Lessons of the Fall: Ike's In, Reagan's Out

To a guy with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But I can't help seeing this moment of combined military and financial crisis as a validation of Dwight D. Eisenhower and a repudiation of Ronald Reagan.

Eisenhower figures prominently both in my 2006 film Why We Fight and my forthcoming book The American Way of War, so I've been basically living with the guy since 2003. The Ike I've come to know is a fiscal and military conservative with a healthy skepticism toward the kind of unwarranted conflict in which we are engaged abroad and the fiscal irresponsibility we are witnessing at home. As the nation approaches November -- already beleaguered by war and now bracing itself for the brunt of this banking tsunami -- Eisenhower has much to teach us about how we lost our way and what we can do to get back.

Reagan, on the other hand, is long overdue for a rethink. At a time when we are mired in a tragic foreign conflict invented by his latter-day acolytes and digging through the wreckage of their corrupt and deregulated economy, the fullness of Reagan's vision is upon us. But if there can be any silver lining to these combined crises, it may be to inspire a shift away from America's blind obsession with Reaganism and a return to the more sober polices that once kept America secure -- militarily and fiscally.

What a difference fifty years makes.

During his presidency, Eisenhower wasn't seen as a very bright light. But today, he haunts us. First, the Iraq war fulfilled his now legendary 1961 farewell warning about the "military-industrial complex." Back then, he was all but written off as a kook for suggesting that a shadowy network of corporate and military actors could lead the country to war for profit or ideology rather than principle or necessity. Now, as we try to understand how we got into our domestic financial mess and to what extent it relates to the military mess overseas, Eisenhower grows more prescient by the minute. Perhaps, too, he can teach us something about how to respond.

As president, Eisenhower gave the lie to George Clemenceau's axiom "War is too important to be left to the generals." As his granddaughter Susan recounted to me, he was deeply shaken by his experience of World War II and sought to ensure that no such thing could happen again. As president at the height of the Cold War, he initiated his controversial "New Look" policy -- a far-reaching program of defense reduction that pitted him against an entrenched bureaucracy of military-industrial interests. Fearing not only the direct costs of war but the disfiguring indirect impact that foreign entanglement can have on the nation's financial health, Eisenhower described America's conflict with the Soviet Union as "an unbearable security burden leading to economic disaster."

Ike's career holds so many such applicable pearls of wisdom, it's best to get them right from the horse's mouth. In 1953, in one of his first addresses as President, he made the now legendary Chance for Peace speech, in which he quantified in brutally simple terms how money spent on defense is diverted from other areas of national need:

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... 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 fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane 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.

As president, Ike's advocacy for military and economic restraint put him at almost constant loggerheads with the Pentagon over defense expenditures and pressure from Congress for increased overseas military engagement. While during the Bush years it has been the Republicans who critique their opponents as soft on terror, in Eisenhower's time, the party lines were reversed. As Democratic senators Henry "Scoop" Jackson and John F. Kennedy used the spurious "bomber gap" and "missile gap" charges to impugn Eisenhower's stewardship of national security, he resisted pressure by members of both parties to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union.

"God help this country," the embattled President was overheard to say, "when someone sits at this desk who doesn't know as much about the military as I do."

With 20/20 hindsight, the regrettable covert activities Eisenhower approved in Iran, Guatemala, Indochina, and elsewhere, are part of the larger covert story of how Cold War America came to violate the framers' resistance to foreign entanglement. It's a tragic story of unintended consequences that leads uncomfortably to today's quagmire in Iraq. Yet, beyond his role at the dawn of such covert mischief, Eisenhower did manage to keep America largely out of conflict for eight years at the height of the Cold War without bankrupting the country.

That was then. But today's Republicans are a different breed. This was confirmed earlier this year when lifelong Republicans John and Susan Eisenhower -- Ike's son and granddaughter -- opted to break ranks with their party, no longer able to brook its abandonment of first principles. In this sense, the current combination of crises is the culmination of a long process by which the commitment to small government and isolationism that were once the hallmark of the Republican party have been replaced by Reagan's free-market fundamentalism and runaway militarism, which have directly and indirectly led to our current predicament.

