Eisenhower's farewell address gave two warnings and Republicans remember one

Say "military-industrial complex" in any room where people argue about the Pentagon budget and watch the nodding start. Somebody says "even Eisenhower warned us," a second person agrees gravely, and a third studies the carpet, because he has never read the speech and suspects the other two have not either. The line is one of the most quoted sentences in twentieth-century American politics, and it gets quoted mostly by people who stopped reading when it ended.

That is a shame, because the speech it comes from is better than its reputation. It is about fifteen minutes long, it was delivered on January 17, 1961, three days before John Kennedy took the oath of office, and it was given by a man who had commanded the largest amphibious invasion in history and then served two terms as President. He used his last television address to give the country a short list of warnings. Two of them are at the center of this post, and Republicans have a habit of remembering one, ignoring the other, and then being surprised when the argument at the dinner table goes sideways.

What the speech actually says

Let me do what a good host should do and take you to the text. You can find it in full, free, on the website of the Eisenhower Presidential Library or in the National Archives, and I would urge you to read all of it in the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee.

The first half looks backward and describes a nation that had gone from having no permanent arms industry to maintaining one on a vast scale. Eisenhower says plainly that this was necessary. The country faced, in his words, a hostile ideology that was global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose and insidious in method. He does not apologize for the armed forces. He calls the military establishment a vital element in keeping the peace.

Then he turns. "In the councils of government," he says, "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, he adds, exists and will persist. And then the line people leave out: "Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."

Read that again. He is not asking for a smaller defense or a lazier one. He is asking for a citizenry that pays attention, so that the machinery stays under the control of the voters. That is a conservative sentence. It is the Federalist Papers in a general's mouth.

Warning one is only half the speech

The sentence about the military-industrial complex gets all the attention, and the very next ideas in the text get almost none. Eisenhower goes on to describe a change in how research is done. In earlier days, he says, the lone inventor in his shop was the typical source of new ideas. Now, because of cost, research had become formalized and complex, and a government contract was becoming virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. The free university, "historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery," had experienced a revolution in how it conducted research.

Then comes the part I want you to underline. "The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded." And the companion warning: "we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite."

Think about what the President of the United States is saying here. He is warning that the people who hold the money can steer the questions that researchers ask, and that the people who hold the expertise can steer the decisions that elected officials make. He worried about both, and he said so in the same breath. He did not want the generals running the country, and he did not want a class of credentialed experts running it either. Notice that this is not an attack on science. He says plainly that we should hold scientific research and discovery in respect. The warning is about the relationship between government money and independent thought, and between expert advice and democratic decision.

Warning two: the grandchildren's bill

Now the second warning, the one that fits on a bumper sticker for any family that has paid a mortgage. Near the end of the address Eisenhower pivots from guns to the checkbook. "As we peer into society's future," he says, "we, you, and your government, must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow." And then the sentence that every Republican who has ever voted on a budget should have laminated: "We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage."

Notice the structure. The heritage at stake is not just money. He says that debt put on the backs of the next generation costs them their political freedom as well, because a nation that owes its future away has fewer choices to make. That is a moral argument for fiscal restraint, and it comes from the same speech, the same page, the same man. If you want to see how conservatives have made that argument since, look at A Balanced Budget Is a Moral Argument Before It Is an Accounting One.

So the full picture is this. Warning one says defense and its industry must stay under the control of the citizens. Warning two says no generation has a right to spend what its grandchildren will have to earn. The two are linked, and Eisenhower knew they were linked. A defense budget that grows without limit is a debt that grows without limit, and a debt that grows without limit is a mortgage on the grandchildren.

The record behind the words

A good argument has evidence, and Eisenhower had a record to back his words, which is more than you can say for most farewell addresses. Let me lay it out.

Korea. In the 1952 campaign Eisenhower promised that he would go to Korea, and he did, in December, after his election. The armistice was signed on July 27, 1953, at Panmunjom. He had ended a war that had dragged on for three years without sending the country into a wider one. If you are looking for the first sign that this man was cautious about spending American blood and treasure, that is it.

A chance for peace. In April 1953 he gave a speech that is not as famous as it should be, in which he said that every gun made and every warship launched was, in the final sense, a theft from people who hunger and are not fed. That is the same moral frame he used on the way out the door eight years later.

The New Look. In October 1953 his National Security Council adopted a strategy known as the New Look, set out in a document called NSC 162/2. The idea was to rely on nuclear deterrence, air power and alliances rather than on keeping enormous conventional armies in the field year after year, because a permanent mobilization on that scale would, the administration feared, strain the economy. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles described the deterrent in January 1954 as massive retaliation. You may think the doctrine was too blunt, and plenty of people did. But the logic was fiscal as much as military: security the country could afford for decades.

Balanced budgets. The federal budget showed a surplus in fiscal years 1956, 1957 and 1960. Not every year was in the black. The recession of 1957 and 1958 pushed the books into deficit, which happens when revenues fall and the government keeps its commitments. But the goal was clear, and he hit it three times in eight years, which is three more times than most of his successors in either party can say.

