Eisenhower (59 page)

But the speech’s most enduring and provocative passages were tucked in its center. There, Ike and Moos had honed Eisenhower’s foreboding about modern militarism into a sharp warning:

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well.

But we can no longer risk emergency improvisations of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States corporations.

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.

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.

That was, as Eisenhower later wrote, “the most challenging message I could have left with the people of this country.” But it was only one of two related passages; the second contained an equally disturbing insight:

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields.

In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountain-head of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new, electronic computers.

The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by federal employment, project allocations and the power of money is ever-present—and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

Those notions sprang from the exhaustive drafting and editing of this speech. At one point, the writers considered fusing the two, related phenomena within a single phrase, the “military-industrial-scientific complex.” But that was imprecise. The danger of military influence over public policy was that it would drive spending and encourage fear and even war. The peril in the area of science was in one sense the opposite: federal domination of research would tend to push out other innovation and direct too much intellectual capacity to government needs rather than to the breadth of human possibility. The military-industrial complex is measured by its achievements: when it prevails, government overspends on defense. The technological-scientific elite is judged by a negative; its danger is in research unperformed, in the great insights or innovations undiscovered, crowded out by government-funded projects. Smartly, Eisenhower split the two notions, giving each its singular emphasis.

A telling review of those passages came later. Moos had weighed describing the union of military interest and government power as the “military-industrial-congressional complex,” a description that might have tempted Eisenhower after eight years of wrestling with his congressional colleagues. But Ike had opened his speech with his reflection on his long relationship with Congress and his satisfaction with its cooperation with his administration. To then shift and accuse Congress of being a participant in a dangerous network would have seemed jarring and accusatory. The idea was dropped, having never been included in a formal draft.

There was something tender, even grandfatherly, beneath the import of Eisenhower’s warnings. He spoke nostalgically of a blackboard replaced by “new, electronic computers.” And he acknowledged that the growth of an armaments industry was as inevitable as it was pernicious. His remedy for these threats was neither legislation nor specific government action but rather a call to public vigilance. In his final hours as president, as in his early days as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army, Eisenhower maintained a deep, even naive, confidence in the good sense of the American people.

Eisenhower delivered a message of stunning prescience, but it took some time for its full weight to impress itself on the American public. Just as with Washington, some of Eisenhower’s message was lost, distorted, or selectively read in ways that tell more about the interpreter than about the message.

Ike had not set out to grab headlines, but most major newspapers extensively covered the speech the next day. “Eisenhower’s Farewell Sees Threat to Liberties in Vast Defense Machine,” the
New York Times
headline read. “Ike Warns of Danger in Massive Defense,” summarized the
Los Angeles Times
. The
Wall Street Journal
focused on Eisenhower’s budget but briefly reported on his address on its front page. Many papers published the full text of the address, and the
New York Times
even reprinted Ike’s closing prayer on its front page.

But the first wave of editorials hinted at the degree to which some misunderstood Ike’s message or underestimated its significance. The
New York Times
declined to editorialize on the speech, opting instead for a critical reprise of his presidency and concluding on a general note of appreciation: “Dwight Eisenhower will retire from office with the respect and goodwill of his countrymen. Few Presidents in the history of the United States have had a more secure hold on the affections of the American people.” The
Los Angeles Times
quoted the passage on the military-industrial complex and rightly noted that it reflected a president who spent his time in office “striving for the balance that it was his chief concern to maintain.” Rather than explore the implications of Eisenhower’s warning, however, that editorial concluded: “Surely the people are proud of this man and proud of themselves for electing him while he was available.” Overridingly, the reaction was to regard the address with nostalgia for the presidency and appreciation for the president, to wish him well, and to move on rather than to dissect the import of the threats he identified to political integrity, the nation’s safety, and the future of the country’s intellectual life.

That would change over time as the Kennedy administration abandoned Eisenhower’s defense strategy, exchanging its heavy reliance on the threat of nuclear retaliation for a more flexible ability to confront Communism around the world, first at the Bay of Pigs and then in Vietnam. Vast American resources and many American lives were sacrificed in that struggle, and Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex seemed culpable to many. Critics of the Vietnam War imagined Eisenhower’s prophecy to be part of their rhetorical heritage, though they often misconstrued his deliberately chosen words. Ike had not blamed the military-industrial complex for corrupting American life, had not suggested that it should be denied all influence. The need for a permanent armaments industry, he recognized, was “imperative,” even if its implications were grave. But Ike’s words captured an essential element of American militarism: some interests depended on an armed and frightened nation; they would consistently urge action where prudence might have suggested otherwise.

Meanwhile, Eisenhower’s equally incisive critique of the power of government to direct research went largely unremarked, perhaps because the “scientific-technological elite” seemed less dangerous, less frightening. And yet just as Eisenhower was right to warn of unwarranted influence by those who depended upon war and the threat of war, so, too, was he correct to wonder at the substitution of government research for individual innovation. We can witness the new technologies unveiled in the service of defense or oil exploration; we can only wonder at the breakthroughs undiscovered. Universities, heavily dependent on government contracts, produced what they did in the late twentieth century; we can never know what they did not.

