Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road. the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. SOURCE: March, 1953 speech by US President Dwight Eisenhower. usnews/opinion/blogs/robert-schlesinger/2011/09/30/the-origins-of-that-eisenhower-every-gun-that-is-made-quote CIRCUMSTANCES: Eisenhower and presidential speech writer, Emmet Hughes, would go over a dozen drafts of the speech, each of which the president carefully edited. It survived criticism from quarters as disparate Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill who thought an overt peace overture a mistake. When he gave the speech, to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in April of 1953, Ike was ill and was barely able to deliver it. Luckily for all of us, he did—even out of the Cold War context, it remains magnificent presidential statement.
Posted on: Mon, 12 Aug 2013 21:14:09 +0000
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