What Eisenhower Got Wrong

Ike was good for his kind but not so good as to rise above the interests of his class and especially those of the elites that truly ran the show.  And his inbred anti-communism clouded his vision.

January 13, 2011

farewell address in which he famously warned of the dangers of influence on our government by the “military industrial complex.” Our current Secretary of War, Robert Gates, has proposed to retire this year and has recommended that his successors stop increasing the military budget. But Eisenhower didn’t just bring this up on his way out the door. It was seven years earlier that he had remarked:

acceptance speech and leave out everything but that peaceful opening line,

How does one dismantle the military industrial complex in the face of a ruthless, atheistic ideology? Of course, Eisenhower did not do so. He refrained from some of the excesses, in both war funding and war lying, of his successors. He dug our country into a pointless war on Vietnam, but not to the extent of his successors. And when his immediate successor resisted the military machine more than Eisenhower had, a single bullet struck him multiple times in Dallas.

speech in which Eisenhower spoke of the theft from those who hunger, he claimed eternal innocence for the United States in foreign affairs. The United States had never been an aggressor; that was the Soviet Union’s role. The United States relied on “trust and mutual aid” while the USSR relied on “force: huge armies, subversion, rule of neighbor nations.” Why did we have to steal from the hungry in order to build weapons? Eisenhower had the answer:

know that to have constituted a pair of super-destructive lies. The point is not that Eisenhower wasn’t relatively responsible, when compared with his predecessors and successors. But he maintained the same set of lies that allowed for the military industrial complex to grow into something today that probably didn’t penetrate his worst nightmares.

said:

war machine is stronger than ever, the war propaganda slicker, the dangers heightened. Continuing down this course is not survivable in terms of proliferation or blowback, environmental destruction or loss of democratic representation, or in simple economic terms. This week a congress member proposed a bill to allow his colleagues to come armed to work, on the grounds that they could not safely walk home on Capitol Hill.

outgrow the idea that there can be a good or just war any more than there can be a good slavery or a just rape. We need to confront the root of the militaristic ideology that even Eisenhower pushed on us: the lies about World War II. Yes, Franklin Roosevelt campaigned for office promising to stay out of a war he was already working to maneuver the United States into, and for all the wrong reasons, and he lied about German attacks and plans for conquest, and he lied about Pearl Harbor.

read what FDR and others knew. Then read the endless saga of investigations and coverups.

That FDR pursued very good policies domestically is not altered by what he did abroad. If we are looking for people to model our lives after, they should not be elected officials.

They should be people like Martin Luther King, Jr.