«Ogni ordigno prodotto, ogni nave da guerra varata, ogni missile lanciato significa, infine, un furto ai danni di coloro che sono affamati e non sono nutriti, di coloro che sono nudi ed hanno freddo. Questo mondo in armi non sta solo spendendo denaro. Sta spendendo il sudore dei suoi operai, il genio dei suoi scienziati, le speranze dei suoi giovani. [...] Questo non è un modo di vivere che abbia un qualsiasi senso. Dietro le nubi di guerra c’è l’umanità appesa ad una croce di ferro»
«Un elemento vitale nel mantenimento della pace sono le nostre istituzioni militari. Le nostre armi devono essere poderose, pronte all’azione istantanea, in modo che nessun aggressore potenziale possa essere tentato dal rischiare la propria distruzione...
Questa congiunzione tra un immenso corpo di istituzioni militari ed un’enorme industria di armamenti è nuovo nell’esperienza americana. L’influenza totale nell’economia, nella politica, anche nella spiritualità; viene sentita in ogni città, in ogni organismo statale, in ogni ufficio del governo federale. Noi riconosciamo il bisogno imperativo di questo sviluppo. Ma tuttavia non dobbiamo mancare di comprendere le sue gravi implicazioni. La nostra filosofia ed etica, le nostre risorse ed il nostro stile di vita vengono coinvolti; la struttura portante della nostra società.
Nei consigli governativi, dobbiamo guardarci le spalle contro l’acquisizione di influenze che non danno garanzie, sia palesi che occulte, esercitate dal complesso militare-industriale. Il potenziale per l’ascesa disastrosa di poteri che scavalcano la loro sede e le loro prerogative esiste ora e persisterà in futuro.
Non dobbiamo mai permettere che il peso di questa combinazione di poteri metta in pericolo le nostre libertà o i processi democratici. Non dobbiamo presumere che nessun diritto sia dato per garantito. Soltanto un popolo di cittadini allerta e consapevole può esercitare un adeguato compromesso tra l’enorme macchina industriale e militare di difesa, i nostri metodi pacifici e gli obiettivi a lungo termine in modo che sia la sicurezza che la libertà possano prosperare assieme...»
Profilo biografico di Dwight David Eisenhower
Dwight David Eisenhower nacque a Denison, nel Texas, il 14 ottobre 1890. Fu il terzo di sette figli, di David Jacob ed Ida Elizabeth Stover. Dwight David, per gli amici "Ike", proveniva da una famiglia originaria di Forbach in Alsazia, trasferitasi in America fin dal XVIII secolo. La famiglia tornò ad Abilene, Kansas, nel 1892, dove Dwight David si diplomò nel 1909 alle scuole superiori, lavorando poi dal 1909 al 1911 in un’industria casearia.
Dwight David si sposò con Mamie Geneva Doud (1896-1979), a Denver, Colorado, il 1 luglio 1916. Ebbero due figli, Doud Dwight (1917-1921), morto tragicamente nell’infanzia, e John Sheldon David Doud (n. 1922).
La famiglia Eisenhower faceva originariamente parte di una chiesa evangelica mennonita. Tuttavia, quando Dwight David ebbe cinque anni, i suoi genitori divennero seguaci degli Studenti biblici, i cui i membri successivamente presero il nome di Testimoni di Geova. In seguito il padre abbandonò i Testimoni di Geova a causa della mancata realizzazione delle profezie sulla fine del mondo, attesa per il 1914. Dwight David ed i suoi fratelli smisero di frequentare i Testimoni di Geova dopo il 1915.
Durante gli anni successivi Dwight David fu battezzato e cresimato nella Chiesa presbiteriana il 1° febbraio 1953, poche settimane dopo il suo primo mandato come Presidente degli Stati Uniti.
