50th Anniversary of Eisenhower's 'Military-Industry Complex' Speech; Still Shocking on Many LevelsTake 10 minutes. Read Dwight Eisenhower's Farewell Speech, to the nation, delivered 50 years ago yesterday. You'll be stunned.
You'll be stunned by its intellectual courage. If your impression of Eisenhower is limited to his military leadership during World War II, and the perceived conformity and deadening of American culture during the "Eisenhower Era," you'll find much here to radically alter your thinking about him, and his Leave it to Beaver brand.
The guts of the speech are contained in these lines, which represent some of the bravest and most prescient words and thoughts ever uttered by an American president:
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.Eisenhower's fears were well-placed. Since the speech, we've seen a massive extension and consolidation of the power of the military industrial complex.
Hanft has a point, of course. And it's a very good one. But there's also a very disturbing fact: Almost eight years earlier, near the very beginning of his presidency, on April 16, 1953, in his first major speech outside of Washington, DC, Eisenhower gave a even more powerful speech, compared to which the "military-industrial complex" speech was but a mild echo. Officially known as "The Chance for Peace", it is also referred to as the "Cross of Iron" speech--Here is a crucial passage:
The worst to be feared and the best to be expected can be simply stated.The worst is atomic war.
The best would be this: a life of perpetual fear and tension; a burden of arms draining the wealth and the labor of all peoples; a wasting of strength that defies the American system or the Soviet system or any system to achieve true abundance and happiness for the peoples of this earth.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. These plain and cruel truths define the peril and point the hope that come with this spring of 1953.
There are, of course, various different ways one can take these two speeches together. But two things, I think, at least appear to be clear: First, that Eisenhower was not successful in struggling with what he saw as a major challenge. And second, that Eisenhower's words--at least on these fleeting occassions--weres a good deal more honest and forthright than other presidents since have been.
This is not to say that Eisenhower was free from his own contradictions--indeed, one might argue that his contradictions defined him, and that these two apparently clear points are not entirely what they seem, as indeed, Ira Chernus ably argues in his book Apocalypse Management: Eisenhower and the Discourse of National Insecurity. From the blurb:
For eight years President Dwight Eisenhower claimed to pursue peace and national security. Yet his policies entrenched the United States in a seemingly permanent cold war, a spiraling nuclear arms race, and a deepening state of national insecurity. Ira Chernus uncovers the key to this paradox in Eisenhower's unwavering commitment to a consistent way of talking, in private as well as in public, about the cold war rivalry. Contrary to what most historians have concluded, Eisenhower never aimed at any genuine rapprochement with the Soviet Union. He discourse always assumed that the United States would forever face an enemy bent on destroying it, making national insecurity a permanent way of life. The "peace" he sought was only an endless process of managing apocalyptic threats, a permanent state of "apocalypse management," intended to give the United States unchallenged advantage in every arena of the cold war. The goal and the discourse that supported it were inherently self-defeating. Yet the discourse is Eisenhower's most enduring legacy, for it has shaped U.S. foreign policy ever since, leaving us still a national insecurity state.
Still, compared to those who followed him, key passages from these two speeches stand out as beacons of clarity. And Barack Obama--with his own expressed yearnings for a more peaceful and secure world and his deepening of his predecessor'a destructive deadend "long war" policy--has all of Eisenhower's contradictions and more, even as we long for Eisenhower's contrasting clarity, however little actual fruit it bore.
What seems increasingly likely at this point in time is that Obama is quite faithfully acting out the same set of contradictions that Chernus describes regarding Eisenhower. The enemies have changed, of course... or have they? Aren't our enemies always, in some measure, at least, rejected and projected shadow aspects of ourselves?
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