IT WAS JUST LIKE IKE

General of the Army

Forty- eight years ago. 48. Just shy of two score and ten. Almost half a century...

“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 statehouse, 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. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together. - Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address to the Nation, 17 January 1961

Forty-eight years ago Dwight D. Eisenhower, President, Commander-in-Chief, 5-star or General of the Army, of which there have only been five in the history of the United States, presciently warns the citizenry of the threat of a “military-industrial complex”

Who hasn’t heard that? Yet only eight years earlier Eisenhower had said much the same in his Chance for Peace Speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 16,1953. Who has heard of that speech?

You should listen to it.

“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. ... Is there no other way the world may live? - Dwight D. Eisenhower, Speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, "The Chance for Peace", 16 April 1953

What happened to Ike in the eight years between 1953 and 1961? Only two terms as President, that’s all.

What laurels more could a grateful nation bestow? What power was withheld from this victorious general? What could he not have done, this conqueror, this Supreme Allied Commander Europe, this Military Governor of the American Occupation Zone in Germany, this Commander-in-Chief, Head of State, statesman, leader, chief executive, this exalted being do? Was there nothing the former and future General who supposedly said, “God help any man who sits behind this desk who doesn't know the military like I do.” could do about the Military-Industrial Complex in eight years.

Ike had eight years, by gad! In ’53 he warned the People. In ’61 he warned us again. Wasn’t his farewell address just like Ike eight years prior? The only real difference was that in 1961 he threw up his soon to be former presidential hands and said let “the Citizenry” do something!

So now, forty-eight (or, fifty-six years later - who’s counting) we have a President-elect, Barack Obama, that seems unwilling to even wait for his Administration to begin before throwing in the towel. Iraq, torture, spying on citizens, loss of Constitutional guarantees, crime upon crime committed by the Bush Administration...Sorry, I promised change; but you’re gonna’ get more of the same. That’s how is seems to be shaping up. Campaign promises are meant to be broken and elective office is an ephemeral motive that scarcely ever outlasts the particular ambition for society that aroused it, to paraphrase the Philosophe Denis Diderot.

So there we have it. Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Bush Senior, Clinton, Bush Junior... Eight Presidents and it is still left to “the citizenry” to do something about the Military-Industrial Complex. I am baffled. What can I do as a mere citizen that eight presidents couldn’t?

I know what I could do to support and defend the Constitution as a Sergeant of Marine Infantry. I obeyed legal orders and disobeyed illegal orders. I grant you, that doesn’t seem like much in the scheme of things; but I did my best. Can that be truthfully claimed for eight former presidents?

Can we expect something better from the newly elected president?