The United States that Vandenberg lived in is long gone. The same generation dubbed “the greatest generation” did fight WWII, but they came home and started the slide down to where we are today.
Not quite. The Greatests who fought and won WWII came home to live their lives and raise their families in the country they fought to protect. But while they were fighting, the Roosevelt era expansion of of the federal government was quickly turning it into something very different that we now call the administrative or deep state. Truman and Eisenhower did little to oppose this trend, and added to it (cold war, interstate highways, space program, etc).
Ike warned us about the military-industrial complex, he just didn’t talk about how the federal government promoted and paid for all of it.