Reagan's renaissance, which culminated in his near-monarchic state funeral four years ago, coincided with the rise of the neoconservatives in Washington, all of whom laud him as their political hero. The ever-shifting candidate John McCain, who appeared in "Why We Fight" and makes a characteristically fitful appearance in my book, describes Reagan as "our icon, reversing the lesson of Vietnam in his policy of military strength and support for freedom fighters around the world." Not surprisingly, McCain's straight talk express is having a bumpy ride during the current array of crises. In Tuesday's Washington Post, George Will described McCain as "behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high." It's a pretty sad day in Mudville when you're trying to win the hearts of conservatives and George Will accuses you of being more socialist than FDR. To be fair to John McCain, though, the current crisis doesn't only reveal a disconnect in his thinking. It uncovers a basic dilemma over what it means today to be a Republican more broadly.

The problem, of course, is that you can't really love Reagan and love Eisenhower at the same time. Eisenhower was a fiscal conservative, military conservative, and government-bureaucracy conservative. Conversely, Reagan had a proactive, expansionist view of America's role abroad and a blank-check enthusiasm for military-industrial corporatism at home. Taken to their logical extreme, these produce entanglement abroad, economic instability at home, and now, the big-government solutions that inevitably follow. Of course, it didn't start that way. Reagan's revolution was sold on a ticket of "small government." But buyer beware. Now that Reaganomics' warranty has run out, the party of anti-Communism and small government is proposing to socialize our economy. It turns out -- and this is what Eisenhower saw so presciently - that you can't have the neocons' Reaganesque fantasies of military adventurism overseas and deregulated corporatism at home without paying a price in the long run. Suddenly, with Joseph Stiglitz assessing the Iraq war's cost at over $3 trillion and all hell breaking loose in the markets, one-time critics of big government are standing on Wall Street handing out bailouts like party favors (no pun intended).

No wonder it's hard to be John McCain these days -- or any other acolyte of Reagan -- struggling, after supporting the Iraq war and fighting for Reaganesque deregulation, to distance yourself from the inconvenient consequences of these policies. For like his party, McCain bet on the wrong horse, hitching himself not to the soldierly restraint of Eisenhower but to Reagan's radical fantasy that a society of foreign entanglement abroad and deregulated trickle-down economics at home can long endure. So what to do about it?

Well, I might encourage John McCain and, for that matter, anyone in Washington who's drunk the Gipper's free-market fundamentalist and gun-toting expansionist Kool-Aid, to spend a bit more time reading Eisenhower. In combination, a couple of striking phrases in the farewell address and in an earlier speech Ike gave upon assuming the presidency of Columbia University may hold a key to optimizing our reaction.

"Crises there will continue to be," Eisenhower declared in his farewell warning. "In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties."

It's impossible to read these words today and not see the Iraq war as a "spectacular and costly" reaction to the crisis of 9/11 and Paulson's $700 billion blank check as a "miraculous solution" to our "current difficulties."

It's too late, of course, to heed Eisenhower's warnings against militarism and avert the ravages of the Iraq war. But perhaps it's not too late to seek his economic counsel. Unlike today's profligate Republicans, under whom the deficit has increased from $6 trillion to over $9 trillion, Eisenhower achieved a balanced budget for three of his eight years in office, a feat unmatched by any president in the years since. (Not surprisingly, we saw a similar explosion of the deficit under Reagan.) Eisenhower's fiscal conservatism, though, wasn't just a function of knee-jerk penny-pinching or callous, laissez-faire free market fundamentalism. His was a deeply held vision of the precious balance between government expenditure and republican liberties. At his inauguration as President of Columbia University in 1948, he decried that "if carried to the logical extreme, the final concentration of ownership in the hands of government gives to it, in all practical effects, absolute power over our lives."

In his article critiquing McCain's response to the crisis, George Will asked a pointed question not only about the candidate but about his party: "So, is not McCain's party now conducting the most leftist administration in American history?" Will went on to question Paulson's reasoning when he responded to charges that his bailout was socialist: " this is not socialism, this is necessary." What Will to his credit is highlighting is the central problem at this moment for Republicans: how to support the audacious efforts of the White House to respond to a financial crisis born on its watch by taking over the banking industry in a way FDR never dreamt of while on the other hand trying to cling to a coherent Republican ideology. To its own horror, contemporary republicanism is in danger of becoming the new socialism, and George W. Bush a modern-day New Dealer.

