Defending America from the U.S. Department of Defense

In his final year in office, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had also been the 5-star general who led the allied forces against Nazi Germany in World War II, warned Americans against the dangers of maintaining an oversized military and the military-industrial complex itself. He knew this joining of industry and the military could easily grow out of control, could easily drain rather than protect the nation, could easily become a threat to the future of democracy. Here is a portion of a speech President Eisenhower gave to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in April of 1953: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket ...