Why Ike’s Warning

WHAT WAS THE SUPREME ALLIED COMMANDER TRYING TO TELL US?

by Charles Girrens, Editor, The Wichita Observer

(Jan. 19, 2011) — This week is the 50^th anniversary of Ike’s farewell address. Contained in it was a warning about the military industrial/financial complex and its threat to our freedoms. I first found that speech to be quite conflicting since he was a major player in the perpetuation of said complex. So naturally my curiosity was piqued. (I didn’t hear the speech until a year or so ago.)

Some of you may recall the U2 spy plane incident from May 1, 1960. Note the date. Was it a coincidence that the incident happened on the communists “4^th of July” celebration? At the time Ike was pushing his Crusade For Peace initiative with the Soviets. He had been invited to Moscow for a meeting with Nikita Khruschev. He had hopes of ending the Cold War as his final act as President. Doing so would cost the “Complex” a lot of money and upset their carefully-laid plans. Ike had ordered all spy flights over the USSR canceled during the pre-summit interval, yet one was ordered and on the longest-ever overflight, at that.

News reports said the plane was shot down over the USSR. According to Allen Dulles, then head of the CIA, it was not shot down, which he stated in testifying to the Senate.

The plane landed safely in the USSR. In Captain Francis Gary Powers‘s possession were numerous identification items, all of the things that are not allowed on any spy flights ever. It’s been opined that the plane came down due to a preplanned shortage of auxiliary hydrogen fuel. All a coincidence? FDR said, “In politics, nothing happens by accident…” The bottom line was that Ike’s hopes were dashed and the Cold War was on again, full tilt.

It’s my belief that Ike tried to buck the system, a system in which he had been more than a willing participant, one that had catapulted him to Supreme Allied Commander during WWII, leaping over the heads of senior and more qualified commanders. The “Complex” gave him a wake-up call and put him back in his place, so to speak. So he took out his frustrations in his quite candid and lucid farewell speech. What other President has tried to warn us as he did? Noble? I think not. I think he was just trying to get back at those who had slapped him upside the head,  a parting shot, if you will. No one listened anyway. We’re living the nightmare of that speech…perpetual indifference will be America’s epithet.

As an aside. Ike was a Democrat who was “persuaded” to run for President as a Republican. This was to split the vote so that Robert A. Taft, a more America First candidate, wouldn’t get elected. It worked. The same trick was used so  that President Woodrow Wilson would become President, so the money power could get the Federal Reserve established, of which when Wilson left office he said,”I have unwittingly brought about the destruction of my Country.” That he did.