Dwight David si diplomò in seguito all’Accademia di West Point ed ebbe il compito di addestrare le reclute alla vigilia dell’entrata in guerra degli USA nel 1917. Venne decorato per meriti di guerra durante il primo conflitto mondiale. Nel marzo del 1941 divenne colonnello, in seguito, nel 1942 fu nominato generale di brigata. Nello stesso anno il generale George Marshall, capo di Stato Maggiore Generale dell’Esercito americano, lo designò quale Comandante in capo delle forze americane in Europa. Lo sbarco in Europa, nome in codice “Operazione Overlord”, ebbe inizio il 6 giugno 1944, nonostante l’imprevedibilità del clima sulla Manica (giorno universalmente notò come “D-Day”), e fu una delle piú grandi operazioni militari combinate aero-terrestre-navale di tutta la storia militare.
Fu pure Eisenhower a guidare lo sbarco in Marocco, contribuendo alla sconfitta delle truppe dell’Asse in Nord Africa, e fu anche l’ideatore degli sbarchi in Italia (in Sicilia e a Salerno). Il 3 settembre 1943 l’Italia firmò nelle sue mani l’armistizio a Cassibile (annunciato il successivo 8 settembre).
Dotato di una personalità brillante e affascinante, in grado di imporsi naturalmente sui suoi sottoposti, Eisenhower seppe guidare vittoriosamente le armate alleate fino al cuore della Germania nazista, congiungendosi con l’Armata Rossa in avanzata da Oriente.
In numerose circostanze Eisenhower diede mostra delle sue qualità di capo e della sua notevole capacità di valutazione strategica e operativa meritando cosí, il 20 dicembre 1944, la nomina a General of the Army. Nel 1951 fece ritorno in Europa come comandante supremo della NATO, l’Organizzazione del trattato del Nord Atlantico.
Per la sue singolari qualità il Partito repubblicano lo scelse come candidato per le elezioni politiche alla presidenza degli Stati Uniti del 1952. Grazie all’enorme popolarità legata ai successi ottenuti in guerra, incontrò il anche favore dei democratici e venne eletto con uno scarto di oltre sei milioni e mezzo di voti sul suo avversario Adlai Stevenson. In politica interna seguí una linea moderata: ampliò il programma di previdenza sociale e riformò il sistema scolastico. Nel 1954 la Corte Suprema dichiarò incostituzionale la segregazione razziale nelle scuole ed Eisenhower non esitò a inviare truppe federali a Little Rock, nell’Arkansas (1957) per sedare i disordini e garantire i diritti civili alla popolazione di colore.
Sul piano della politica estera Eisenhower concesse l’armistizio che pose fine alla guerra di Corea (27 luglio 1953), ormai giunta ad un punto di stallo. Rafforzò il sistema di alleanze occidentali, favorí l’ingresso della Repubblica federale tedesca nella NATO e firmò accordi con le nazioni del Terzo Mondo, ponendo un freno all’espansionismo sovietico (Dottrina Eisenhower, 1957). A lui si devono i primi tentativi di distensione con l’URSS, contrassegnati da una prima conferenza a Ginevra (1955) tra le due superpotenze.
Sebbene Eisenhower fosse un convinto sostenitore della corsa agli armamenti, alla fine del suo mandato, il 17 gennaio 1961, nel discorso d’addio alla Nazione, mise in guardia dal pericolo rappresentato dagli interessi commerciali dell’industria bellica e dalla sua influenza politica sempre piú pervasiva. Il testo viene qui offerto nell’originale inglese.
Dwight D. Eisenhower Biography
Bringing to the Presidency his prestige as commanding general of the victorious forces in Europe during World War II, Dwight D. Eisenhower obtained a truce in Korea and worked incessantly during his two terms to ease the tensions of the Cold War. He pursued the moderate policies of “Modern Republicanism”, pointing out as he left office, “America is today the strongest, most influential, and most productive nation in the world”.
Born in Texas in 1890, brought up in Abilene, Kansas, Eisenhower was the third of seven sons. He excelled in sports in high school, and received an appointment to West Point. Stationed in Texas as a second lieutenant, he met Mamie Geneva Doud, whom he married in 1916.