By the twenty-first century, few could doubt the enduring place of the military-industrial complex in American life. The defense establishment came to absorb private industry increasingly into its own ranks. Support services for American troops in Ike’s day were the province of the Pentagon; Eisenhower’s invasion force was fed, clothed, and supplied with fuel by military men and women.

In the Iraq wars, food, communications, and even security for American troops and civilians were largely the province of contractors. Those contractors depended on government payments, and they sought influence over the government at all levels. Boeing, Blackwater, Halliburton—these became the point of the spear of the military-industrial complex, the recipients of government largesse, and the suppliers of American logistics and power. In 2001, after a closely divided American election, George Bush became president. Seated beside him was Vice President Dick Cheney, the former chief executive officer of Halliburton. The military-industrial complex now had an elected representative in the White House. On March 19, 2003, America went to war for a second time in Iraq, a conflict initially estimated to cost the American people $50 billion. (When one White House aide suggested it could reach $100 to $200 billion, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld called it “baloney.” The official who argued otherwise was fired.) Instead, Iraq ballooned into a war longer and costlier than World War II; by the time the last combat brigade had departed Iraq in 2010, the war had killed more than forty-four hundred soldiers and drained the national treasury of more than $750 billion, much of it spent on private contractors—one Halliburton division alone, KBR, was paid more than $11 billion for its work from 2002 to 2004; overall, private contractors received as much government money as the initial estimates for fighting the entire war. Against such facts, Ike’s warnings seemed profoundly true.

Moreover, the corrupting and interlocking relationship that Eisenhower described in 1961 would find expression in other walks of American life. Pharmaceutical companies and prison guards, public employee unions and major construction concerns, automakers, energy firms, and agricultural enterprises all were among the interests that had come to depend on government support—in the form of either contracts or regulatory consideration—leading them to cultivate influence in Washington. The result was a culture of lobbying, campaign contributions, and corporate influence that amplified Eisenhower’s original warning and sapped public confidence in the integrity of government. That sobering trend reached its apotheosis in 2010, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that corporations possess free-speech rights that entitle them to full participation in politics. With that, the military-industrial complex and its many descendants secured not just power but constitutional protection.

Those were the proof of Eisenhower’s prescience. But they were generations away when he delivered his warnings. In the meantime, Ike quietly concluded his presidency and prepared to retire to the edge of the Gettysburg battlefield, to end his days as a philosopher-farmer in the tradition of Washington himself. On the morning after his speech, Ike awoke to the appreciative reflections on his presidency. He sparred with reporters at a friendly, final news conference and then met with Nixon. In the afternoon, he presented medals to a few of his most trusted aides, their families proudly looking on. Half a world away, Patrice Lumumba paid the heavier price in the struggle for power in the Congo. Captured by his rivals, bound, and badly beaten, Lumumba and other government foes were lined up before a tree and shot at almost precisely the moment that Eisenhower delivered his farewell. Lumumba was thirty-five years old.

Promptly at 9:00 a.m. on January 19, Kennedy arrived with his senior cabinet designees; he and Ike met privately for a few minutes, then with Christian Herter and Dean Rusk, the outgoing and incoming secretaries of state; Thomas Gates and Robert McNamara, the outgoing and incoming secretaries of defense; and Bob Anderson, the departing secretary of the Treasury, and his designated successor, Douglas Dillon, one of the few Ike aides whom Kennedy retained. Jerry Persons and Clark Clifford, personal aides to the two presidents, attended as well.

Kennedy began by asking about Laos, and Eisenhower warned him of the complexities there. The loss of that country to Communism, he said, would open the “cork in the bottle,” and the rest of the Far East might collapse. Kennedy had been elected on a promise to act, had campaigned on the argument that Eisenhower had been too willing to allow Communism to gain ground. He probed his predecessor for some way to halt another loss of territory, in this case to keep the Chinese at bay. Ike offered little. It was, he said, like playing poker with tough stakes. His commitment to massive retaliation—and his refusal to countenance the use of nuclear weapons to decide limited wars—persisted to his final moments in office.

Many members of Ike’s staff, trapped by the snow overnight in Washington, spent a final night at the White House, bunked in meeting rooms. Bleary the next day, they bade Eisenhower farewell, many with tears in their eyes. Eisenhower shook their hands, praised their service, acknowledged their devotion. Then he joined Kennedy on the Capitol steps to complete the transfer of power that has been an essential symbol of American democracy since Washington handed authority to John Adams. Eisenhower listened as Kennedy delivered an address that was stirring, youthful, and poetic—and unmistakably laced with rejection of his predecessor. “Let the word go forth from this time and place,” Kennedy proclaimed, a sour-faced Eisenhower behind him, “to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage—and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.”