In Archive, New Light on Evolution of Eisenhower Speech

The phrase that would emerge as the most enduring legacy of what became, arguably, the most famous farewell address since George Washington’s evolved over 20 months and was agreed to only a few days before it was delivered.

The words, in a speech by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, were transformed from a warning against a “war-based industrial complex” into a “vast military-industrial complex” and finally into a more vanilla “military-industrial complex,” which seemed controversial enough without the qualifier.

Documents released Friday by the National Archives shed new light on the genesis of the phrase in the televised address, which Eisenhower delivered on Jan. 17, 1961, three days before his successor’s inauguration.

In the final version, the president recalled that until recently the nation had no permanent arms industry, that “American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well,” but said that the country could no longer risk “emergency improvisation of national defense.” An adequate military establishment and arms industry were vital, he said, but their conjunction and “its total influence — economic, political, even spiritual” also had “grave implications.”

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” Eisenhower warned. “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.”

In the version he read from that night, those words were underlined. Several were typed in capital letters.

The newly released letters, memos and speech drafts — 21 in all — were received by the National Archives from Grant Moos, whose father, Malcolm, was Eisenhower’s special assistant and chief speechwriter.

The statement itself has created a problem of its own.

The key word term, from which the unanticipated problem from the phrase has arisen is “unwarranted influence”.

A totally objective sense of that term is nearly impossible in the political arena.

Thus, almost any national security expenditures that go to the “military industrial complex” are seen by some as always representative of “unwarranted influence”.

And, others have such an extreme concern about THAT over-reaction that they will not open themselves to the basic concern that Eisenhower had; that WE SHOULD be buying ALL THAT WE NEED, but all that we need may not in fact be as much as the “military industrial complex” wishes we would spend.

It has been hard, politically, to get a happy medium, and at the same time an equal, and bi-partisan, problem has begun to dominate Congressional action on military equipment expenditures - the equally corrupt, and equally “unwarranted influence” of pushing military expenditures as jobs programs in Congressional districts, and not solely on true national security needs. Frankly, I think this Congressional horse-trading over where the expenditures will land, and the lobbying that goes along with it, has been worse than any direct “unwarranted influence” from the military suppliers themselves.

"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. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron." -- Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953)

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