And of course H. L. Mencken's quote is the reason for this mess - "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary"

Source

Papers underscore Ike's military fears

by John Milburn - Dec. 11, 2010 12:00 AM

Associated Press

ABILENE, Kan. - For nearly two years, President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his aides searched for the right words to describe at the end of his presidency his fear that the nation's burgeoning military power was driving its foreign policy, newly released papers show.

Many months before delivering the farewell address in which he famously warned about the strength of the American "military-industrial complex," Eisenhower weighed various ideas for the speech, but concerns about the military were always central to his remarks.

The Eisenhower Presidential Library on Friday unveiled previously unseen drafts of the speech that were found recently in a cabin owned by Eisenhower speechwriter Malcolm Moos.

The documents help explain the origins of the term military-industrial complex, which Eisenhower used to warn against unbridled military development. The term was thought to have started as "war-based" industrial complex before becoming "military" in later drafts.

That theory was based on an oral history from Ralph Williams, one of Eisenhower's aides.

In the new collection, "military" appears in the passage from the first draft.

"What we know now is that 'military-industrial complex' was in there all along," said Valoise Armstrong, the archivist who processed the new papers.

In one draft, the paragraph mentioning the military-industrial complex is riddled with pencil marks deleting whole sentences, but the term itself is unblemished.

Moos' son, Grant, found the papers in a cabin in Minnesota earlier this year. He turned them over to the library in October.

"We are just so fortunate that these papers were discovered," said Karl Weissenbach, director of the library in Abilene. "We were finally able to fill in the gaps of the address."

The papers show that Eisenhower and his staff spent two years preparing his final speech to the nation. One document features a typewritten note from the president, lamenting that when he joined the military in 1911, there were 84,000 Army soldiers, a number that ballooned roughly tenfold by 1960.

"The direct result of this continued high level of defense expenditures has been to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions, where none had existed before," he wrote in the passage, a variation of which reached the delivered speech on Jan. 17, 1961.

The drafts show that the speech started as a reflection on public service and the role of the military, but expanded into wide-ranging remarks about the technological revolution and his lament that he never achieved world peace, but avoided a nuclear war.

Born in 1890, Eisenhower grew up in Kansas and graduated from West Point. During World War II, he commanded the Allied forces in Europe, including the D-Day invasion of France.

He ran for president in 1952, in a campaign that featured the slogan "I like Ike." He died in 1969.