Dwight D. Eisenhower quotes and documentary

Recently I thought through some music video ideas. One was within the topic of the military-industrial complex. Former U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell speech to the nation is a classic and my idea about the music video stopped short there. Instead like many times and about many other people before, I dived into reading up on Ike and the time around his presidency. Right now the topic of the military-industry is still relevant and important as ever since his farewell adress to the nation (see video below). After seeing the documentary (also below) I cannot think that if not the U2 plane had been shot down and Ike hadn’t sent it over Soviet. There might have been some success and progress in the Paris meetings. That might have led to a more stable world at the time and less of an arms race and a shorter lifespan for the cold war. But also perhaps no Kennedy, no Wernher von Braun (Project Paperclip), Saturn rockets and ‘one small step for a man’.

We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.

Ike seemed to be a man really tired of war and the cost of it. The costs are amazing and even in smaller wars (if a war with casualties can ever be small?) and in smaller areas the costs are enormous and could have been used to so much more good. Like the example I write about from the Željava Airbase in Tito’s Yugoslavia; that cost too much to build, didn’t get used, got destroyed during the war in Bosnia & Herzegovina. And still of today, is in no use.

But then we have the Eisenhower and Patton controversy, where historian Robert Wilcox says in a Telegraph article that:

I don’t think Dwight Eisenhower would ever have been elected president if Patton had lived to say the things he wanted to say.

Just as a side theme left alone ever since the still mysterious death of General George S. Patton.

From Ike’s time until today, we cannot imagine how much extra money the world would have seen its use in other areas. While the national wars have decreased the internal civil wars and endless war on terror have increased. In a perpetual state of war to feed the military-industrial complex. There seems to be no end in sight. Although I personally around the time in 2007 thought about how the world was about to cool down in temper and shooting. It seemed like that back then. Yet ever since conflicts are starting and just keep going.

That’s why Dwight Eisenhower lingered on my mind these days. No president is perfect but at the time some major things were about to be decided and come to pass. Like the military-industrial complex, the missile race, space race and nuclear arms race. Below are the two Ike related videos and below the videos some official Ike photos and quotes. Oh, and here is an article from The Daily Mail ‘President Eisenhower had three secret meetings with aliens, former Pentagon consultant claims’. If this was true then this man truly was international and intergalactic.

..But on the 28th of July 1938, he was present as one of McArthur’s junior aides in the Bonus Army incident where Herbert Hoover ordered his Chief of Staff General Douglas McArthur to attack the mass of some 43 000 marchers, where veterans with their families were demanding their pay for their WWI service. “During the military operation, Major Dwight D. Eisenhower, later the 34th president of the United States, served as one of MacArthur’s junior aides. Believing it wrong for the Army’s highest-ranking officer to lead an action against fellow American war veterans, he strongly advised MacArthur against taking any public role: “I told that dumb son-of-a-bitch not to go down there,” he said later. “I told him it was no place for the Chief of Staff.”Despite his misgivings, Eisenhower later wrote the Army’s official incident report which endorsed MacArthur’s conduct.” Bonus Army – Wikipedia.

 

http://youtu.be/A2IJ_FXjKJM

 

Any man who wants to be president is either an egomaniac or crazy.

Dwight D. Eisenhower. Official presidential portrait.
Dwight D. Eisenhower. Official presidential portrait.

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.

 

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.

Dwight D. Eisenhower. Photo: Fabian Bachrach 1952.
Dwight D. Eisenhower. Photo: Fabian Bachrach 1952.

Pessimism never won any battle.

 

War settles nothing.

 

We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it.

Dwight D. Eisenhower. Photo: Public Domain U.S. Army.
Dwight D. Eisenhower. Photo: Public Domain U.S. Army.

The history of free men is never really written by chance but by choice; their choice!

 

How far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without?

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