“I always voted Republican… Republicans are the party of big white men. I’m a big white man, so I vote Republican. When George W. Bush came along, he made clear he represented the party of big white men. So I voted for him… It has only been through the administration of George W. Bush that I’ve come to realize that big white men are the men most to be feared in this world” – John Eisenhower, author, former U.S. ambassador to Belgium, brigadier general, and son of our 34th President.
The above words of John Eisenhower were said to Eugene Jarecki during an interview for Jarecki’s book, “
The American Way of War – Guided Missiles, Misguided Men, and a Republic in Peril”. Jarecki notes that he failed to get Eisenhower’s words on camera, and he could never get him to expand on those thoughts, but that he would never forget them.
Voicing opinions like that about a sitting war-time President is not something that a high profile person and former military officer does lightly.
Nevertheless, four months later John Eisenhower made public his quitting of the Republican Party, in
an editorial in the New Hampshire
Union Leader, writing:
For 50 years, through the election of 2000, I was (a Republican). With the current administration’s decision to invade Iraq unilaterally, however, I changed my voter registration to independent, and barring some utterly unforeseen development, I intend to vote for the Democratic Presidential candidate, Sen. John Kerry.
The fact is that today’s “Republican” Party is one with which I am totally unfamiliar.… Recent developments indicate that the current Republican Party leadership has confused confident leadership with hubris and arrogance.
Eisenhower’s statement to Jarecki was much more than just a repudiation of the Republican Party and its leaders – which is why Jarecki said he will never forget it. More important, it is a confession, perhaps inadvertent, of long-standing misguided priorities. The fact that “big white men are the men most to be feared in this world” is not something that started with the presidential administration of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. True, it reached new heights under them, but it didn’t start with them. Eisenhower’s statement to Jarecki implicitly acknowledged that by the words “It has only been through the administration of George W. Bush that
I’ve come to realize…”
I’ve discussed this issue in previous posts by detailing our long history of
slavery, imperialism, militarism, genocide, and
regime change of sovereign governments. My dwelling on this issue is not meant as a racial slur on white people. Like John Eisenhower, I am also white. Rather, these facts reflect the reality that white men in general, and the United States of America in particular, hold great power and that they have often abused that power, with devastating consequences to other peoples of the world. It is a statement on the nature and perils of power, and on the need for citizens of democracies to be aware of how their leaders make use of their power.
John Eisenhower’s statement to Jarecki is so significant because it is an admission by an historical figure that our country has gone very wrong – an admission that, contrary to what many American politicians keep on telling us, the United States has definitely NOT been the “
greatest force for good in the world”. It is a terribly difficult thing for people to admit that they or their country have been guilty of very serious misdeeds. Yet it is absolutely necessary if we are ever to reverse course.
And it is extremely interesting to me that John Eisenhower’s own father’s career embodies the dilemma that he raised in his interview with Jarecki.
President Eisenhower’s dilemmaDwight Eisenhower’s mother was a pacifist, and Eisenhower himself was a man of peace – his military career notwithstanding. His discomfort with nuclear weapons and his
disagreement with Harry Truman’s decision to use nuclear weapons against Japan in World War II have been well documented. Here is what his son John says about his father’s opinion on the subject:
He wished we hadn’t invented it. He just thought war was terrible enough as it was. You could have all the thermonuclear weapons in the world but that doesn’t solve human problems. We live on earth.
Eisenhower ended the Korean War six months after he took office, true to his campaign pledge to do so. He long held grave misgivings about the amount of money that our country spent on its military, as noted in his “
A chance for peace” speech of April, 1953:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms… is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children…
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people… This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
Jarecki notes that Eisenhower was concerned about war profiteering and the military industrial process long before his famous farewell address of 1961, as evidenced in speeches he gave even before he became president. Jarecki describes the role of the newly created CIA (1947) in facilitating war profiteering:
War profiteering was nothing new. What was new in the era of covert activity was the use of the CIA to implement invisibly the plans hatched in private consultation between the executive, select advocates in Congress, and their cronies in industry… The establishment of the CIA helped to create a new layer of secrecy and reduced accountability, blurring the line between America’s national interest and the private interests of corporations…
Eisenhower faced great pressure to increase military expenditures, despite his aversion to them. When the USSR
developed the hydrogen bomb in 1953, a wave of fear swept the country. Eisenhower’s political opponents repeatedly warned of a “
bomber gap” and a “
missile gap”, which never existed, but for which they blamed Eisenhower for not spending enough money to address them. Eisenhower’s own Pentagon, allied with the defense industry, repeatedly clamored for vast amounts of money. Jarecki says that an exasperated Eisenhower told Republican leaders he was
Getting awfully sick of the lobbying by the munitions… You begin to see this thing isn’t wholly the defense of the country, but only more money for some who are already fat cats.
