to my CT. For the past seven years on this website I have proposed that the anonymous informant who told Walker that LHO had been his shooter “within days” of the shooting – was none other than the local Dallas FBI agent, James Hosty.
My evidence is the close relationship that Hosty had with Walker in Dallas, and the many ways in which his book, “Assignment Oswald” (1996) agreed with the radical right interpretation of LHO.
Newsman William Penn Jones, Jr. reported that FBI agent James Hosty was the regular Bridge partner of Robert Alan Surrey, whose business office was inside the home of General Walker. Hosty himself admitted that his first task in the FBI was to keep track of General Walker (Hosty, p. 4).
That’s a direct connection. So if (and only if) Natasha Voshinin had relayed her message to FBI agent James Hosty – we have further clues. First, that Hosty would have quickly called General Walker with the news, and next, that Hosty would have kept that report secret from the FBI office. Thus, the FBI has no record of it.
Why would Hosty withhold it? Because, IMO, Hosty had been working along with Surrey and Walker since June 1962 when LHO first flew into Fort Worth from the USSR. Hosty was not assigned to monitor LHO, but this was a political urgency for Hosty as well as for Surrey and Walker. They had a common cause.
Finally, the core theme of Hosty’s book “Assignment Oswald” (1996, titled as if he was officially assigned to monitor LHO instead of Walker) is that the JFK Assassination was the work of LHO in cooperation with KGB assassin Valerie Kostikov.
The Warren Commission rejected that theory categorically, reaffirming that the JFK Assassination was clearly not a USSR deed. But the theory about Kostikov is still circulating among the US right-wing.
In conclusion, IMO the JFK Assassination was a right-wing plot, and it has never been resolved because the US right-wing has been powerful enough to keep the truth hidden for over 60 years and counting. This has given a big political advantage to the US radical right, enabling them to entrench in the US, as we see all around us today.
Thank you,
--Paul Trejo
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