Eisenhower: Wisdom of a Patriot
The proposed star wars missle defense system will use nuclear power.
With all the junk already up there, what do you think? If you REALLY
cared about nuclear non-proliferation, where were you in 1979 when Dr. Roy
released his Roy Process invention to the press?
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Dwight D. Eisenhower: The Wisdom of a Patriot
It’s too bad the Chickenhawks in Washington have ignored the
words of this old soldier.
February 26, 2004 Intervention Magazine
Commentary: By Mick Youther
http://www.interventionmag.com/cms/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=647
Dwight D. Eisenhower was the first President I remember. I
saw him as a doddering old bald guy; who played golf a lot,
and suffered a heart attack sometime during his presidency.
I didn’t have any idea of what he had done in WWII, nor did
I care. Presidents were not really a top priority for me at
that time. Since then, I’ve learned there was a lot more to
Eisenhower, and that he had some very important things to
say to America—then and now.
• “We have arrived at that point, my friends, when war does
not present the possibility of victory or defeat. War would
present to us only the alternative in degrees of
destruction.”-- 1954
• “We annually spend on military security more than the net
income of all United State 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. . . . 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.”--
Farewell address, 1/17/61
• “The problem in defense is how far you can go without
destroying from within what you are trying to defend from
without.”
• “Our military organization today bears little relation to
that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed
by the fighting men of World War II or Korea. 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.”-- Farewell
address, 1/17/61
• “There is no way in which a country can satisfy the
craving for absolute security, but it can bankrupt itself
morally and economically in attempting to reach that
illusory goal through arms alone.”
• “If all that Americans want is security, they can go to
prison. They'll have enough to eat, a bed and a roof over
their heads”-- as president of Colombia University, 12/8/49
• “May we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal
subversion.”
In 1955 Eisenhower had his opportunity to wage preemptive
war against Communist China after China invaded some islands
near Taiwan (Formosa). Congress gave Eisenhower approval to
attack China at the time and place of his choosing. Instead
of attacking, Eisenhower sent his ambassador, John Foster
Dulles, to Europe to gain support for a war; but Churchill
refused, and so did NATO. If we went it alone, Pentagon
officials assured Eisenhower that we could destroy China’s
military capability within three weeks.
So, what did Eisenhower do? Did he bribe together a
“coalition of the willing”, start handing out no-bid
contracts, and mobilize the military? No, Eisenhower called
together his top advisors and told them to find a diplomatic
solution—which they did. There was no war.
• “A preventive war, to my mind, is an impossibility. I
don’t believe there is such a thing, and frankly I wouldn’t
even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked
about such a thing.”-- Press conference in 1954
• “When it comes to the matter of war, there is only one
place that I would go, and that is to the Congress of the
United States.” --January 1956 [A few months later, he
explained]”I am not going to order any troops into anything
that can be interpreted as war, until Congress directs it.”
No law says our President has to have been in the military,
but such service would certainly make a better President. It
would give (him) the perspective that is so lacking in the
current flock of Chicken Hawks that are misusing our troops
in their ill-conceived plan for world domination.
• “Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and
you're a thousand miles from the corn field.”-- From an
address at Peoria, IL 9/25/56 (The same can be said for war.)
• “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.”-- April 16, 1953
• “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only
as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”
Mick Youther is an Instructor in the Department of
Physiology at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale,
IL. You can email your comments to
Mick@interventionmag.com
Posted for educational and research purposes only,
~ in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 ~
(very, very unlikely but still thought provoking). unforunatley the world seems to be heading more toward the seccond set rather than the first.