Eisenhower’s meddling with the rights of sovereign nationsGiven Eisenhower’s aversion to military spending and war-profiteering, one wouldn’t expect him to be the first U.S. president to use the CIA to overthrow sovereign governments for the benefit of corporate interests. Yet, that’s exactly what he did, with long standing tragic results for the nations we overthrew.
Iran 1953In 1953 Eisenhower’s
CIA intervened in Iran to overthrow a popular prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, who had done much to improve the lot of the Iranian people. Here is how Stephen Kinzer describes Mossadegh in his book, “
All the Shah’s Men – An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror”:
His achievements were profound and even earth-shattering. He set his people off on what would be a long and difficult voyage toward democracy and self-sufficiency… He dealt a devastating blow to the imperial system and hastened its final collapse. He inspired people around the world who believe that nations can and must struggle for the right to govern themselves in freedom.
In Mossadegh’s place we installed the dictatorship of Mohammad Reza Shah. This is how Kinzer sums up the effects of the Shah’s rule:
In Iran, almost everyone has for decades known that the United States was responsible for putting an end to democratic rule in 1953 and installing what became the long dictatorship of Mohammad Reza Shah. His dictatorship produced the Islamic Revolution of 1979, which brought to power a passionately anti-American theocracy that embraced terrorism as a tool of statecraft. Its radicalism inspired anti-Western fanatics in many countries…
The violent anti-Americanism that emerged from Iran after 1979 shocked most people in the United States. Americans had no idea of what might have set off such bitter hatred… That was because almost no one in the United States knew what the CIA did there in 1953.
Guatemala 1954Kate Doyle
describes the CIA-sponsored regime change in Guatemala:
Although inside Guatemala, President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman was seen as a reformer bent only on changing the country's rigid oligarchy, Washington was nervous because he permitted the Guatemalan Communist Party to operate openly. Also, his land reform program threatened U.S. commercial interests, in particular those of the powerful United Fruit Company.
Most historians now agree that the CIA-sponsored military coup in 1954 was the poison arrow that pierced the heart of Guatemala's young democracy. The covert operation overthrew Arbenz, the second legally elected president in Guatemalan history. Over the next four decades, a succession of military rulers would wage counter-insurgency warfare that also would shred the fabric of Guatemalan society. The violence caused the deaths and disappearances of more than 140,000 Guatemalans…
Vietnam 1956The
Geneva Conference Agreements, which officially ended the war between France and Vietnam in 1954, provided for general elections which were to bring about the unification of Vietnam in 1956. However, fearing a Communist victory in those elections, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles convinced Eisenhower to
prevent those elections from taking place as planned. Eisenhower proclaimed an indefinite commitment by the United States to that effect – a commitment that President Kennedy inherited, and which was subsequently passed on to Presidents Johnson and Nixon.
From the time that we prevented the Vietnamese from holding elections in 1956 as previously agreed, until our withdrawal from Vietnam 17 years later, the justification for our imperial policies there was always to help the Vietnamese to throw of the yolk of Communism, and also to prevent the spread of Communism to other countries.
ReasonsIn each of the above three examples, the Eisenhower administration rationalized its actions by citing the need to contain communism. But Communism was not being forced on any of these countries. In Iran and Guatemala, the governments we overthrew were not Communist. They were elected leftist governments that
tolerated Communists. In Vietnam, the Eisenhower administration prevented an election that probably would have resulted in a Communist government. But what moral right did we have to prevent any of these countries from having the government that they desired?
