Shot in the Dark

Victor Reuther decided to skip a special union conference in downtown Detroit and spend a quiet evening at home. The kids were sent up to bed as usual after dinner. A couple of friends dropped in to chat a while. After they left, Vic Reuther, a top policy strategist in the mighty C.I.O. United Auto Workers, picked up a morning paper and sat down in a straight-backed wooden chair to read. His wife Sophie lounged comfortably on a sofa a few feet away.

Suddenly a shotgun muzzle was thrust through the front living room window; the crash of falling glass was drowned out by a double blast. A spray of lead pellets the size of peas ripped Vic Reuther's head and right shoulder--his shattered eyeglasses and his dental bridge flew to the rug ten feet away. Slowly he rose, clutched his bleeding face, then fell to the floor crying, "Call an ambulance." Sophie Reuther called police, then rushed screaming into the dark, empty street.

Keep Fighting. Thus last week a cowardly attack was repeated in Detroit almost to the last detail. Thirteen months before, an assassin had fired a shotgun through a kitchen window in the home of Vic's elder brother Walter, and shot down the cocky, redheaded president of U.A.W. Walter Reuther's right arm is still crippled from the blast that hit him.

Walter learned of his brother's injury from a radio bulletin as he was riding home from a union session, accompanied by two bodyguards, in the armored car the union recently bought for him. At Redford Receiving Hospital he comforted 37-year-old Vic while the doctors pumped four pints of blood into him. "Remember, Vic," said Walter, "how you held my hand a year ago. Now I'm holding yours. Keep fighting, Vic, keep fighting." Vic mumbled, "Look after the kids . . . and Sophie." At Henry Ford Hospital, where he was transferred a few hours later, doctors dug six pieces of lead out of his body and removed his right eye.

Who & Why? Somebody was out to get the hard-driving Reuther boys of U.A.W. But who? And why? The Reuthers had made enemies in their climb to power in U.A.W., but Vic, the quiet union educational director and behind-the-scenes strategist, insisted that he could not imagine who would want to kill him. Walter Reuther wasn't quite sure either: "The same people who paid to have me shot paid to have my brother shot and for the same reason. They could be diehard elements among employers, or they could be Communist or fascist agents." Michigan Senators Arthur Vandenberg and Homer Ferguson guessed that it was the Communists (the party hotly denied it), got the U.S. Senate to call for FBI investigation. Others guessed that it might be the work of some crackpot, either anti-union or a U.A.W. man soured by bitter fights within the union.

Police were convinced that the two shootings were related, but their only suspect in the first case--a deposed U.A.W. local officer named Carl Bolton--was snugly locked in Jackson Prison for burglary on the night Vic was shot. Faced with a second attack before the first was solved, detectives tried to make the most of a handful of clues: the neighbors' report of an old-vintage car roaring away after the shooting; a double-barreled shotgun, two empty shells found in the shrubbery outside Vic Reuther's window, and one well-defined heel print in the mud. It was not much to go on--little more than Detroit's fumbling police had on the night Walter Reuther was shot last year.

This week Walter Reuther and the Ford Motor Co. reached a truce in the three-week-old U.A.W. strike which had laid off more than 100,000 workers. They agreed to resume production while a three-man board arbitrated union charges of a speed-up on Ford assembly lines.

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