Talk:Dwight D. Eisenhower

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Checklist last edited by	John Stephenson 21:56, 27 September 2007 (CDT)

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Campaign

There's a picture of the famous button at http://www.kshs.org/publicat/kaleidoscope/graphics/2004august_ike_button.jpg which I am going to email the KSHS to find out what the license information is. I believe that it *might* be public domain. --Robert W King 23:59, 10 September 2007 (CDT)

with rare exceptions pre 1976 buttons were not copyrighted and are in the public domain. Old pre 1976 items had to be registered in copyright office and include the (c) symbol on it. I have collect buttons and have seen hundreds --I have seen only one copyrighted button pre 1976 (and that was a fund-raising device in 1940 for America First, not a campaign button). Richard Jensen 00:29, 11 September 2007 (CDT)

Eisenhower’s Farewell Address

Maybe some of this text might be useful?

President Dwight D. Eisenhower was much loved by the American people during his time in office. Eisenhower was a benign-seeming, grandfatherly figure of whom Ronald Reagan would be an analogue three decades later. Yet, quietly, undemonstrably, Eisenhower was sanctioning covert guerrilla wars, political coups, and clandestine dirty tricks across the world, and was arming America to the teeth. The Eisenhower administration acquired enough atomic bombs to kill every Russian citizen many times over.

In 1953 President Eisenhower signed National Security Council Directive 162/2, a statement of policy which included the chilling line, “in the event of hostilities, the United States will consider nuclear weapons to be as available for use as other munitions.”

In 1954 President Eisenhower set America’s annual defense budget at $34.5 billion. It was $15 billion less than the defense expenditures for 1953, but still far more than the $14.4 billion that had been allocated for 1950. In 1956 Eisenhower allocated $35.8 billion for defense. For the rest of the decade America’s annual military budget would be in the thirty billions. America was insuring for itself, in the words of John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State, “massive retaliatory power.” Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles were being stockpiled. The first Thermonuclear Age was a boom time for the defense contractors of America’s military-industrial complex

Yet Eisenhower was somewhat of a prisoner of his times. Intelligence estimates delivered to him regularly warned of a major arms build-up in the U.S.S.R. Whether or not the intelligence estimates were proven to be accurate, the White House felt it had no choice but to keep pace with the Russians. Many top brass in the military argued vociferously not for “parity” but “superiority”. The ensuing Arms Race directed many billions of tax dollars annually into a rapidly growing U.S. defense industry.

Speaking at a press conference on March 11, 1959, Eisenhower voiced fears that America was becoming a “garrison state”, in business primarily for war. Time and again, Eisenhower would return to this theme of the garrison state, most famously in his Farewell Address to the Nation, delivered January 17, 1961. First, Eisenhower described the tenor of the times in dramatic terms:

"We face a hostile ideology global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. Unhappily the danger it poses promises to be of indefinite duration. . . . A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction."

Yet Eisenhower believed that the conjunction of big business and the military, while a necessary evil, might lead in future years to a situation in which the government is held hostage to the interests of what he is going to term the military-industrial complex:

"Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. . . . 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."

Eisenhower delivered a dramatic warning, one of the most quoted presidential statements of the twentieth century:

"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."

During the eight years of the Eisenhower Administration, the United States spent more than $350 billion on defense. Yet Eisenhower went on to say in his Farewell Address, “Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative.”