Military Spending, President Eisenhower's Forgotten Speech

On Jan. 17, 1961, Dwight Eisenhower, the 34th president of the United States, fulfilled the last public act of his two terms in office. [His two terms] had spanned eight years of American history: from 1953, when he won the elections against Adlai Stevenson to 1961, when he passed the torch to John F. Kennedy.

His eight years on the international scene had been for the pursuit of two fundamental goals: the containment of Soviet political influence and solidarity with the Western-allied governments.

The Yalta model had survived Stalin, who died exactly at the beginning of Eisenhower’s first term, and a turbulent international power balance would have dominated the future. Dwight Eisenhower, the Republican candidate, had on several instances urged the European allies to build a different order with senior responsibilities for the new players, who were excluded from Yalta but were still intent on developing a role in the international limelight. Tito’s chapter had not been written yet, just as the real reach and significance of the 1965 Suez Crisis also had yet to be written.

In matters of foreign policy, Eisenhower was the classic American conservative, exchanging irrevocable principles to attain pragmatic results, patiently listening to all, day by day: a mix of intransigence and flexibility that the man at the head of the allied forces in Europe had demonstrated in the military.

The Normandy landing, the most awe-inspiring engagement of aerial, ground and naval troops in a military action in history — so much so that Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps with his elephants pales by comparison in our collective imagination — comprised another chapter about the strategist’s flexibility.

Eisenhower was not a pacifist. Like all true career military men, he did not like war. Like Von Clausewitz, whom he had studied at West Point, he knew that war becomes necessary when the reasons behind good politics are powerless. But times of peace belong to politics. This is why the rational use of force, and not violence, is the rule of war. He had gotten to the point of displaying strong disapproval of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki because he thought they were unnecessary for an already bowed down Japan.

In his farewell speech, Eisenhower could have confined himself to a standard account of how much his administration had done, with its largely positive margin of successes over failures.

But he chose another path: A military president, like Grant, he spoke of the military-industrial complex and its negative influence on the decision-making mechanism in democracy. He spoke to the American people of tomorrow — our today — and looked ahead in time. He looked ahead even when he knew that the transient concerns expressed through public opinion were focused somewhere else.

“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,” he said.

This speech did not make it into the hall of fame of speeches by American presidents. The oversight seems plain and clear. But it is the banality in the obvious that makes us think twice.