In his early Army career, he excelled in staff assignments, serving under Generals John J. Pershing, Douglas MacArthur, and Walter Krueger. After Pearl Harbor, General George C. Marshall called him to Washington for a war plans assignment. He commanded the Allied Forces landing in North Africa in November 1942; on D-Day, 1944, he was Supreme Commander of the troops invading France.
After the war, he became President of Columbia University, then took leave to assume supreme command over the new NATO forces being assembled in 1951. Republican emissaries to his headquarters near Paris persuaded him to run for President in 1952.
“I like Ike” was an irresistible slogan; Eisenhower won a sweeping victory.
Negotiating from military strength, he tried to reduce the strains of the Cold War. In 1953, the signing of a truce brought an armed peace along the border of South Korea. The death of Stalin the same year caused shifts in relations with Russia.
New Russian leaders consented to a peace treaty neutralizing Austria. Meanwhile, both Russia and the United States had developed hydrogen bombs. With the threat of such destructive force hanging over the world, Eisenhower, with the leaders of the British, French, and Russian governments, met at Geneva in July 1955.
The President proposed that the United States and Russia exchange blueprints of each other’s military establishments and “provide within our countries facilities for aerial photography to the other country”. The Russians greeted the proposal with silence, but were so cordial throughout the meetings that tensions relaxed.
Suddenly, in September 1955, Eisenhower suffered a heart attack in Denver, Colorado. After seven weeks he left the hospital, and in February 1956 doctors reported his recovery. In November he was elected for his second term.
In domestic policy the President pursued a middle course, continuing most of the New Deal and Fair Deal programs, emphasizing a balanced budget. As desegregation of schools began, he sent troops into Little Rock, Arkansas, to assure compliance with the orders of a Federal court; he also ordered the complete desegregation of the Armed Forces. “There must be no second class citizens in this country”, he wrote.
Eisenhower concentrated on maintaining world peace. He watched with pleasure the development of his “atoms for peace” program - the loan of American uranium to “have not” nations for peaceful purposes.
Before he left office in January 1961, for his farm in Gettysburg, he urged the necessity of maintaining an adequate military strength, but cautioned that vast, long-continued military expenditures could breed potential dangers to our way of life. He concluded with a prayer for peace “in the goodness of time”. Both themes remained timely and urgent when he died, after a long illness, on March 28, 1969.
[Biographical note from The White House Web Site]
Discorso d’addio alla Nazione - Eisenhower’s farewell address
The farewell speech of U.S.A. President, Dwight D. Eisenhower
Given on 17 January 1961
Good evening, my fellow Americans.
First, I should like to express my gratitude to the radio and television networks for the opportunities they have given me over the years to bring reports and messages to our nation. My special thanks go to them for the opportunity of addressing you this evening.
Three days from now, after a half century in the service of our country, I shall lay down the responsibilities of office as, in traditional and solemn ceremony, the authority of the Presidency is vested in my successor.
This evening I come to you with a message of leave-taking and farewell, and to share a few final thoughts with you, my countrymen. Like every other citizen, I wish the new President, and all who will labor with him, Godspeed. I pray that the coming years will be blessed with peace and prosperity for all.
Our people expect their President and the Congress to find essential agreement on issues of great moment, the wise resolution of which will better shape the future of the nation. My own relations with the Congress, which began on a remote and tenuous basis when, long ago, a member of the Senate appointed me to West Point, have since ranged to the intimate during the war and immediate post-war period, and finally to the mutually interdependent during these past eight years. In this final relationship, the Congress and the Administration have, on most vital issues, cooperated well, to serve the nation good, rather than mere partisanship, and so have assured that the business of the nation should go forward. So, my official relationship with Congress ends in a feeling - on my part - of gratitude that we have been able to do so much together.
We now stand ten years past the midpoint of a century that has witnessed four major wars among great nations. Three of these involved our own country. Despite these holocausts, America is today the strongest, the most influential, and most productive nation in the world. Understandably proud of this pre-eminence, we yet realize that America’s leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches and military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment.
