Against Eisenhower
Eisenhower’s attack on Guatemala was brilliantly executed. A faux invasion force consisting of a handful of right-wing Guatemalans used fake radio broadcasts and a few bombing runs flown by American pilots to terrorize the fledgling democracy into surrender. Arbenz stepped down from the presidency and left the country. Soon afterward, a Guatemalan colonel named Carlos Castillo Armas took power and handed back United Fruit’s lands. For three decades, military strongmen ruled Guatemala.
The covert American assault destroyed any possibility that Guatemala’s fragile political and civic institutions might grow. It permanently stunted political life. And the destruction of Guatemala’s democracy also set back the cause of free elections in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Honduras.
From “Ghosts of Guatemala’s Past,” by Stephen Schlesinger, in the New York Times, June 3, 2011
This is kindly, honest, grandfatherly “Ike.”
This is the president who for decades has been praised for telling us as he left office that we should beware of giving “the military-industrial complex” too much power or letting it direct our national policies.
To destroy democracy in Guatemala he used American military or paramilitary force in the interests of an enormous American corporation, United Fruit. After employing militarism to serve industrial capitalism for eight years, his pious warning against both seems incredibly hypocritical.
Yet on it has been built a whole tower of adulation of Eisenhower as a far-seeing statesman, above party politics.
He was nothing of the kind. He was an Army general, accustomed to using violence to gain his goals, accustomed to the undemocratic, unquestioning obedience of the military, and fiercely opposed to any control over industrial capitalism, let alone any social alternative to it. He was the Cold Warrior par excellence. He saw “creeping socialism” everywhere. He was the grandfather of present-day reactionary Republicanism.
He might not like some of its present forms, the open religious and racial bigotry, the fiscal irresponsibility; but these demagogues are his political descendants, and though he might wince at their hate talk and shameless lying, his own policy was built on xenophobic fear (called “anti-Communism”) and protected by deception and hypocrisy.
I have felt for a long time that Eisenhower’s election (in 1952, defeating Adlai Stevenson in a landslide) was a cross-roads. We took the road that led us away from a rational future towards a mythical past; that led us away from hope, which is such hard work, towards fear, which is so easy; that led us to give up social justice as a guiding principle in favor of short-term-profit capitalism. Nixon, Reagan, Bush all came to power along that road, and each took us farther along it.
Another notable thing Eisenhower said as he left office was to the effect that “the future lies in packaging.” Not what is produced, not why or how it is produced, not who it is produced for, but how it is packaged — disguised — presented, represented, misrepresented, in order to be sold.
So here we are, suffocating under mountains of discarded plastic packaging — our armed forces engaged in three wars which bring profit to international corporations while bankrupting America — and our citizens still hearing that they can’t be safe unless they live in terror. Welcome to Eisenhower’s future.
– UKL
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Ursula K. Le Guin is a founding member of Book View Café
As a military man, Ike was probably thinking in a simple and straightforward manner – communism is the new enemy and war must be waged against it. With this in mind, he was indeed an honest man, honest and consistent with himself.
No matter what he did and which of the threads he spun remained intact as his legacy to this day, his famous warning should not be devalued. I doubt that he ever questioned himself; in his mind he was always fighting the good fight. Nazis to communists were probably little different.
Maybe he realized in the end what he was helping take place. Maybe he did wonder if he was used, like so many soldiers before and after him. Does that oblige us to redeem or justify him? Certainly not. But I, only looking through history’s quirky lens, can’t help believing that he was being honest when he gave that warning, maybe even shaken by the realisation.
Eisenhower’s parting shot about packaging sounds like what McLuhan said a few years later. I don’t think Eisenhower was telling us it was something good. Neither was McLuhan. I think they were both stating a fact.
And I think Clinton should be in the list with Bush and Reagan and Nixon. He gave us NAFTA after all. And is Obama actually doing anything to further a socialist cause despite the fact that the wing nuts tell each other he’s a commie?
I’m not convinced that Iran, Guatemala, and Congo wouldn’t have happened under a Democrat: we’ve only recently learned how much destruction Truman wrought in Korea. And whose administration started the Red Scare anyway?
Eisenhower, who basically ended McCarthyism and segregation by putting a bunch of civil libertarians on the Supreme Court, who maintained New Deal-era levels of taxation, and who spoke out against religious discrimination, is at odds with today’s wingnuts on some pretty significant issues.
His greatest domestic blunder might end up having been the “What’s good for General Motors” policy that gave us the interstate highway system
I’ve always thought the “military industrial complex” speech was Ike’s apology for letting it take complete control of the government during his term. He wasn’t willing to do more than make that speech — like everybody else who ends up in public office, he played by the rules even when he left — but it was a hint of what we’d ended up with. I’ve never seen him as grandfatherly or benign, but then my mother stood in line for two hours, in the rain, pregnant, to vote for Adlai Stevenson. (OK, she was probably 6 weeks pregnant and I suspect the line wasn’t that long, but you get the idea.)
Josh, I think we just got lucky when Eisenhower put Earl Warren in as chief justice. I’m sure he was not expecting what Warren ended up accomplishing. As for McCarthy, Eisenhower didn’t act until he had gone so far over the edge that even his supporters were moving away from him. I don’t recall Ike doing anything to stop the House Unamerican Activities Committee, which went on unabated throughout the 50s into the 60s. His justice department kept right on prosecuting people for refusing to testify about their “Communist” backgrounds.
As someone who doesn’t believe for a New York minute that Kennedy would have stopped the Vietnam War, I’m beginning to think that when it comes to foreign policy, something — a combination of the military industrial complex, the national security mindset, and other influences that I can’t even quite name — hijacks our presidents, even the ones with good intentions.
I find quite interesting that the three comments above relate to the reasons & circumstances surrounding Ike. All very enlightening, but clearly nobody gives a hoot about Guatemala (or about the other two-three dozen Guatemalas that were subject to the “gunboat policy” during the last hundred years).
Good point, Martin. Having spent some time in Guatemala in the 70s, I can attest that our overturning of their elected government did a great deal of damage. Though it was interesting at the time that the Guatelmalan press frequently criticized the Somoza regime in Nicaragua while supporting a similar regime at home.
I think the future will see Ike’s most significant “legacy” as the cold-blooded murder of Patrice Lumumba. According to Adam Hochschild’s magnificent book, “Eisenhauer would have vastly preferred to have him taken care of some way other than by assassination, but he regarded Lumumba as I [Allen Dulles, chief of the CIA] did and a lot of other people did: as a mad dog . . . and he wanted the problem dealt with” (p. 302).
Lumumba’s death paved the way for the coup that put Mobutu in power; Mobutu, one of the most corrupt and heartless dictators the world has ever seen, paved the way for the civil wars, mass rapes, and other disasters the Congo has witnessed since. One could even argue that the AIDS crisis would not have had the impact we have all seen had Lumumba been permitted to establish a stable government in the Congo. But Eisenhauer–a “straightforward military man,” as another commentator has pointed out– thought only of “winning a conflict,” i.e., destroying an enemy. “Quirky lens of history” or not, as a human being and especially as a leader, Ike had a moral obligation to think of the broader consequences of his actions. Bottom line: he did not.
There is a socio-political name for the kind hand-in-hand relationship between capital, government, and the military that Ike promoted and UKL describes. It’s “fascism.” I’m not being hyperbolic here. This is how Goering described National Socialism. This is the knife’s edge America has danced along since WW II. In my opinion, we’ve slipped and fallen.