CIVICS NEWS.com
January 7, 2009
While the American Historian might critique the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower (I certainly would), the man had a clear understanding of the nature of military spending and the corruption of a permanent defense establishment. At the beginning and at the end of his 8-year presidency, spanning the years 1953-1960, Eisenhower spoke out against the injustice and corruption that inevitably exist within the military pocketbook. In early 1953, he even labeled military spending a "theft" from the "sweat of laborers":
Indeed, it is the productive who are forced to fund the imperial designs of their government masters. It is humanity that is crucified by the militarist state. And it is no doubt a theft and an injustice to take from the laborer his earned fruits, in order to wage wars around the globe in which he has no interest and over which he has no choice.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. [...] Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
After 8 years of being an insider within the Cold War defense-intelligence establishment, Ike finally concluded that a permanent national security state had taken hold, and the "military-industrial-complex," that was already exercising undue influence over policy and national life, needed to be stopped. In fact, Eisenhower was so concerned about this great evil, that he took special pains to warn Americans about its poisonous effects in his final words to the nation, pointing out that the undue influence of the newly militarized federal government would be "economic, political, and even spiritual." Watch the clip from January of 1961 in Dwight Eisenhower's farewell address:
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