Dan Walker (politician)

Daniel J. Walker (August 6, 1922 – April 29, 2015) was an American lawyer, businessman and politician from Illinois.

He was raised near San Diego, California, and was valedictorian when he graduated from high school there in 1940.

He joined the U.S. Naval Reserve while still in high school, serving on a four pipe destroyer during the summers.

His college plans at San Diego State College were interrupted when he was called to active duty in 1940 and served as an enlisted man on a minesweeper out of Point Loma, San Diego.

In 1941 he took an exam to become an officer, ranking fifth out of over three thousand that were tested.

He was attending the Naval Academy Preparatory School in Norfolk when Pearl Harbor was attacked.

He graduated the United States Naval Academy in 1946 and would later be the second governor of Illinois to graduate from Annapolis.

After that, he served as a naval officer near the end of World War II.

Walker moved to Illinois to attend Northwestern in 1947.

He was recalled to the Navy during the Korean War and was communications officer on USS Kidd (DD-661).

A 1950 graduate of the Northwestern University School of Law, Walker served as a law clerk for Chief Justice of the United States Fred M. Vinson, and as an aide to Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson II.

Walker later became an executive for Montgomery Ward while supporting reform politics in Chicago.

This was to run north–south, along Cicero Avenue and had been part of the State of Illinois Transportation plan since the 1950s.

He moved to Illinois between the wars to attend Northwestern University School of Law, entering politics in the state during the 1960s.

The National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence appointed Walker to head the Chicago Study Team that investigated the violent clashes between police and protesters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

In December, the team issued its report, Rights in Conflict, better known as the Walker Report.

The Report became highly controversial, and its author well-known.

The report stated that while protesters had deliberately harassed and provoked police, the police had responded with indiscriminate violence against protesters, journalists, and bystanders, which Walker described as a "police riot".

The Report charged that many police had committed criminal acts, and condemned the failure to prosecute or even discipline those police.

In 1970, Walker was campaign chairman for the successful U.S. Senate campaign of Adlai Stevenson III (son of Adlai II).

Walker was perhaps best known for walking the state of Illinois in 1971 during his candidacy for governor and for being an outsider to Illinois' machine politics.

Walker announced his candidacy for Governor of Illinois in 1971 and attracted wide attention by walking 1197 mi across Illinois in 1971.

At this time he was the General Counsel of Montgomery Ward and Company, a position he had for over 5 years.

During his campaign, Montgomery Ward & Company continued to pay him.

Running against the machine's candidate for the Democratic nomination for governor, Walker scored a rare upset in the March 1972 primary election.

He narrowly won the 1972 Democratic primary against then-Lieutenant Governor Paul Simon.

A member of the Democratic party, he served as the 36th governor of Illinois, from 1973 until 1977.

Born in Washington, D.C., Walker was raised in San Diego, before serving in the Navy as an enlisted man and officer during World War II and the Korean War.

He went on that year to defeat the Republican incumbent, but lost his own bid for re-election in 1976.

His post political career was marked by high living, but marred by a guilty plea to bank fraud and perjury at the peak of the late 1980s savings and loan crisis.

After a year and a half in federal prison, Walker retired to the San Diego metro area and wrote several books before he died in 2015.

Walker was born in Washington, D.C., the son of Virginia May (Lynch) and Lewis Wesley Walker, who were both from Texas.

They paid him $200,000 per year (equal to $2,000,000 in 2020 dollars.) He also employed his administrative assistant, working on his campaign, who was also paid by Montgomery Ward.

Montgomery Ward hoped that this political support would yield benefits when Walker became governor.

This never materialized.

Walker's political platform was to stop the "Crosstown Expressway" in Chicago.

This expressway would have had 1 billion dollars of federal funding (10 billion in 2020 dollars).

Walker received campaign funds from the Archdiocese of Chicago to stop this Expressway because it would have affected two of the most profitable parishes at the north end at Cicero and the Kennedy expressway.

When Walker was elected, he stopped the Illinois Department of Transportation from pursuing this expressway project.

This was a direct political strike against Mayor Daley, who did not support Walker.