'Every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger'

BuzzFeed notes that "the figure who permeated both the undergraduate and graduate courses" in geopolitics that Chuck Hagel has taught for three years at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service was "former President and five-star General Dwight D. Eisenhower":

The senator even kept a large portrait of the former president, painted for him by his brother, in his office at Georgetown. In his book, Hagel wrote that Eisenhower is the man he'd "put up on my Rushmore."

Hagel's admiration for Eisenhower, adds BuzzFeed, is "one reason he meets some of his most intense opposition from those who fear cuts to America's massive defense spending." Perhaps they're thinking of this sort of earnest rhetoric, from President Eisenhower's 1953 speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors:

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.

Observes Jean Edward Smith, in his excellent Eisenhower in War and Peace:

The ideas for Eisenhower's speech did not bubble up from the bureaucracy. They did not reflect a cabinet consensus...; they did not derive from learned professorial research; nor did they represent the work product of policy think tanks. They were pure Eisenhower. Ike believed the country wanted peace, and he was determined to provide it. War was neither a board game nor a seminar exercise for armchair intellectuals (italics mine).

Smith penned those words in 2012 with his own era in mind, as much as Ike's.

Comments

[Turgidson]

Eisenhower was a socialist peacenik?!?! Why didn't somebody say something!

(so was that dirty hippie Ronald "nuclear-free world" Reagan, of course)

[Peter G]

And brothers it's even worse being on the receiving end.

[Bulworth]

OK, another book I'll have to buy now.

[Peter G]

I know Bulworth. I know. In graduate school my prof was the same way. You should read these he would say, handing me my weekly pile. And through gritted teeth I would have to admit that he was right. Same with this PM fellow.