Investigations: The Muzzled Military

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Capitol Hill's cavernous Senate caucus room was alive with a sense of impending drama. Newsmen swarmed, all 250 public seats were filled early, and standees wedged themselves along the sidelines. All had come to see what promised to be the most exciting congressional hearing since Robert Kennedy, as counsel of a Senate subcommittee investigating labor racketeering, matched acid insults with Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa.

Last week's hearing was the start of an inquiry by a Senate Armed Services subcommittee, chaired by Mississippi's calm, courtly John Stennis, into an issue that is both hotly topical and permanently challenging. The central question: How far should U.S. military leaders be allowed to go in public expressions of views that might run contrary to civilian-controlled national policy?

The issue is topical because U.S. right-wingers have rallied around the cry that the Kennedy Administration is trying to "muzzle" the military; they strongly imply that this means governmental softness against Communism. But in a deeper way, the Stennis hearings were aimed at trying to resolve a conflict that has existed throughout the life of the republic. Freedom of speech is a basic right of every U.S. citizen—and that right presumably extends even to military leaders. But civilian control over the military is another fundamental tenet of U.S. Government; to be effective, it must include restraint of generals and admirals in their public pronouncements.

Enter Walker. When the Kennedy Administration took over, it made evident that it was going to crack down on military talkers. The first victim was Chief of Naval Operations, Arleigh Burke. A routine anti-Communist Burke speech was heavily cut by Pentagon censors on grounds that it might roil negotiations for the release of two U.S. RB-47 flyers held prisoner in the Soviet Union. In the week that followed, lesser military leaders submitting speeches for clearance got them back heavily blue-penciled. Finally, last spring, the controversy blew wide open with the Walker case.

Major General Edwin A. Walker, commander of the Army's 24th Infantry Division in Germany, came under fire both for speeches and for his troop education program. He labeled Harry Truman, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt and former Secretary of State Dean Acheson as "definitely pink." Walker's "pro-blue" educational program boosted conservative candidates for office back home and brought on charges that Walker was dabbling in partisan politics. After he was admonished and reassigned to another command in Hawaii, Walker resigned from the Army. He found a champion in South Carolina's Senator Strom Thurmond, himself a reserve major general (see box). Thurmond complained that Walker was being pilloried; the Senator pushed for a Senate investigation of "muzzling," brought on the hearings that opened last week.