To Move the World Read Online Free PDF Page B

power, Lavrentiy Beria, Georgy Malenkov, and Vyacheslav Molotov. Khrushchev won the backing of Soviet generals in part by urging a hardline response to the United States. And equally important, Eisenhower’s own side pushed back, especially Secretary of State Dulles. Both sides missed the most important opportunity since the end of World War II to halt the spiraling instability and escalation.
    Prime Minister Churchill met with Eisenhower in Bermuda in December 1953 to urge a new peace initiative. Convinced that Stalin’s death offered a rare opportunity to wind down the Cold War, Churchill told the House of Commons on May 11, 1953, that “[i]t would be a mistake to assume that nothing can be settled with Soviet Russia unless or until everything is settled.” 12 Yet Eisenhower was more skeptical. He told Churchill rather brutally that Russia “was a woman of the streets and whether her dress was new, or just the old one patched, it was certainly the same whore underneath,” demonstrating his deep hesitation about negotiating with the Soviets despite his desire for peace. 13 Churchill was dismayed to watch the United States squander this opportunity under the thrall of simplistic Cold War ideology and the dogma of “massive retaliation.”
    Nevertheless, Eisenhower longed to be a peacemaker. Given the severe limitations in mutual understanding between the United States and the Soviet Union, however, his moment never arrived. Stubborn disagreements between the United States and the Soviet Union over whether onsite inspections were required to distinguish underground nuclear explosions from earthquakes (as the United States held) prevented the completion of a much-discussed test ban treaty. And as so often happened in the Cold War, even when events were moving slowly in the right direction, they were knocked off track by miscalculation: Eisenhower’s last push for peace in 1960 ended in the flames of Gary Powers’s downed U-2 spy plane.
Eisenhower’s Farewell Address
(January 17, 1961)

 
    Eisenhower delivered his most famous speech just three days before he left the White House to John Kennedy. 14 Only two presidential farewell addresses are widely remembered today. George Washington used his to warn Americans about “entangling alliancesoverseas.” Eisenhower used his to warn Americans about entangling alliances right at home, specifically those among the military, industry, and the government. Eisenhower’s warning about the risk of the “military-industrial complex” has reverberated through a half century.
    How poignant and powerful for America’s greatest twentieth-century general to caution America about the threat the military posed to American democracy. No one besides Eisenhower could have had the stature and credibility to deliver this message:
    In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
    We must never allow the weight of this combination to endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
    These words were prescient, and also bittersweet. Eisenhower had wanted to make peace with his Soviet counterparts, but he never succeeded. Events, experts, the CIA, and cabinet members always put obstacles in his path. He himself was perhaps too skeptical and detached. Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial complex, but he never really held it in check, or found the voice and presidential direction to achieve agreement with the Soviet Union.
Kennedy’s Inaugural Address
(January 20, 1961)

 
    Kennedy would draw on these precedents of public persuasion, and