Who Shot Walter?

Walter Reuther, the cocky, redheaded president of the C.I.O. United Automobile Workers, is a model husband. He neither drinks nor smokes, hates to travel without his auburn-haired wife Mae, and listens to the family phonograph when other men go to nightclubs. When a meeting of the U.A.W. executive council keeps him in downtown Detroit after the dinner hour, he never fails to telephone, always tries to get home for an icebox snack instead of eating in a restaurant.

Last week he followed this routine as methodically as a toolmaker setting up a lathe. He drove his 1941 Chevrolet sedan into the garage behind his neat white six-room house at 9:30 p.m. His wife turned on the back porch light; he walked into the kitchen, took off his coat, asked about their 5 1/2 year-old daughter Linda, and sat down to some warmed-up beef stew.

His dutiful adherence to habit almost killed him--somebody was waiting with a shotgun in the darkness outside the window.

"Those Dirty Rats." It went off with a bright flash and a stunning roar just as Reuther stood up, with a dish in his hand, to get some fruit salad from the refrigerator. Glass tinkled, the dish flew into a thousand pieces. Reuther spun, staggered and fell to the floor like a man who had been clubbed. For a second there was no more sound. Mrs. Reuther stood transfixed. Reuther lay on his back, industriously trying to move his bloody right arm and deciding, with the casualness of shock, that it had been blown off.

Then Mae Reuther ran for towels, knelt, tried to stop the flow of her husband's blood. People burst into the kitchen. A neighborhood doctor arrived. Reuther said wildly: "Those dirty rats had to shoot a fellow in the back." An ambulance crew pushed in, carried him off to Grace Hospital.

Reuther had missed death by an eyelash. He remembered turning a second before the blast--if he had not, his spine would have been blown out. Four heavy buckshot had plowed into his arm, shattering bone and tearing flesh. Another had entered his chest. But he would live, keep the arm and, with luck, regain its use.

"It Could Have Been . .." Meanwhile police scoured the neighborhood for clues. A woman had seen a man's dark figure running across Reuther's backyard after the shot. Three boys had seen someone leap into an automobile--a red 1947 or 1948 Ford sedan--and drive madly away. By calculating the angle of fire, the cops decided that the gunman was 5 ft. 6 in. tall and righthanded. But who was he? Why had he fired?

But Reuther himself could not guess who had pulled the shotgun's trigger. Said he: "It could have been management, a Communist, a Fascist or a screwball. I can't put them in any order."

As he lay in the hospital with his arm braced in a traction apparatus, a staggering total of $126,900 was offered ($100,000 of it by the U.A.W.) for the arrest and conviction of the gunman. Last week every cop, private dick, stool pigeori and neighborhood snoop in Detroit was working overtime, and half the population seemed to have turned amateur detective. But at week's end the assassin was still at large.

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