Eisenhower delivers TV farewell warning

[NightskyeB4Dawn]

Eisenhower delivers TV farewell warning against "Military-Industrial Complex," live from Oval Office, tonight Jan 17, 1961, three days before handing Presidency to JFK:






Eisenhower's close aide and friend General Andrew Goodpaster told presidential historian Michael Beschloss in 1982 that President Eisenhower had originally planned to warn against the "Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex" but concluded that it would be "too provocative" to include Congress in this indictment.

Here is the most crucial passage of Eisenhower's "Military-Industrial Complex" speech of tonight 1961 (reading copy he used for TV):



Eisenhower's warning against "Military-Industrial Complex" was largely (an unheeded) warning to JFK, who had campaigned in 1960 claiming that US suffered from a "Missile Gap" (it didn't) and needed big increases in military spending.

War is a racket.

JFK’s War Against the Military Industrial Complex

A question I often receive in response to my articles and books on the Kennedy assassination is: What difference does it make? The assassination took place almost 60 years ago.

My answer: Look at three things: (1) the current budget of the military-industrial complex; (2) the perpetual foreign-policy crises into which our nation has been plunged; and (3) the totalitarian-like, dark-side powers wielded and exercised by the national-security establishment, none of which can be reconciled with a genuinely free society.

Congress recently awarded the military with a budget of $839 billion, which was several billions more than what President Biden had requested. That’s a lot of money. And it all comes out of the pockets of the American people.

Look at the foreign-policy crises and chaos since the end of the Cold War. The Persian Gulf War, deadly sanctions against Iraq, terrorist blowback, the global war on terror, the deadly and destructive invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, Iran, Kosovo, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, sanctions, embargoes, and now, once again, China and Russia.

Consider the dark-side, communist-like powers wielded by the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA: torture, indefinite detention, mass secret surveillance, secret prison camps, military tribunals and state-sponsored assassinations.

Why does the Kennedy assassination matter? It is a virtual certainty that none of that would be happening today if Kennedy had not been assassinated. That’s one big reason why the Kennedy assassination still matters today.

“A Republic, if you can keep it” —attributed to Benjamin Franklin, born today 1706, who was reportedly asked in Philadelphia what kind of government the Founders had decided on.

And Kennedy tried to warn us.

We just didn't know how much we just didn't know back then.

Now we know, and it is too late. The die has been cast.