[Peace-discuss] Militarization of America

[C. G. Estabrook]

The Other Eisenhowers
Ike’s anti-militarist roots
By Bill Kauffman

Dwight D. Eisenhower’s mother was a pacifist, a breed common in the Middle 
America of yore, before war became the national religion. Her son left Kansas to 
climb the martial ladder of the Department of War, whose motto, suggested 
Declaration of Independence signatory Benjamin Rush, should have been “A Widow 
and Orphan making office.” It was also the greatest deracinating force in 
American history; Dwight, unlike Dorothy and Toto, never returned to the 
Sunflower State.
Old men grow sentimentally pensive, and one wonders if President Eisenhower’s 
sober and remarkable Farewell Address counseling vigilance against the 
“military-industrial complex”—delivered 50 years ago over the televisions that 
even then were addling America—echoes, however faintly, Ida Eisenhower’s 
Mennonite convictions. It surely is redolent of his older brother and frequent 
correspondent Edgar, the Tacoma attorney who in most Eisenhower biographies gets 
a walk-on as the crusty reactionary pestering the moderate Ike to repeal the New 
Deal and support the Bricker Amendment, that last gasp of the Old Right.
The president’s son John, in his memoir Strictly Personal, writes affectionately 
that Uncle Ed “considered President Roosevelt a work of the devil.” No jingo 
chickenhawk of the sort whose squawk dominates today’s Right, Ed tried to talk 
John out of a career in the military: “he declared that I should forego any 
ideas of becoming a ‘professional killer’ and go to law school at his expense, 
later to join his law office.”
This language—“professional killer” —marked Edgar Eisenhower as an anachronism 
among the placeless technocrats who were busy engineering the Empire of 
Euphemism. Organization men like Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy could no 
more understand Edgar Eisenhower than they could dig Jack Kerouac or Paul Goodman.
In his new study of Ike’s valediction, Unwarranted Influence, James Ledbetter 
places the Farewell Address within a thematic range that stretches from North 
Dakota Senator Gerald Nye’s 1930s investigation of the “merchants of death” to 
the power-elite analysis of C. Wright Mills and his idealistic admirers in 
Students for a Democratic Society. Speechwriters Malcolm Moos and Capt. Ralph 
Williams—perhaps younger brother Milton Eisenhower, too—crafted much of the 
address, but its concerns were those of the president, who later wrote in Waging 
Peace: “During the years of my Presidency, and especially the latter years, I 
began to feel more and more uneasiness about the effect on the nation of 
tremendous peacetime military expenditures.” (How many Republican members of the 
112th Congress would nod assent: ten, at most?)
The somber dignity with which Eisenhower left office ought not to obscure his 
administration’s disgraceful interventions abroad (Iran, Guatemala) and at home 
(the Interstate Highway System, the National Defense Education Act). For those 
who preferred the American Republic to the American Empire, Ohio Sen. Robert 
Taft was the GOP choice in 1952.
Yet Ike was the last president confident enough to name, and even sometimes take 
on, the military-industrial complex. He lamented the “appalling costs” of the 
war machine and worried that a “garrison state” might arise in freedom’s 
erstwhile land. He was justly furious to be reproved as soft on defense by such 
hawkish Democrats as the Pulitzer Prize-winning PT boat hero and devoted husband 
John F. Kennedy.
In his twilight, my old boss, Sen. Pat Moynihan, a Kennedy loyalist, was 
unsettled in Eisenhower-like ways by the seeming permanence of the 
national-security state, enshrouded in its miasmic secrecy. The new collection 
Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary, 
contains a Sept. 8, 1990, letter to Erwin N. Griswold, former dean of Harvard 
Law School, in which Moynihan grandiloquently—that is, 
characteristically—announces, “I have one purpose left in life; or at least in 
the Senate. It is to try to sort out what would be involved in reconstituting 
the American government in the aftermath of the cold war. Huge changes took 
place, some of which we hardly notice.”
Two months later, in a letter to constituents—which Moynihan, unlike most 
members of Congress this side of Tennessee’s Jimmy Duncan and my late friend 
Barber Conable, wrote himself—the senator “wondered…whether we any longer knew 
how” to be a “nation essentially at peace with the rest of the world.”
We do not. Since 1941, war has warped American life. Only the doddering and the 
dotards among us have lived in an America that is not armed, aggressive, and 
perpetually at war. If you would seek those who know what an America at peace is 
like, visit the nursing home. If you would hear the sounds of America at war, 
walk the corridors of a veterans’ hospital. Listen to the shrieks and sobs—the 
keening for the lost America of Ida and Edgar Eisenhower.
Bill Kauffman’s latest book is Bye Bye, Miss American Empire: Neighborhood 
Patriots, Backcountry Rebels, and Their Underdog Crusades to Redraw America’s 
Political Map
This article is part of a symposium on the fiftieth anniversary of Eisenhower’s 
Farewell Address and the military-industrial complex.

http://www.amconmag.com/blog/ikes-last-stand/the-other-eisenhowers/