I like Ike

Most known for the campaign slogan “I like Ike”, many senior citizens today and a vast majority of Americans from both political parties have a very high regard for Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Well known for his role as the Supreme Allied Commander during World War II, many Americans would be surprised to learn that Dwight Eisenhower was raised by a pacifist mother who was also a Mennonite. Perhaps this is why Dwight D. Eisenhower, a man more known for his ability to wage war, while as President had sought a way to wage peace. A man who was well aware of the brutality and the senseless death that war brings, tried valiantly to fight the growing power of a tangled web of interlocking public and private interests, that he would ultimately call the military industrial complex.

While all political scientists and most of the policy makers in Washington D.C. are acquainted with Eisenhower’s 1961 Farewell Address to Congress, some neoconservative policy makers such as Richard Pearl have tried to say that the term used by Eisenhower was “the work of some speechwriter” and “the Eisenhower warning about the military-industrial-complex was silly at the time”. Although Eisenhower did have speechwriters, before he was president, Eisenhower was Douglas MacArthur’s speechwriter and was known during his career in the Army for the ability to write speeches and to “turn a phrase”. Fully discrediting the accusation of the neoconservative Richard Pearl, one of the main architects of the Iraq War in 2003, is a review of several major policy speeches written by Eisenhower himself during his eight years as President, starting as far back as 1953 during his first 100 days in office.

In a speech known as the “Chance for Peace” given to The American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 16, 1953, he asserted that the Soviet Union was spending vast amounts of on military weapons and it was causing the United States to follow suit. Eisenhower declared that for whatever the reasons behind the arms race, it was diverting national resources and other priorities disproportionately towards military weapons. In his speech Eisenhower declared,

“Every gun 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 genesis of its scientists, the hopes of its children”.

In a similar manner and almost word for word of the speech he gave to the American people in 1961, in the “Chance for Peace” speech in 1953 Eisenhower warned about the trade-offs:

“The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brink schoolhouse in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with the homes that could have housed 8,000 people. This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

Considering that the speech was given at a time when the Red Scare of Communism was gripping the nation and the United States was involved in a military conflict on the Korean peninsula, the speech by Eisenhower showed the former military general to be a genuine leader of the country. Not only concerned or beholden to the interests of the former institution he spent most of his life in, the “Chance for Peace” speech by Eisenhower in 1953 proved that he was concerned about the interests of all Americans.

Providing the best example of Eisenhower’s humanism and his idolization of General George Washington, was when Eisenhower took the oath of office on January 20, 1953. It was during Eisenhower’s inauguration that he held his hand on two bibles- one used by George Washington at the nation’s first inauguration and the one given to Eisenhower by his mother upon his graduation from West Point.

George Washington, a fellow general turned president, was the model president for Eisenhower to idolize. Like the farewell speech given by Washington in which the first president warned of foreign entanglements and a large standing army, the farewell speech by Dwight D. Eisenhower indicates that the thirty-fourth president of the United States ended his presidency in the same noble manner in which he begun his presidency.

As the United States finds itself mired in perpetual war and a country flirting with insolvency and long term economic stagnation, the actions and deeds by the thirty-fourth president before, during and after his time in office definitively prove him to be one of the greatest patriots in American history.