The highways. The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 created the Interstate system, and the argument for it ran partly through national defense, since a road network lets you move troops and evacuate cities. I mention it because the military argument was never his only argument. He spent on what he thought the country needed and held back on what it did not.

Put those together and you have a President who signed a peace, set a defense posture around deterrence, and balanced the books when he could. His farewell warning was an accurate description of his own governing philosophy.

The best objection: he was soft on defense

Here is the strongest version of the case against him, and I want to state it fairly, because it was made by serious people and it was made at the time.

The critics said the New Look starved the Army. Generals Matthew Ridgway and Maxwell Taylor, both distinguished soldiers, left the service and criticized the policy on the record. Taylor's book The Uncertain Trumpet, published in 1960, argued that relying on nuclear weapons left the President with only two choices in a crisis, doing nothing or ending the world, and no good options in between. Then in October 1957 the Soviets launched Sputnik, and Americans began to ask whether the country had fallen behind. By 1960 Senator John Kennedy was campaigning on a "missile gap," the claim that the Soviets had built more long-range missiles than the United States.

That is a serious indictment, and conservatives of the day, including defense hawks in Eisenhower's own party, took it seriously.

The answer: what the record shows

I would give three answers.

1. Missile gap was wrong, and it was wrong in America's favor. After the election it became clear from intelligence, including photographs from the U-2 reconnaissance flights and then from the first reconnaissance satellites, that the Soviets had far fewer long-range missiles than the campaign talk implied. Eisenhower had known more than he could say in public, because telling the public how he knew would have exposed his sources. He took the political hit rather than reveal the intelligence. A President who will lose an argument to protect a secret is not a President who is soft on defense.
2. He did not neglect the programs that mattered. The administration pushed ahead with ballistic missile programs, with submarine-launched missiles, and with the reconnaissance systems, after Sputnik, and created the agency that became NASA in 1958 and a defense research agency the same year. Whatever you think of the Army's complaints, the long-range deterrent that kept the peace for the next thirty years was built on his watch.
3. The critique cuts both ways. If you believe that peace is bought with strength, you also have to ask what you do with the evidence that the strength was already there. You cannot at once say that defense spending is a sacred cow and that Eisenhower's restraint left us dangerously weak. The test is whether the country was deterred, and it was.

That does not mean the New Look was perfect. Reasonable conservatives still argue that relying on one kind of weapon limits your options, and the Kennedy and Johnson years moved toward a more flexible posture for a reason. I would say the debate is a live one. For a way to think about it on your own terms, try the questions in A Worksheet for Reading Any Defense Budget Number Without Being Fooled and Seven Tests of Whether the Military Is Really Ready for a Fight.

Why Republicans remember one warning

So why do Republicans, as a rule, remember the first warning and let the second one gather dust? I have a theory, and it is not flattering.

Some of us, when we hear "military-industrial complex," feel an urge to defend the troops, and rightly. Nobody who has watched a family say goodbye at an airport wants to hear the uniform insulted. So we flinch from the line, assuming it comes from the left, and we do not look at where it came from. Eisenhower was the Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe in the Second World War. He was no pacifist. If he could say that the defense establishment needs the voters to watch it, then a Republican can say it too, and say it proudly.

On the other side of the ledger, the second warning, about debt, is the one the party has been most willing to forget when it holds power. It is easy to be a fiscal hawk when the other fellow is in the White House. It is much harder to vote against a defense program in your own state or to say no to a popular entitlement. I wrote about that pattern in Why Spending Restraint Keeps Losing in Washington, Whoever Is in Charge, and there is a plain, uncomfortable fact underneath it: the grandchildren do not vote, and they cannot call their congressman. If you want the nuts and bolts, try twelve questions about the national debt, answered straight.

The honest conservative position, the one Eisenhower held, is both. Fund what defense truly needs, and make the Pentagon prove it. Ask hard questions of the contractors, the way you would of any other supplier. And do not pay for it by borrowing against people who are not yet old enough to object.

What to do with this

I would not turn this into a slogan. Eisenhower did not write slogans. He wrote a warning, and a warning is something you act on. A few practical ways to do that:

First, when your representative votes on a defense bill, read the committee summary before you form an opinion. The Armed Services Committees post their reports, and Congress.gov has the text. Second, when anyone, including a friend, quotes the farewell address, ask which half they are quoting. The full text is a short read. Third, when a candidate promises both a bigger defense and a balanced budget, ask them to name the other thing that gets cut, because arithmetic has no party.

The bottom line

• Eisenhower's farewell address warned about two things: unchecked influence by the defense establishment and its industry, and the habit of living off what the grandchildren will earn. He meant both.
• The speech also warned that public policy could be captured by a scientific-technological elite, and that federal money can steer which questions scholars ask. Conservatives who distrust credentialed authority will find that warning is theirs by right.
• His record backs his words: a Korean armistice in 1953, a deterrence-based defense policy, and balanced budgets in fiscal 1956, 1957 and 1960.
• Defense and fiscal restraint are not enemies. Pay for what the military really needs, and make sure each dollar is justified.
• Read the speech yourself, all of it. It will take you about as long as a commercial break.