Eisenhower Misunderstood

Fifty years ago, Dwight Eisenhower delivered what has become, with the possible exception of George Washington’s departing speech, the best-known presidential farewell address in U.S. history. In his valedictory, Ike famously warned against “unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” But as a recent wave of anniversary pieces has reaffirmed, Eisenhower’s speech itself has come to be romanticized all out of proportion to its merit, and the reasonableness of straightforward critiques of Pentagon spending cannot account for the mad embrace of Eisenhower in recent decades by anti-war leftists and so-called realists.