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42 Chapter 2 Putsch On April 16, 1961, the Overseas Weekly, a controversial tabloid newspaper sold mostly on U.S. military bases in Europe, published an article entitled “Military Channels Used to Push Birch Ideas.”1 The article alleged that Major General Edwin A. Walker, a decorated war hero of both the Second World War and the Korean War, and since October 1959 the commander of the Twenty-Fourth Infantry Division, based in Augsburg, West Germany, had been indoctrinating his troops with John Birch Society material as part of a program known as “Pro-Blue.” On April 17, Secretary of the Army Elvis J. Stahr relieved Walker of his command, pending a formal investigation of the charges against him. As a result of this investigation, Walker was officially “admonished” for his activities. This, though, was far from the end of the matter. Spurred on by the Walker affair and also by broader concerns about the kinds of anticommunist propaganda and educational programs the military was engaged in, on June 28, 1961, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, J. William Fulbright (D-AR), sent a private memorandum to President Kennedy and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, expressing his worries about the seemingly increasingly close relationship between the ultraright and the U.S. military, and asserting the need to maintain civilian control of the military in the United States. “If the military is infected with [the] virus of rightwing radicalism, the danger is worthy of attention,” the senator wrote. He pointed to the April 1961 attempted coup d’état against Charles de Gaulle in France by retired generals who were opposed to his policies in Algeria—and who had intended to create an anticommunist military junta—as an example of the “ultimate danger” the nation faced.2 Walker resigned from the army in November 1961 and entered the political fray, running for governor of Texas in 1962 and becoming a target for assassination by Lee Harvey Oswald a year later. He was also the star witness at hearings undertaken by the Special Preparedness Subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee, “Military Cold War Education and Speech Review Policies,” which ran from January to June 1962 in the aftermath of the Fulbright memo, largely as a result of the urgings of Democratic South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond and other conservative members of Congress. This chapter examines the Walker affair and its significance for the John Birch Society in detail. It explores concerns that the rise of the Birchers heralded either a fascist takeover of the United States, or given their—and other right- Putsch  43 wing groups’—apparent connection with members of the armed forces, a move toward military dictatorship in the country. It also considers some of the wider social and cultural anxieties of the time, including fears of brainwashing and the frustrating realities of the early Cold War period. Pro-Blue The Overseas Weekly article of April 16, 1961, reported that Walker had established a Special Warfare unit within the Twenty-Fourth Infantry Division in October 1960 to conduct a “Pro-Blue” campaign, designed (in Walker’s words) to give a “new and vital approach towards anticommunism” and a “positive approach toward the defeat of open Communist subversion of the American way of life.” It noted the connection between the name of Walker’s “indoctrination” program and the Birch Society’s Blue Book, informed readers that Robert Welch’s The Life of John Birch was being distributed to the division’s company and battery day rooms, that the Society’s magazine American Opinion was on sale at army newsstands, and that the division’s own weekly paper, the Taro Leaf, had published “at least one article” from the Birch magazine. It also alleged that before the creation of the Pro-Blue program in January 1960, Walker had given a speech to a parent-teacher association in Augsburg during which he described legendary newsman and current director of the U.S. Information Agency Edward R. Murrow, newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann, and CBS commentator Eric Sevareid as “confirmed Communists,” and former president Harry Truman, former secretary of state Dean Acheson, and former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt as “definitely pink.” He was also said to have claimed that communism had “infiltrated every institution in the United States in an attempt to overthrow our way of life,” and that communists had control of 60 percent of the American press, TV, and radio industry.3 After news of the allegations against him broke, Walker issued...

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