In Monday's New York Times, Paul Krugman referred to Paulson's bailout bill as the"Authorization for Use of Financial Force," a joking echo of the wording of the Joint House Resolution that produced the Iraq war by conferring Congress' war-making power on the president. Beyond Krugman's jibe, though, is a very real concern that Eisenhower would overwhelmingly share - that just as the country did in the wake of 9/11 America might respond to the current crisis not with the prudence of improved oversight but with a radical doctrine of government ownership, marked by the too familiar stains of cronyism and corruption.

"We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren," Eisenhower hauntingly remarked in his closing words, "without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow."

If, how, and when the current crisis will end is anyone's guess. Somehow it's always easier to dig oneself into a hole than to claw one's way back out. And broadly speaking, the question about the bailout does not seem to be whether to have it, but just what form it should take. This is a complex question -- like that which faced America after 9/11 -- that requires the time for a textured consideration. Having ignored Eisenhower's example of military restraint for the past eight years, perhaps we can cut our economic losses by heeding his example of fiscal and small-government conservatism. As the White House now demands the rubber-stamping of its sweeping blank-check bailout with the same fervor it used to sell Congress on the need to invade Iraq (with the added new twist that McCain is hinging his appearance at Friday night's debate on the achievement of a signed bailout), we must remember that Eisenhower, at the height of the Cold War, did not allow his policymaking to be bullied by those who would allow the public interest to be "held captive" by private interests.

For ultimately, Eisenhower understood that misguided national priorities that place military expansion and unchecked cronyism above other vital aspects of our national life condemn us to "destroy from within what we are trying to protect from without." Instead, he argued, crises must be met not by spectacular and costly exercises of radical governance but through a consistent commitment to "balance in and among national programs." This requires a holistic understanding of what makes a nation strong. For Eisenhower understood that an uneducated country is an undefended country, that a country without adequate health care is an undefended country, that a country that bullies its friends in the international community is an undefended country; and, above all, that a country in which corporate-political corruption has compromised its people's faith in their leaders is a country they will not fight for. Ultimately, that country - and the principles on which it was founded -- cannot long endure.

* * * Eugene Jarecki's 2006 film Why We Fight won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival as well as a Peabody Award. His forthcoming book, The American Way of War: Guided Missiles, Misguided Men, and a Republic in Peril (Simon & Schuster/Free Press), will be released October 14th.

Comments

[bltmn]

As I've read some 'old-school' conservatives (Pat Buchanan, George Will, Ben Stein, etc.), I've come to realize just how far the current Republican Party has drifted from its ideological heart. Conservatism has been so bastardized and manipulated that many of its stalwarts of the 70's and 80's have been more critical of its policies than Democrats.

It's not just Reagan. Reagan's projection of strength and optimism was productive as an antidote to the malaise of the seventies. He also maintained the psychological pressure on the Soviet Union that hastened its demise. But once the economy recovered from 70's stagflation, Reaganomics only fostered corporate excess and corruption. After the fall of the Soviet Union, our military strength and national pride became heavy-handed hubris.

The most significant of Eisenhower's words is "balance". Partisan politics have become so savage and narrow-minded that no one seems willing, or capable, of considering both sides of an issue. Worse, the Neocon-controlled Republican Party has repeatedly attempted to subvert the democratic process to tighten its control of policy and ensure its hold on power.

Any single ideology, applied unconditionally, with no regard for its suitability to the challenges at hand, will eventually fail. Any instrument of strength, in the absence of dangers that require it, will lead to runaway corruption. Thus the Bush administration, the chaos among Republicans, and the agonizing mess in which this country finds itself today.

[FebM]

Where is the republican party of Eisenhower? Its beyond shameful that the right wing currently carry the banner for such an esteemed party.

[GrainOSand]

Two things come to mind after reading this treatment.

1. A knee-jerk reaction is bad and a delayed reaction is bad. John McCain's campaign is exemplary of the former and Americas' understanding of the illegitimacy of the Reagan presidency is a fine example of the latter. I knew Reagan sucked as a president when he was president and I was a child then. This Johnny come-lately realization that evil and confusion once lead this nation is tripping me out.

2. As I read I was struck by all the lives that have been wasted, left unattended, while bullets, guns, and bombs rolled off the assembly line. The words of Eisenhower brought that message home. America has wasted precious life on trivial pursuits arising out of narrow-minded hubris and greed, creating shortsightedness, leading to shortfalls in the economy, pitfalls in foreign policy, and an ever-darkening forecast for its future.

