Congressman Walter: The Lion of the US House

Francis Walter was a humble man, born in 1894, from the stock of Main Street America – the Lehigh Valley area of eastern Pennsylvania. Known, in his youth, as a natural leader with a keen mind and a disarming wit, young Francis Walter went on, in his early adult years to achieve financial success in the steel and banking industries.  Yet in 1917, while many similarly successful young men (such as Joseph Kennedy Sr.) were looking for ways to avoid service during WWI, Walter joined the US navy without hesitation. He would later earn an officer’s commission and during WWII, aged well into his 40s, Walter would again step forward to serve his nation.

While in his 30s, he was urged by leaders throughout his community to run for an open seat in the United States House of Representatives. He would go on to represent the Lehigh Valley area in congress for thirty years. Congressman Walter was a member of the Democratic Party and a loyal supporter of President Franklin Roosevelt and the idea that the government had a responsibility to help the “little guy” who was willing to work hard to better himself. He was a strong proponent of the New Deal policies of FDR.

As a member of congress and later, Chairman of the House committee on Un-American Affairs, he would develop a growing concern over the efforts of foreign governmental backed subversive activity in the United States. In the years leading up the Second World War, Congressman Walter, stood firm in fighting the influence and espionage of the Axis alliance of Fascist nations including Imperial Japan and the Nazi government of German leader Adolph Hitler.  After WWII, Congressman Walter became alarmed by a new threat to American security.

Soviet sponsored and funded Communism had tried, unsuccessfully so, for decades to gain influence and a voice in US policy and governmental circles. However, in the 1940s, these Marxist agents had seen considerable growth and success toward achieving their initial aims. This was due, in large part, to the uneasy and loose alliance with the Soviet Union during WWII. This short-lived and dangerous partnership helped US Communists to give their poisonous and untenable ideology, validation in limited circles of American society. Further, as the Communists sanitized their message to sound similar to New Deal policies during the Great Depression, some well meaning yet, gullible, souls where tricked in to buying into the this secret, cult like movement. Communists first started to gain a foothold in academia, radio, organized labor and motion pictures as well as in our own government. Taking their marching orders from the Kremlin, this secret, undercover Communist movement was beginning to spread to influential corners in American society.

Congressman Walter and many others, Democrat and Republican alike, began to be concerned by the fast spreading wave of Communism infiltration in American cultural and governmental circles. It would not be long before the fight against Communist sponsored espionage became a priority of the US Government.  Leading that important and ultimately victorious, fight was Congressman Francis Walter – the humble son of the Lehigh Valley. Working hand-in-hand with the various US intelligence and law enforcement agencies, Congressman Walter, the fighting New Deal Democrat, was able to slowly undercover the Communist plan to subvert American society and it’s security apparatus. What disturbed him most was how Communist were camouflaging themselves as liberal and praying on the gullible. They recruited many of their hapless followers by plying them with emotional liberal arguments as opposed to logic. It was no surprise when, decades later after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it turned out that many of the so called “liberals” were in fact working for the enemies of America.

Through the thousands of hours of work in coordination with his committee and virtually every security organ of the US Government, Congressman Walter read into the record a detailed list of Communist objectives, based on their own communiques, words and policies, concerning their planned destruction of the United states. These became known officially as the “Communist Goals”  list and they were read into The Congressional Record on January 10, 1963 and while supported by overwhelmingly by the American people in a January 23, 1963 Gallup Poll, the goals were also supported by the vast majority of members or congress and lauded by President John F. Kennedy, Vice-president Lyndon B. Johnson, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy as well as the Joint Chiefs of staff.

Less than three decades later, the ‘Communist Goals” would be verified by the opening of the  Security Achieves of the former Soviet Union.

The goals, as published, were as follows:

1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.

2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.

3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament [by] the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.

4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.

5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.

6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.

7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.

8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev’s promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.

9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.

10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.

11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N.  as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)

12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.

13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.

14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.

15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.

16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.

17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers’ associations. Put the party line in textbooks.

18. Gain control of all student newspapers.

19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.

20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.

21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.

22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to “eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms.”

23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. “Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art.”

24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them “censorship” and a violation of free speech and free press.

25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.

26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as “normal, natural, healthy.”

27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with “social” religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a “religious crutch.”

28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of “separation of church and state.”

29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.

30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the “common man.”

31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the “big picture.” Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.

32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture–education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.

33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.

34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.

36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.

37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.

38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand [or treat].

39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.

40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.

41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. (“It Takes A village” authors note) Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.

42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use [“]united force[“] to solve economic, political or social problems.

43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.

44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.

45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court

   Thanks to patriots like Democratic Congressman Walter, Communism was eventually destroyed as a global theat. A future President would read Congressman Walter’s list in January of 1963. He was shocked by it and some eighteen years later, the day he took the oath of office as our 40th President of the United States, he would, later that day, meet with his military chiefs of staff and tell them, “I’m sick and tired of trying to contain Communism and our new policy will be to destroy it as a viable threat.’ This president would later develop a plan that would drag the Soviet Union and it’s puppets into a ramped up cold war, which would ultimately bankrupt them and cause their people, at long last, to rise up in a successful revolt. That Communist slaying President was the great Ronald Reagan.

Despite our victory over communism abroad, one can tell, from fifty-five year-old list above, that there is still work to be done. Interestingly enough, another future US President would also read Congressman Walter’s list as a child. His father, a rags to riches real estate developer who posted the goals on the kitchen wall of his family home. As the young boy grew, he never forgot the “Communist Goals” list or its implications. That boy would one day himself become President and his name is Donald Trump. He will make sure that those lingering issues from the get stomped out.