In Iran and Guatemala, a more important reason for the CIA-sponsored overthrow may very well have been the furthering of corporate interests. In Iran, the overthrow of Mossadegh enabled American and British oil companies to obtain access to Iranian oil. In Guatemala, the overthrow of Arbenz furthered the interests of the United Fruit company. In Vietnam there appears to have been no corporate interests involved. The fear of Communism may have been the only motive in that case.
It’s difficult to know Eisenhower’s true motivations. Why would a man who in many other ways demonstrated himself to be a man of peace do such things? Stephen Ambrose, Eisenhower’s biographer, who considered him a great president,
had this to say (p 147) about his use of the CIA to achieve regime change in Iran:
The methods used were immoral, if not illegal, and a dangerous precedent had been set. The CIA offered the President a quick fix for his foreign problems. It was there to do his bidding; it freed him from having to persuade Congress, or the parties, or the public…
Jarecki seems unable to make sense of it:
These methods reflect his willingness to put national and corporate economic interests ahead of respect for democratic processes at home or abroad…
What happened? Just five years earlier, Eisenhower had warned the faculty and students of Columbia of the threat posed to freedom by “private pressure groups” and “the power of concentrated finance.” Did he not see that these very forces were guiding America’s actions in Iran and Guatemala? Had a blind spot emerged in his thinking? Worst of all, was Eisenhower seduced by the power afforded him by the newly formed CIA? ... The covert activity undertaken on his watch is a dark underside of his presidency. Given the widespread fears of the time and the formidable influence of McCarthy on the domestic landscape, one can fairly see how any president could have been drawn into the vortex …
In summary: Lots of questions, no good answers.
Warnings and ConfessionsThere have been precious few Americans to occupy the highest rungs of power, who later acknowledged the profiteering aspects of our wars. Here are three:
Smedley Butler In 1935, Major General Smedley Butler, the most decorated marine in U.S. history,
warned the American people of the dangers of war profiteering, while acknowledging his role in it:
I spent thirty-three years and four months in active service… and during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.
I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all members of the military profession… my mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher-ups…
I helped in the raping of half-a-dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. (gives a list of examples in which he participated)…During those years, I was rewarded with honors, medals, and promotion…
Dwight D. EisenhowerPresident Eisenhower gave us a less radical warning on a similar subject in his
farewell address of January 1961. Unlike Butler, he did not imply that war profiteering had historically been an issue in our country. Nor did he imply that our military was currently too big. Nor did he acknowledge any culpability. Rather, he simply warned us that, due to the rapidly increasing size and reach of our vast military apparatus, there may come a time in the not too distant future when it presents a serious problem for us. Still, it was a very radical speech for a U.S. President:
We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions… We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations. This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience…
We must not fail to comprehend its grave implications… In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
John Perkins Perkins wrote two books, “
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man” and “
The Secret History of the American Empire”, in which he exposes American and corporate corruption from an insider’s viewpoint, admitting his own role in the process. He explains his basic role like this:
We build a global empire. We are an elite group of men and women who utilize international financial organizations to foment conditions that make other nations subservient to the corporatocracy running our biggest corporations, our government, and our banks. Like our counterparts in the Mafia, EHMs provide favors...
In his second book he describes how he finally broke free from his dark side:
I came face-to-face with the shocking fact that I too had been a slaver, that my job at MAIN had not been just about using debt to draw poor countries into the global empire. My inflated forecasts were not merely vehicles for assuring that when my country needed oil we could call in our pound of flesh… My job was also about people and their families, people akin to the ones who had died to construct the wall I sat on, people I had exploited. For ten years, I had been the heir of those slavers who had marched into African jungles and hauled men and women off to waiting ships. Mine had been a more modern approach, subtler – I never had to see the dying bodies, smell the rotting flesh, or hear the screams of agony. But what I had done was every bit as sinister…
I closed my eyes to the walls that had been built by slaves torn from their African homes. I tried to shut it all out… I leaped up, grabbed the stick, and began slamming it against the stone walls. I beat on those walls until I collapsed from exhaustion…. I knew that if I ever went back to my former life, to MAIN and all it represented, I would be lost forever… I had become a slave. I could continue to beat myself up as I had beat on those stone walls, or I could escape.