May we seek and then see the light, real time as opposed to too late or past our time to get things right.

[mouselion]

' Instead, [Eisenhower] argued, crises must be met not by spectacular and costly exercises of radical governance but through a consistent commitment to "balance in and among national programs." '

The lesson of the middle way. Moderation is the key to success. Blind-faith ideologies are usually reactions to their perceived antitheses, precipitating the strengthening of that which the ideologues wish did not exist. Neo-con laissez-faire free-marketeers brought on "corporate (shudder!) socialism", just as destitute socialist nations ultimately embrace the capitalist market (what else is there, in regards to money?)

You always attract that which you fear.

We're in the 21st century now. Reality requires giving up blind idealism and learning to value pragmatism as the guiding principle of governance. Perhaps it will be recognized that such a approach is not devoid of morality, after all -- but, actually does more to help the (perceived antithetical) values of freedom and the greater good to both be realized. Time dualistic thinking of either/or and to embrace a more holistic approach.

[rehajm]

From The New York Times
New Agency Proposed to Oversee Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae
By STEPHEN LABATON
Published: September 11, 2003
The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.
Under the plan, disclosed at a Congressional hearing today, a new agency would be created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government­-sponsored companies that are the two largest players in the mortgage lending industry.
The new agency would have the authority...to set...capi­tal-reserv­e requirements for the companies. It would exercise authority over any new lines of business. And it would determine whether the two are adequately managing the risks of their ballooning portfolios...
...''These two entities -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- are not facing any kind of financial crisis,'' said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ''The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.'' (end)
As politically convenient as it is to blame this crisis on Republicans or free market fundamentals, the evidence above demonstrates the disasterous unintended consequences of blind advocacy of one socioeconomic group at the expense of everyone else. Things won't improve until we demand of our leaders sensible measures intended to improve the lives of every American- not just 'the rich' or 'working families'.

[mouselion]

As the party touting smaller government, the Bush has reacted to every major crises in the past eight years by growing more bureaucracies and spending more treasury than any other president since FDR's New Deal.

[research]

You GOP had absolute power to pass whatever bill you wanted to no matter what the dems wanted.

You GOP have always touted deregulation.

Why didn't you pass this bill?

[freshnotbitter]

You are doing Reagan a disservice by comparing today's republican to a Reagan Kool-aid drinker.

Reagan's tax plan would mean raising some taxes today. Reagan was reacting to many excesses of the sixties and seventies which have all disappeared today. The result is that conservatives today invoke Reagan for no discernible purpose since Reagan's program was directed at times which do not exist today.

Eisenhower is worth another look for sure. Eisenhower basically resisted the extention of WWII. The neo-conservatives did not resist the "expansion" of the cold war after the soviet union dissolved, electing instead to convert it into another conflict aimed at world domination through the use of force on the pretext of making the world safe for democracy as if we were Trotskyites. Reagan did spend too much unnecessarily on weapons but at least he had the historic context for it and he resisted armed intervention outside the Western Hemisphere. indeed, the republicans understand that the Reagan legacy is useless for today's problems and they are having a heck of a time figuring out which direction to go in. Republicans will understand eventually that the internet and modern communications have changed the game and large central bureaucracies may do some things better than the market. The operative word there is "some". Reaganism would say government cannot do anything better than the private sector. Again, he is "out of date", not wrong in the absolute sense.

[idest]

When was Lebanon in the Western Hemisphere?

[darker]

Free market is a LOOSER for middle class Americans--for years now.

As for our "most dramatic" presidential candidate:
MCCAIN = TOO MUCH BAGGAGE.
MCCAIN = TOO MANY SKELETONS IN HIS MANY CLOSETS.
Not to mention S. Palin's.

no thanks. No more years of republican shenanigans and hoodwinking the public.

I CAN'T AFFORD REPUBLICANS any more.
Republicans don't know how to govern and THEY'RE TOO EXPENSIVE!

[JBS]

Until we find some way to remove the undue influence of money power, great concentrations of wealth, from the American political system, there is no way back.

[research]

Good article, but go back further to FDR.

"To its own horror, contemporary republicanism is in danger of becoming the new socialism, and George W. Bush a modern-day New Dealer."

You reiterate the conservative irrational hatred of "left" "New dealer"(FDR).

Too bad,

We need FDR now, not Ike.

