People who know me and are familiar with my political and moral views are always surprised to find out that I am an admirer of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. But his farewell address in 1961, in which he highlighted the rise of the military-industrial complex and its threat to democracy and decency, can really only be described as prophetic. Less well-known but equally powerful is his 1953 address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, which contains the following passage:
What can the world, or any nation in it, hope for if no turning is found on this dread road?
The worst to be feared and the best to be expected can be simply stated.
The worst is atomic war.
The best would be this: a life of perpetual fear and tension; a burden of arms draining the wealth and the labor of all peoples; a wasting of strength that defies the American system or the Soviet system or any system to achieve true abundance and happiness for the peoples of this earth.
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. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school 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 new homes that could have housed more than 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…This is one of those times in the affairs of nations when the gravest choices must be made, if there is to be a turning toward a just and lasting peace. It is a moment that calls upon the governments of the world to speak their intentions with simplicity and with honesty. It calls upon them to answer the questions that stirs the hearts of all sane men: is there no other way the world may live?
What strikes me about these words is that they could just as easily have been found in Pacem in Terris or Caritas in Veritate as in a speech by a man who spent his entire career in the military. What does it say about our nation today when we can always find a billion dollars here and a trillion dollars there to fight the latest war and buy the latest weapons systems, but cannot provide all of our citizens with health insurance because it is “too expensive”? What does it say about us when our fighter jets and cruise missiles are state-of-the-art and our inner-city schools are literally crumbling into pieces? What does it say about us when we spare no cost to train and equip a soldier, and then let him sleep in the streets when his tour of duty is up? If Eisenhower, a soldier all his life, could see the perverseness of such a priority system, then why can’t so many of us who claim to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ?
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