# Edwin Walker Edwin Anderson Walker (1909-1993) was a U.S. Army major general whose far-right political activism inside the military forced his 1961 resignation, making him a touchstone for [[John Birch Society]]-style anti-communism and an earlier-generation prototype of the militarized conspiracism [[The Octopus]] frame tracks. ## The "Pro-Blue" affair and after In 1961 the Army admonished Walker for his "Pro-Blue" troop-indoctrination program -- which drew on John Birch Society and Billy James Hargis materials -- and for trying to influence his soldiers' votes in violation of the Hatch Act. He resigned his commission, only the second 20th-century U.S. general to do so. In 1962 he helped agitate the Ole Miss riot over James Meredith's enrollment (a 15-hour riot that left two dead) and was arrested for inciting it; the same year he ran in the Texas Democratic gubernatorial primary and finished last with roughly 10% of the vote. In April 1963 he survived an assassination attempt at his Dallas home that the Warren Commission later attributed to Lee Harvey Oswald. ## Epistemic status Walker's resignation, Ole Miss arrest, and gubernatorial loss are documented. The famous claim that "Eisenhower is a conscious agent of the communist conspiracy" is properly [[Robert Welch]]'s, not Walker's -- Walker belongs to that Birch milieu and used similar rhetoric, but the specific Eisenhower line should be attributed to Welch. Beyond the Warren Commission's official finding, the assassination-attempt and JFK threads are contested by revisionists; that is conspiracy territory. ## See also - [[The Octopus]] - [[John Birch Society]] - [[Robert Welch]]