FDR broke up the banks and mega corporations as needed.
FDR rebuilt the infrastructure employing millions.

[fedupinpa]

Lincoln., Teddy Roosevelt, Eisenhower where have all the good Republicans gone?

[NoOneSpecial]

I was under the impression they were re-labeled as pinko commies by their own party.

Except when they need to trot out "freeing the slaves" or whatever, most of the things these men were know for, including their forward-thinking wisdom, is anathema to modern Republican politics.

[fedupinpa]

Thank you NoOne Special. You're more eloquent than me but you definitely got my point.

[fedupinpa]

Another thought for you, NoOne Special. What would Teddy Rosevelt think about these giant Wall Street financial firms, their mergers and buyouts?

[leoeris]

Please remember that in the original, unedited version of his speech, Eisenhower referred to it as the "military-­industrial­-congressi­onal complex".

[BobOnThis]

Good article but your final analysis seems rather circular... You Love Ike... and his Libertarian principles... but you hate the religiousity of the new conservative movement that Reagan helped spur into political action... but you probably won't vote Libertarian because they still think like Ike!

Welcome to the duomockery of democracy!

'Truth is treason in the kingdom of lies' - Ron Paul

[Scottyp]

What a great article. As a "big picture" fan and a person who every now and again thinks in "geologic time", I feel that we as a people are accelerating toward some sort of critical mass. Eisenhouer stood as the man who accepted the reigns of power from a post WWI Britain (power which rose from the British East India trading Co. centuries ago) on D-Day 1944. His participation in that conflict and the Marshal plan (the U. S. had money back then) allowed him a unique historical insight. Something that seeems to be very lacking in the past few administrations. The upcoming election will serve as a signal that the world is ready for a more informed, intellectual approach to governance, or a sign that the sawtooth of the progressive zeitgeist needs to dip a little lower before it moves forward. Thanks for caring. Obama/Biden for new(ish) leadership. (They will struggle with Eisenhouer's Mliltary Industrial complex, and it will be a battle)

[Viper]

And yet for all of Ikes greatness... he did give permission for the assasination of the Iranian president that now haunts us, was first to send troops into S. Vietnam and to plan the Bay of Pigs invasion... that later haunted Kennedy.

Regards

[avance]

Assassination of the Iranian president? Don't you mean the removal by chicanery of the prime minister of Iran, Mossadegh? As for Vietnam, it was not Ike who initiated the US intervention there, but Harry Truman who decided that a return of French colonialism was preferable to the self-determination of the Vietnamese if that meant a left turn. Ike continued that policy, and JFK continued it when he became president. You are right when you say that the Bay of Pigs invasion was planned by the CIA and the Pentagon under Ike, but the Plans Division of the "Defense" Department churns out all kinds of plans for aggression as well as defense against putative antagonists who might include Cuba or Albania or Iraq or Canada. Recall the brief dustup several years ago when US plans for war with Canadaw were revealed? The point is that plans of all kinds are in Pentagon files, but it takes a president to carry them out. And in the case you mention, it was JFK.

[larry278]

Check the history, but it's said that the former USSR didn't care for, didn't like & was afraid of Mossadegh &, at the very least, authorized & agreed to Mossadegh's removal by UK & US operatives

[AbileneDream]

Mossadeq was not assassinated. But the CIA did engineer his removal from power.

[batguano]

Contrast these words of wisdom with the ignorant gibberish of todays "Republicans".


"In this spring of 1953 the free world weighs one question above all others: the chance for a just peace for all peoples.
The way chosen by the United States was plainly marked by a few clear precepts, which govern its conduct in world affairs.

First: No people on earth can be held, as a people, to be enemy, for all humanity shares the common hunger for peace and fellowship and justice.

Second: No nation's security and well-being can be lastingly achieved in isolation but only in effective cooperation with fellow-nations.

Third: Any nation's right to form of government and an economic system of its own choosing is inalienable.

Fourth: Any nation's attempt to dictate to other nations their form of government is indefensible.

And fifth: A nation's hope of lasting peace cannot be firmly based upon any race in armaments but rather upon just relations and honest understanding with all other nations.

In the light of these principles the citizens of the United States defined the way they proposed to follow, through the aftermath of war, toward true peace". Dwight David Eisenhower

http://www.eisenhowermemorial.org/speeches/19530416%20Chance%20for%20Peace.htm