Ike’s Warning Revisited

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address, a Presidential speech considered one of the most noteworthy—and prophetic—ever given. Often compared with John F. Kennedy’s historic inaugural three days later, Eisenhower’s farewell peered from 1961 down “the long lane of history yet to be written.” Like Kennedy, he spoke about the responsibilities and challenges confronting popular government, including his famous call to “guard against the unwarranted acquisition of influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

We tend to remember the Fifties nostalgically as peaceful and prosperous. Eisenhower’s words conveyed a more complicated reality. Fear was a powerful current in national politics—fear of war, of Communism, the A-bomb, and of a second Great Depression.