And then he wrote his books.
An example of “big white men” in New Orleans during Hurricane KatrinaA. C. Thompson recently wrote an article in
The Nation titled “
Katrina’s Hidden Race War – In New Orleans’s Algiers Point, white vigilantes shot African-Americans with impunity.” It is a ghastly story of how, freed from the reach of the law, under cover of a catastrophe, a bunch of racist white men in a white enclave of New Orleans formed a militia to prevent black people from using their neighborhood as a sanctuary from death. Several horrific examples are provided in the article. Thompson describes how the racist militias thought of themselves:
Nathan Roper, another vigilante, says he was unhappy that outsiders were disturbing his corner of New Orleans and that he was annoyed by the National Guard’s decision to use the Algiers Point ferry landing as an evacuation zone… The storm victims were “hoodlums from the lower Ninth Ward and that part of the city”, he says. “I’m not a prejudiced individual, but you just know the outlaws who are up to no good. You see it in their eyes… There was a few people who got shot (black people shot by the militia) around here… I know of at least three people who got shot”.
The historian Lance Hill provides some perspective on what happened, noting that “Some white New Orleanians think of themselves as an oppressed minority”:
Because of the widespread notion that blacks engaged in looting and thuggery as the disaster unfolded, Hill believes, many white New Orleanians approved of the vigilante activity that occurred in places like Algiers Point. "By and large, I think the white mentality is that these people are exempt – that even if they committed these crimes, they're really exempt from any kind of legal repercussion… It's sad to say, but I think that if any of these cases went to trial, and none of them have, I can't see a white person being convicted of any kind of crime against an African-American during that period."
I include this story here because it seems to me that it operates on the same principle as do many U.S. global actions, but on a local rather than on a world-wide scale.
“Big white men” in perspectiveWhat I hoped to do in this post is raise the issue of how people rationalize their evil behavior by proclaiming how virtuous they are. “I’m not a prejudiced individual, but you just know the outlaws who are up to no good…” says a white racist vigilante – thereby justifying the killing of innocent black people. “The United States is the greatest force for good in the world” we are repeatedly told by our politicians – thereby justifying literally anything that we do in the world.
On rare occasions high profile individuals see the light and come out publicly with surprising revelations, warnings, or admissions. John Eisenhower, at the age of 80, finally realized that “Big white men are the men most to be feared in this world”, and he therefore quit the Republican Party. His father warned us of the military industrial complex at the end of his presidency, though he had known about it for a long time before that, and even participated in it. Smedley Butler and John Perkins went much further, publicly admitting their evil deeds, and going on a sort of crusade to warn the people of the world about how the world is run.
I very much admire these people for doing these things. Self-criticism is one of the most difficult things in the world – and it is absolutely necessary if the world is going to survive.
When I was younger I sometimes wondered about what it would be like to be President of the United States – though I don’t recall ever actually wanting to hold that office. I always felt that the biggest argument against doing that job, even if it miraculously fell into my lap, would be that I would be routinely called upon and expected to commit deeply immoral acts. That is, it seemed to me that a U.S. President is expected to put the “national interest” so much above all else that he is expected to think nothing of exterminating the lives of thousands (or millions), so long as it advances the “national interest”. Since then I have come to believe that such a dilemma does not in reality exist, because immoral acts do not really advance the national interest. One could write a whole book on that thought alone, so I won’t expand on it further here. But I will say that I believe there are only a minority of Americans who agree with me on that point.
Now that we have our first African-American President, some might expect to see a sea change in the way that our country views the world. That could happen. I certainly hope so. But it is not a given. President Obama will be faced with the same pressures that all U.S. Presidents have been faced with. The fact that he is black may even increase that pressure. We know that he will be a significant improvement over George W. Bush. But will he go beyond that, to lead Americans to see their role in the world in a very different way than they have historically seen it? I hope that he will, but I’m afraid that he won’t.