Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,739

This is the grave of Vernon Walters, though his whole life he preferred to be called Dick.

Born in New York City in 1917, Walters had a bit of an odd childhood. His father was an English insurance guy and he didn’t really value education that much in his children. So despite growing up mostly in England and France and learning several languages, he had almost no formal education and dropped out of school completely by the age of 16 to work in his father’s insurance firm. He joined the Army in 1941, serving in Africa and Italy. His excellent language skills, which included fluency in Portuguese, meant that he had a lot more skills than just holding a gun and he became the liaison between the Brazilian troops fighting for the Allies and the U.S. Fifth Army.

What this all meant is that Walters would have a long career as a leading interpreter, but not, say, interpreting literature. No, he interpreted for presidents and other leading politicians. He was fluent in French, Portuguese, Italian, and Spanish, and could get by pretty well in German. The Truman administration brought him on as a translator and he actually grew quite close to Truman and became a really trusted interpreter. In fact, although he was not needed in translation for this, he personally accompanied Truman on his visit to Asia before he fired Douglas MacArthur, trying to calm the general down. It seems that Walters wasn’t just great as a translator, but he had great diplomatic skills too. I’m not actually sure what he was doing in Greece, as per the grave. I’m sure it was dirty though, as the rest of this post will suggest.

Eisenhower also found Walters useful. He was at every NATO summit the president attended and was the most important translator for the administration. He did the translation between Eisenhower and Franco when the president met the fascist. Sometimes he was needed for other American missions in Europe and would be based at the Marshall Plan headquarters in Paris. He was in the car in Caracas when the protestors attacked Richard Nixon. The VP was not hurt but Walters had a bunch of facial cuts due to broken glass. This brought he and Nixon personally close. Walters became pretty far right as time went on too, including suggesting American military intervention in Italy if they elected a Socialist. This kind of thing became his specialty. Still in the Army and eventually rising to the rank of lieutenant general, Walters was involved in some of the worst covert operations in this nation’s history. He was all mixed up in the coup against Mossadegh in Iran in 1953. He was also involved in the grossness that led to U.S. support for the 1964 military coup in Brazil.

Well, Nixon liked that sort of thing. He became a real insider. One of his tasks when Nixon took over was to sneak Kissinger to North Vietnam for secret talks, doing this by borrowing a plane from his personal friend, former French leader Georges Pompidou, after they had become close when the Prime Minister was astounded by Walters’ skill at French. So, in 1972, Nixon named Walters Deputy Director for the Central Intelligence Agency and actually became acting CIA head after James Schlesinger left in 1973. John Ehrlichmann called Walters a “good friend of the White House” in the CIA. When that guy is calling you that, you know this was a person who was in the grossest stuff possible. Now, Walters and Nixon were close, but Walters was always looking out for himself first and he refused flat out to get involved to help Nixon cover up Watergate. This of course saved his career. But he was a Republican all the way at this point and was involved in some of the nasty work to overthrow Allende in Chile. Some really dismissed him as an idiot. Said one anonymous insider to the Times in 1973, ““His reputation is that of a guy who speaks in four or five languages and thinks in none.” Perfect Nixon guy!

Jimmy Carter had no interest in keeping a guy like this on. So he left office and wrote a memoir in 1978 called Silent Missions. But when Reagan took over in 1981, Walters was back in the saddle. Walters was a right-wing Catholic and so was useful between the administration and the papacy under John Paul II. Reagan named him an ambassador-at-large, basically a troubleshooter and message deliverer. Reagan also used him to work out arrangements with the Contras in Nicaragua, part of his illegal operation to fund them after Congress had stopped it. In fact, Violeta Chamorro, part of the anti-Somoza family that then became anti-Ortega, said that Walters basically forced her and her allies to work with the remnants of the Somoza police forces they were backing as the Contras, seeing no other real choice to gain American support. Walters also got the Argentine dictators to send officers to do much of the training of the Contras. Some of his work was more useful, like going to Pakistan a lot to try and get that nation to chill out on its nuclear program. But mostly Walters was a scumbag,

Then, in 1985, Reagan named him UN Ambassador. Walters soon managed a coup in Fiji when the new prime minister there wanted the islands to be a nuclear free zone. Ah, one of so many countries the US has fucked over. Bush, who knew a great insider who kept his hands clean when he saw one, named Walters ambassador to Germany in 1989, which was a pretty key assignment given that year! He stayed in that position until 1991.

Upon retirement in 1991, Bush gave Walters the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In the aftermath, he used his endless connections to promote his business interests, serving on boards, all that rich insider guy stuff. He never married and so spent all his life at work. He wrote one final book, The Mighty and the Meek: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Diplomacy, published in 2001. He died in 2002, at the age of 85, at that time mostly living in West Palm Beach.

Dick Walters is buried on the confiscated lands of the traitor Lee, Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia.

If you would like this series to visit other CIA folks, always a lovely group of humans, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. James Schlesinger is in Springfield, Ohio and Richard Helms is also in Arlington. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.