Robert Schlesinger: How -- and Why -- Ike's Farewell was Written
[Robert Schlesinger, the opinion editor at U.S. News & World Report, is author of White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters.]
A farewell message was on Dwight Eisenhower’s mind well before the end of his term. Chatting with chief speechwriter Malcolm Moos in the Oval Office in May 1959, the president mentioned as an aside that there was one speech he particularly wanted to deliver. “I want to have something to say when I leave here,” Ike said. “I’m not interested in capturing headlines, but I want to have a message and I want you to be thinking about it well in advance.”
The president hoped Congress would extend an invitation for the speech, which should run 10 minutes. “We should be dropping ideas into a bin, to get ready for this,” Moos wrote later that day in a memo for the record.
Moos started rooting around that bin in earnest in the fall of 1960. He had been struck by the sheer number of companies connected to the burgeoning defense industry and by the volume of mid-career officers who were leaving the military for contractor jobs. On Oct. 31, he had a brainstorming session for the 1961 State of the Union address with his two assistants, a former student of his named Stephen Hess and a naval officer named Ralph Williams. “Conversation with Dr. Moos this morning produced following preliminary guidelines,” Williams wrote in a memo for file. “1. The problem of militarism—for the first time in its history, the United States has a permanent war-based industry. & This creates a danger that what the Communists have always said about us may become true. We must be careful to insure that the ‘merchants of death do not come to dictate national policy’.”...
;This article is part of a symposium on the fiftieth anniversary of Eisenhower’s Farewell Address and the military-industrial complex.
Read entire article at American Conservative
A farewell message was on Dwight Eisenhower’s mind well before the end of his term. Chatting with chief speechwriter Malcolm Moos in the Oval Office in May 1959, the president mentioned as an aside that there was one speech he particularly wanted to deliver. “I want to have something to say when I leave here,” Ike said. “I’m not interested in capturing headlines, but I want to have a message and I want you to be thinking about it well in advance.”
The president hoped Congress would extend an invitation for the speech, which should run 10 minutes. “We should be dropping ideas into a bin, to get ready for this,” Moos wrote later that day in a memo for the record.
Moos started rooting around that bin in earnest in the fall of 1960. He had been struck by the sheer number of companies connected to the burgeoning defense industry and by the volume of mid-career officers who were leaving the military for contractor jobs. On Oct. 31, he had a brainstorming session for the 1961 State of the Union address with his two assistants, a former student of his named Stephen Hess and a naval officer named Ralph Williams. “Conversation with Dr. Moos this morning produced following preliminary guidelines,” Williams wrote in a memo for file. “1. The problem of militarism—for the first time in its history, the United States has a permanent war-based industry. & This creates a danger that what the Communists have always said about us may become true. We must be careful to insure that the ‘merchants of death do not come to dictate national policy’.”...
;This article is part of a symposium on the fiftieth anniversary of Eisenhower’s Farewell Address and the military-industrial complex.