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budget, a growing budget, nearly two-thirds full of defense-related spending. Eisenhower was a man who considered every extra dollar given to the Pentagon a threat to the dream of suburban gentility. He dourly joked that the Joint Chiefs of Staff “don’t know much about fighting inflation.” He said, “This country can choke itself to death piling up military expenditures just as surely as it can defeat itself by not spending enough for protection.” And so by 1955 Ike was proud to declare he had cut the military budget by 20 percent. His desire to push that graph line further downward was merely bolstered the next year by his resounding re-election.
    Like Truman, however, Eisenhower also firmly believed that America must continue to wage the Cold War. Also like Truman, perhaps even more so, Eisenhower saw nuclear weapons as the cheap way to go about it. If America could ring the Soviet domain with nuclear-armed bombers and convince the world we were ready to drop them on our enemy’s advancing tanks and troops, then our citizenry need not choke on the cost of maintaining a much larger conventional military presence abroad. This approach explains why, during the very years that Eisenhower chipped away at military spending, he invested strongly in the foundation of aerospace. He did so not out of any zeal for military expansion, but in pursuit of a less expensive evil.
    The inherent flaw to this strategy is that it worked too well. The Soviets did apparently come to believe the United States waswilling to fight “strategically” with nuclear bombs, willing even to use our new, improved hydrogen bombs, a thousand times more powerful than atomic weapons before, as part of our official doctrine of “massive retaliation” against Soviet ground gains. And so the Soviets redoubled work on an H-bomb to answer our own and, having exploded one nine months after we did in August of 1953, they continued developing missiles meant to carry their H-bomb very far, as far as any golf course within any one of America’s genteel suburbs. By the mid-1950s, both nations were pouring more and more millions into the perfection of intercontinental ballistic missiles.
    Dwight D. Eisenhower dreaded this ICBM race not only because it was dangerous and expensive, but because it was creating before his eyes a new class he didn’t like. In the late days of his presidency he would damn us with now infamous names, calling us “the scientific-technological elite” and “the military-industrial complex.” He would warn of the “danger” posed if public policy fell “captive” to the culture of the technocrat, people like my father.
    He would tell a group of reporters: “When you see almost every one of your magazines, no matter what they are advertising, has a picture of the Titan missile or the Atlas … there is … almost an insidious penetration of our own minds that the only thing this country is engaged in is weaponry and missiles.” He would note that a weaponry-driven “technological revolution” made research more critical and also “more formalized, complex and costly,” and that this meant “a steadily increasing share is conducted by, for, or at the direction of the Federal government.” He would mourn what came with this technocracy: The state was now expected “to make life happy in a sort of cradle to grave security,” and this augured the end of “self-dependence, self-confidence, courage, and readiness to take a risk.” By the end of his presidency, Ike would say such things with the air of a general weary in retreat.
    Yet, throughout his eight years in office, President Eisenhower found himself with little choice but to promote the ascendenceof my blue sky tribe. Even his brightest hopes carried with them an implied lasting dependence upon us. Eisenhower knew his only bet for making ongoing military cuts was to stop the missile competition with the Soviets, to forge some arms control. This made one of the