Throughout America’s adventure in free government, our basic purposes have been to keep the peace, to foster progress in human achievement, and to enhance liberty, dignity and integrity among peoples and among nations. To strive for less would be unworthy of a free and religious people. Any failure traceable to arrogance or our lack of comprehension or readiness to sacrifice would inflict upon us grievous hurt, both at home and abroad.
Progress toward these noble goals is persistently threatened by the conflict now engulfing the world. It commands our whole attention, absorbs our very beings. We face a hostile ideology global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. Unhappily, the danger it poses promises to be of indefinite duration. To meet it successfully, there is called for, not so much the emotional and transitory sacrifices of crisis, but rather those which enable us to carry forward steadily, surely, and without complaint the burdens of a prolonged and complex struggle with liberty the stake. Only thus shall we remain, despite every provocation, on our charted course toward permanent peace and human betterment.
Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties. A huge increase in newer elements of our defenses; development of unrealistic programs to cure every ill in agriculture; a dramatic expansion in basic and applied research - these and many other possibilities, each possibly promising in itself, may be suggested as the only way to the road we wish to travel.
But each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs, balance between the private and the public economy, balance between the cost and hoped for advantages, balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable, balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual, balance between actions of the moment and the national welfare of the future. Good judgment seeks balance and progress. Lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration. The record of many decades stands as proof that our people and their Government have, in the main, understood these truths and have responded to them well, in the face of threat and stress.
But threats, new in kind or degree, constantly arise. Of these, I mention two only.
A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction. Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or, indeed, by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.
Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense. We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States corporations.
Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence - economic, political, even spiritual - is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society.
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.
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades. In this revolution, research has become central, it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present - and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system - ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.
Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society’s future, we - you and I, and our government - must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.
During the long lane of the history yet to be written, America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect. Such a confederation must be one of equals. The weakest must come to the conference table with the same confidence as do we, protected as we are by our moral, economic, and military strength. That table, though scarred by many past frustrations, cannot be abandoned for the certain agony of the battlefield.
Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose. Because this need is so sharp and apparent, I confess that I lay down my official responsibilities in this field with a definite sense of disappointment. As one who has witnessed the horror and the lingering sadness of war, as one who knows that another war could utterly destroy this civilization which has been so slowly and painfully built over thousands of years, I wish I could say tonight that a lasting peace is in sight.
Happily, I can say that war has been avoided. Steady progress toward our ultimate goal has been made. But so much remains to be done. As a private citizen, I shall never cease to do what little I can to help the world advance along that road.
So, in this my last good night to you as your President, I thank you for the many opportunities you have given me for public service in war and in peace. I trust that in that service you find some things worthy. As for the rest of it, I know you will find ways to improve performance in the future.
You and I, my fellow citizens, need to be strong in our faith that all nations, under God, will reach the goal of peace with justice. May we be ever unswerving in devotion to principle, confident but humble with power, diligent in pursuit of the Nations’ great goals.
To all the peoples of the world, I once more give expression to America’s prayerful and continuing aspiration: We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its spiritual blessings. Those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibilities; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; and that the scourges of poverty, disease and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth; and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.
Now, on Friday noon, I am to become a private citizen. I am proud to do so. I look forward to it.
Thank you, and good night.
Appunti bibliografici
EISENHOWER DWIGHT D., Public Papers of the Presidents, 1960, 1035-1040.
EISENHOWER DWIGHT D., “Farewell Address”, in The Annals of America, XVIII, 1961-1968: The Burdens of World Power, 1-5. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1968.
HARTUNG WILLIAM D., Eisenhower’s Warning: The Military-Industrial Complex Forty Years Later, in World Policy Journal, 18, n. 1 (spring 2001).
KURTH JAMES, Military-Industrial Complex, in The Oxford Companion to American Military History, ed. John Whiteclay Chambers, II, Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, 440-42.
MILLS C. WRIGHT MILLS, Power Elite, New York, 1956.
NELSON LARS-ERIK, Military-Industrial Man, in New York Review of Books, 47, n. 20 (December 2000), 6.
