Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [13]
Pretending to the role of Decider, a president all too often becomes little more than the medium through which power is exercised. Especially on matters related to national security, others manufacture or manipulate situations to which presidents then react. Only in the most nominal sense did Harry Truman decide to bomb Hiroshima. By the summer of 1945 the momentum dictating that the atomic bomb should be used had become all but irresistible. Much the same can be said about John F. Kennedy’s 1961 decision to launch the Bay of Pigs operation, Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 decision to commit U.S. combat troops to Vietnam, or even George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003. In each case, the erstwhile commander in chief did little more than ratify a verdict that others had already rendered. Yet with rare exceptions, all presidents—even those held responsible for astonishing blunders—maintain the fiction of having remained fully in charge from start to finish. Thus do they sustain the cult of the modern presidency.
Dwight D. Eisenhower’s justly famous “Farewell Address” stands out as one of those rare exceptions.18 On the eve of leaving office—although not before—Eisenhower offered the American people a glimpse of powerful forces that lay behind and beyond presidential control. He honestly, accurately, and courageously (if belatedly) let his fellow citizens in on the secret that, in Washington, appearances were profoundly deceptive. In describing and decrying what he called the “military-industrial complex,” Ike provided a sobering tutorial in political reality, disabusing Americans of civics book notions of a political apparatus purposefully committed to advancing some collective vision of the common good.
What Americans mistook for politics—the putative rivalry that pitted Democrats against Republicans, the wrangling between Congress and the White House—actually amounted to little more than theater, he implied. Behind the curtain, a consensus forged of ambition, access, money, fevered imaginations, and narrow institutional interests determined the nation’s actual priorities. Although Eisenhower was about to surrender his office to a handsome young successor who promised dramatic change—neither the first nor last president to make such a commitment—he knew that John Kennedy’s personal qualities, however attractive, counted for little given the forces arrayed against him. “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist,” the outgoing president warned. “We should take nothing for granted.”
Eisenhower’s unvarnished warning reflected his own appreciation of a troubling new reality. The nation’s “immense military establishment” married to a “permanent armaments industry of vast proportions” wielded influence—“economic, political, even spiritual”—that reached into “every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government.” In effect, by 1961, semiwarriors—those who derived their power and influence by perpetuating an atmosphere of national security crisis—had gained de facto control of the U.S. government.
Eisenhower chose not to acknowledge that he himself had served as their ally and enabler. Nor did he explain why he had waited until the eve of his return to private life to expose the existence of this misplaced power. Still, given the source, Ike’s admission was nothing less than revelatory: Initiatives undertaken to ensure national security had given rise to new institutions and habits deeply antithetical to traditional American values.
These new forces had yielded unwelcome consequences that Eisenhower himself, whether as general or as president, had neither intended nor anticipated, threatening American democracy. To expect that Washington would remedy a problem that Washington itself had created was, as Eisenhower understood, a delusion. “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry,” he insisted, could keep semiwarriors on a sufficiently short