Obama Ignores Eisenhower at Country's, World's Peril

Saturday 15 January 2011
by: Melvin A. Goodman,
t r u t h o u t | News Analysis

On January 17, 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued his prophetic warning about the military-industrial complex, anticipating the increased political, economic, military and even cultural influence of the Pentagon and its allies. Several weeks earlier, he had privately told his senior advisers in the Oval Office, "God help this country when someone sits in this chair who doesn't know the military as well as I do." Several months after his inauguration in 1953, he warned against warfare that had "humanity hanging from a cross of iron."

In the spring of 1961, I was part of a small group of undergraduates who met with the president's brother, Milton Eisenhower, who was then president of Johns Hopkins University. Milton Eisenhower and a Johns Hopkins professor of political science, Malcolm Moos, played major roles in the drafting and editing of the farewell speech of January 1961. The actual drafter of the speech, Ralph E. Williams, relied on guidance from Professor Moos. Milton Eisenhower explained that one of the drafts of the speech referred to the "military-industrial-Congressional complex" and said that the president himself inserted the reference to the role of the Congress, an element that did not appear in the delivery of the farewell address. When the president's brother asked about the dropped reference to Congress, the president replied: "It was more than enough to take on the military and private industry. I couldn't take on the Congress as well."

In addition to the Congress reference, an entire section was dropped from the speech that dealt with the creation of a "permanent, war-based industry," with "flag and general officers retiring at an early age [to] take positions in the war-based industrial complex shaping its decisions and guiding the direction of its tremendous thrust." The president warned that steps needed to be taken to "insure that the 'merchants of death' do not come to dictate national policy." The section also warned against any belief that some "spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties." President George W. Bush's war in Iraq and President Barack Obama's escalation of the war in Afghanistan certainly come to mind.

Although the cold war ended two decades ago with the collapse of the Soviet Union, recent presidents have found no way out of increased military deployments and expenditures, nor have they challenged the national security influence of the military. No president since Eisenhower has genuinely understood the dangers of the Pentagon's increasing influence over our national security policy. Eisenhower made sure that he was never outmaneuvered by his military advisers, particularly on such key issues as the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam, which his immediate successors thoroughly bungled. President John F. Kennedy never understood that the Pentagon anticipated the failure of the CIA in Cuba in 1961 and hoped to use its air power to achieve success. President Lyndon B. Johnson failed to challenge pleas from the Pentagon for more force and additional troops in Vietnam until it was too late.

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