From Truth Dig: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/eisenhower_and_the_disastrous_rise_of_misplaced_power_20120620/
By Bill Boyarsky
Posted on Jun 20, 2012
Posted on Jun 20, 2012
By
following a warlike path—and getting a free pass from too many
progressives—President Barack Obama is making sure that foreign policy
will remain in the hands of the military-industrial complex.
Hardly
discussed in the presidential campaign is how Obama personally picks
targets on a kill list, hugely has increased drone attacks, and wages
cyberwarfare against Iran. If these actions had occurred under
Bush-Cheney, liberals would have taken to the streets. Instead, the
practices are accepted as facts of life, barely worth comment.
The
truth is that in the last half century, this kind of presidential
power, backed by the military and the arms industry, has been enshrined
as permanent policy. And it will continue no matter who wins in November
or in future elections. Whoever is in charge, the military, the
intelligence spooks and the war industries always seem to co-opt the
president.
Jim Newton, an editor at large and a columnist for the
Los Angeles Times, takes us back to a time when a president wasn’t so
easily conned. His excellent book “Eisenhower: The White House Years”
should be a handbook for today’s policymakers, who are seduced by the
tough talk, intricate communications devices and utter confidence of
people who are often wrong.
For me and many others of a certain
age, it’s hard to say anything pleasant about the time when Dwight David
Eisenhower was president, from 1953 to 1961. Those bland and repressive
Cold War years, the time of the Organization Man, were intolerable to
anyone who harbored even a bit of rebellion.
Newton’s view of
Eisenhower himself is generally more positive. “He was a good man, one
of integrity and decency. But he was not always right. He was too
enamored of covert action, and he did not fully appreciate the moral
imperatives of civil rights, where his belief in measured progress, the
middle way, impeded his sympathy for those who demanded their
constitutional rights immediately.”
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