Unmuzzled

At 52, he remained a stalwart figure of a man. Had he still been in uniform, he could have worn upon his breast several rows of ribbons earned in distinguished service in the U.S. Army. As he testified last week before a U.S. Senate subcommittee, he sought desperately to bring home to Americans his notion of the meaning and menace of international Communism. Yet despite all this--his physical appearance, his record and the sincerity of his intentions--resigned Major General Edwin Anderson Walker cut a pathetic figure.

Den of Iniquity. In a day and a half before the subcommittee chaired by Mississippi's Senator John Stennis, Walker told how he had been "muzzled" by the U.S.'s executive branch in his attempts to indoctrinate his troops against Communism, and how, when he persisted, he was removed from his command of the 24th Infantry Division in Germany, and finally resigned from the Army. Now, Walker could feel unmuzzled at last.

His jaw muscles working nervously as he paused in midsentence to grope for words, Walker assailed, as being soft on Communism, a whole Who's Who in America: Dwight Eisenhower, Eleanor Roosevelt, Assistant Defense Secretary Arthur Sylvester, USIA Director Edward R. Murrow, Commentators Walter Cronkite Eric Sevareid, Writers John Gunther, Max Lerner, Joseph Barnes, and Harry and Bonaro Overstreet. (It turned though, that he had not read the books that he denounced as bad reading his troops.) He charged that he had "framed in a den of iniquity" was and the victim of a mysterious "real control apparatus" dedicated to a "no-win" war policy for the U.S. "I was a scapegoat of an unwritten policy of collaboration and collusion with the international Communist conspiracy . . ." Tower of Babel. Such talk puzzled the Senators. Just what, asked Alaska Democrat Bob Bartlett, did Walker mean by "real control apparatus." Replied Walker: "The real control apparatus" can be identified by its effects and what it is doing, it did in Cuba, what it is doing in the Congo, what it did in Korea. All these were done by people. So the apparatus is in those who wanted to see these happen, and the propaganda front are using for this and the means to do it with is the United Nations, which is the nearest thing to the Tower of Babel that has ever been built." Unenlightened, Bartlett pressed Walker for the names of some apparatus members: "I think our country is entitled to the names of these people because, according to this statement, they are traitors and ready to let this country go over to the enemy." Walker named of State Dean Rusk and State Department Counselor Walt Whitman Rostow as "people who appear to think the same lines as the apparatus." All in all, it was a shoddy and confused display of name-calling without evidence. Senators of all persuasions, saddened by the performance, forbore to question him hard. Upon leaving the hearing room. Walker paused long enough to throw a right jab at a questioning newsman-- Tom Kelly of the Scripps-Howard Washington Daily News. Then he headed back to Texas, where he is a candidate for Governor--and seems likely to finish low among six Democratic primary contenders.

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