“God help the Nation when it has a President who doesn’t know as much about the military as I do,” – President Dwight D. Eisenhower speaking to his White House Staff Secretary, Gen. Andrew Goodpaster.
These words come from a book about Eisenhower’s approach to foreign affairs titled “Ike’s Bluff—President Eisenhower’s Secret Battle To Save The World,” authored by Evan Thomas.
In the same section, this is also noted: “When Defense Secretary Neil McElroy cautioned that further budget cuts could jeopardize national security, Eisenhower sharply responded, ‘If you go to any military installation in the world where the American flag is flying and tell the commander that Ike says he will give him an extra star for his shoulder if he cuts his budget, there’ll be such a rush to cut costs that you’ll have to get out of the way.’”
During a January 10, 1946 address to the Canadian Club in Ottawa, Eisenhower expressed: “I hate war only as a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”
In a 1959 broadcast from London, he remarked: “I think people want peace so much that one of these days, governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.”
Given these and numerous other statements and actions, a compelling argument exists that Eisenhower ranks as one of the most antiwar Presidents in American history.
His most renowned comments were delivered during his farewell speech at the White House on January 17, 1961, where he spoke about the “grave implications” of maintaining “an immense military establishment and a large arms industry.”
He went on to caution: “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.”
I believe Eisenhower would be dismayed by how far the country has strayed from the warning he issued, particularly as the Pentagon now seeks a yearly budget exceeding one trillion four hundred billion dollars.
Less widely known than his farewell address, his first major speech after taking office was delivered on April 16, 1953, at a gathering of the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington, and it might be considered the most outspokenly antiwar address ever by a U.S. President.
He cited numerous beneficial uses for the funds instead spent on war and stated: “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.”
He further explained: “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…This is not a way of life at all…it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
This speech is inscribed above Eisenhower’s grave and is referenced in Brett Baker’s book “Three Days In January—Dwight Eisenhower’s Final Mission.”
Besides his powerful words, Eisenhower helped end the Korean War and even appeared on national television just before the 1956 elections to reject Israel’s demands for involvement in a conflict with Egypt over the Suez Canal.
According to Mitchell Bard writing for The Times of Israel in 2014: “Eisenhower went on television to criticize Israel’s failure to withdraw from Egypt and warned he would impose sanctions if it failed to comply. Eisenhower was prepared to cut off all economic aid, to lift the tax-exempt status of the United Jewish Appeal, and to apply sanctions on Israel.”
Israel withdrew, thus preventing war.
It seems significant that possibly another strongly antiwar U.S. President was our most famous general, George Washington. His farewell address has been ceremonially read in the Senate each year since 1862.
In that address, he cautioned against “overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.”
He also stated a crucial warning: “A passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest…betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification.” (Israel?)
Lastly, Scott Berg’s extensive biography of Woodrow Wilson includes a quote from Winston Churchill to a New York newspaper editor concerning World War I: “America should have minded her own business and stayed out of the world war.”
Churchill continued: “If you hadn’t entered the war the allies would have made peace with Germany in the Spring of 1917. Had we made peace then there would have been no collapse in Russia followed by Communism, no break-down in Italy followed by Fascism, and Germany would not have…enthroned Nazism.”(p583)
I wish more political and military leaders would follow this example and avoid rushing into conflict.
Original article: ronpaulinstitute.org
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