Democracy’s Documents: President Eisenhower’s Farewell Address

Dwight David Eisenhower, raised by parents who hated war, became Supreme Allied Commander of the armed forces that defeated Hitler. An avid student of history as well as a combat veteran, he understood the horrors of warfare and the dangers of hubris in victory. As he told a Guild Hall audience in London on June 12, 1945: “Humility must always be the portion of any man who receives acclaim earned in the blood of his followers and the sacrifices of his friends.”

After nearly four decades in uniform, Eisenhower served a brief stint as president of Columbia University and then, as President, became Commander in Chief. After two terms, he delivered a farewell address to the nation on January 17, 1961. His fifteen-and-a half minute speech is most often remembered for his warning about the “military-industrial complex.”  Yet that was only part of a larger focus on the demands Americans must meet for thoughtful and engaged citizenship.

His concern about the growth of the arms industry came from witnessing it so intimately and for so long.  He had been opposed to the use of the atomic bomb on Japan, calling it a “hellish contrivance.”  Though he presided over the growth of the nation’s nuclear arsenal, his prime motive was not its use but as a shield to permit reducing the growing demands of the military and the defense budget. As biographer Michael Korda (Ike: An American Hero) noted, he did not want to see the nation become a “garrison state.”  Indeed, the day after his Farewell Address he complained about the many pages of a major magazine’s attention to Atlas and Titan rockets.

The key solution to the “unwarranted influence” of the military-industrial complex, he said in his Address, is “an alert and knowledgeable citizenry.”  Sound citizenship, he pleaded, demands character. As he said of the nation’s future course: “[A]ny failure traceable to arrogance, or our lack of comprehension or readiness to sacrifice would inflict upon us grievous hurt both at home and abroad.”

The “readiness to sacrifice” would require citizens “to carry forward steadily, surely, and without complaint the burdens of a prolonged and complex struggle” against communism. But in his more panoramic view, crises and threats would be domestic as well, and he warned about the seductive “recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution.”   

Sound judgment, he urged, requires maintaining balance, another demand of citizenship.  For him, this meant the struggle to weigh the competing demands among various national programs and between the private and public economies, “between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable,” “between actions of the moment and the national welfare of the future.” 

We must, he said, “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.”

Eisenhower also expressed his concern about the growing impact of the federal budget on scholarly research. Public policy, he said “could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite” that might forget that the demands of being good citizens come first.  His tenure at Columbia University had left him worried. As author Stephen Ambrose (Eisenhower: Soldier and Statesman) related:

“When one scholar told Eisenhower that “we have some of America’s most exceptional physicists, chemists, and engineers,” Eisenhower asked if they were also “exceptional Americans.”  The scholar, confused, mumbled that Eisenhower did not understand – they were research scholars.  “Dammit,” Eisenhower shot back, “what good are exceptional physicists . . . exceptional anything, unless they are exceptional Americans.” He added that every student who came to Columbia must leave it a better citizen and only secondarily a better scholar.”

Eisenhower, raised in humble surroundings, had a special fondness for citizen soldiers. On the eve of the D-Day invasion, as they prepared to cross the English Channel, he met with some to express his appreciation.  Rather than focusing on their military service, as Ambrose related:

“Eisenhower’s first question invariably was “Where are you from?”  He wanted to know about their families, what they did in civilian life back in the States, what their postwar plans were. . . . To Eisenhower’s associates, the men were soldiers; to Eisenhower, they were citizens temporarily caught up in a war zone none of them wanted.”

A citizen as well, Eisenhower reflected on that wintry, mid-January evening in 1961 on what awaited him.  “Now, on Friday noon, I am to become a private citizen,” Eisenhower concluded his Address.  “I am proud to do so.  I look forward to it.” 

As he retired to his farm near Gettysburg, he might well have recalled that George Washington also stepped down after two terms as president, retiring to his farm at Mount Vernon.  His own Farewell Address on September 19, 1796, also focused heavily on the demands of citizenship.

Eisenhower passed away on March 28, 1969.  At his request, he was buried in a standard-issue GI coffin, not in the nation’s capitol but in his hometown of Abilene, Kansas.

Photo Credit: National Portrait Gallery photo by George Tames, 1955

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