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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsIs Obama any more powerful than Eisenhower in stopping government agencies?
Eisenhower didn't approve of the military industrial complex, and warned about it in his farewell address, but he seemingly did nothing to stop it. He seemingly didn't go to the Defense Department and order them to stop getting in cahoots with different companies. The Military Industrial complex expanded under the Eisenhower Administration. Is it because he was powerless to stop it?
That question must be asked about Obama and Obama's role with the NSA. Is the Obama Administration powerless to stop NSA surveillance on Americans, or really, is it even Obama's responsibility that the NSA's growing bigger in capabilities and being intertwined in a Surveillance-Industrial Complex, that goes decades back? Are bureaucracies and government-industrial complexes large enough that they can be stopped by a president?
I've often seen people on DU here criticize Obama for not closing Guantanamo Bay, while forgetting that its the Republicans in Congress that have refused to approve actions to close it. The president is not as powerful as one may think.
On the other hand, maybe Obama was brought to the "smoke filled room" and decided that if he can't defy the system, he's gonna have to embrace it, and still manage to do the things he wanted to do within the confines of the system.
graham4anything
(11,464 posts)Eisenhower never should have been elected.
For the vast majority of the 2013 democratic party, the 50s stunk, it was a racist and sexist time period, one of the worst for those
that were affected.
Happy Days they were not.
Eisenhower was Reagan the 1st. Military men should never be elected to office imho
AZ Progressive
(3,411 posts)and is actually seen more positively by liberals and other antiwar people. Eisenhower was seemingly to the left of Obama nowadays.
graham4anything
(11,464 posts)just an old man looking to make the Pearly gates.
I don't buy is redemption nor did I ever like Ike.
Imagine how great the world would have been had Adlai won even one of the two times.
AgingAmerican
(12,958 posts)He actually signed it the second day he was in office, but changed his mind because the Republicans jumped up and down and said mean things.
We have seen this fallacy that the president is a powerless figurehead time and again.
GeorgeGist
(25,321 posts)I think Ike played along ... until no one would listen.
AZ Progressive
(3,411 posts)According to NPR:
"In an effort to control the expansion of the military-industrial complex, Eisenhower consistently sought to cut the Pentagon's budget.
The former general wanted a budget the country could afford, Bowman says. He upset all the military services with his budget cuts, especially the Air Force."
Obviously it wasn't enough.
MicaelS
(8,747 posts)The fascination of some people on the Left with Eisenhower, simply because of his anti MIC speech as he left office never ceases to amaze me. He presided over the enormous buildup of the US Nuclear Arsenal, and regularly contemplated Thermonuclear War with the USSR. Eisenhower was no Dove.
I can't copy and paste the entire article, it's far too long, but the 4 paragraphs below hits the highlights. I suggest you read the entire article.
http://hnn.us/articles/47326.html
Early on, he noted in his diary what he later said in public: nuclear weapons would now be treated just as another weapon in the arsenal. We have got to be in a position to use that weapon, he insisted to Dulles. That became official policy in NSC 5810/1, which declared the U.S. intention to treat nuclear weapons as conventional weapons; and to use them whenever required to achieve national objectives. By early 1957, Eisenhower told the NSC that there could be no conventional battles any more: The only sensible thing for us to do was to put all our resources into our SAC capability and into hydrogen bombs. He found it frustrating not to have plans to use nuclear weapons generally accepted.
His whole reason for fighting was to prevent the communists from imposing a totalitarian state in America. He had long recognized the irony that nuclear war would lead to the very totalitarianism he abhorred. But he confessed to the Cabinet that he saw no way to avoid it: He was coming more and more to the conclusion that we would have to run this country as one big campseverely regimented. After reading plans for placing the nation under martial law, giving the president power to requisition all of the nations resourceshuman and material, he pronounced them sound.
It is hard to give up the man of peace that peace activists have come to admire. And perhaps its not fair to give him up. After all, we can never know what another person truly believes. But the record of the other Eisenhower is so consistent and so extensive (Ive offered only a sampling here) that it is hard to ignore. More importantly, it is dangerous to ignore, because the other Eisenhower was the one who made actual policy. It was a policy that put anticommunist ideology above human life, made by a man who would push whole stack of chips into the pot and hit em with everything in the bucket; a man who would shoot your enemy before he shoots you and hit the guy fast with all youve got; a man who believed that the U.S. could pick itself up from the floor and win the war, even though everybody is going crazy, as long as only 25 or 30 American cities got shellacked and nobody got too hysterical.
AZ Progressive
(3,411 posts)And LBJ escalated the Vietnam war, and Carter re-escalated the Cold War.
It's not like Republicans are the only warmongers.