In the District of Columbia, Republican (fascist/socialist) President Eisenhower delivers his “Chance for Peace” (a.k.a. “Cross of Iron”) speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors:
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. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter 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 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.
Question: Was Eisenhower proposing that Federal budget priorities be redirected enabling Federal accomplishment of these unlawful objectives, or reduced enabling WE THE PEOPLE to realize these ends more peacefully and efficiently in a free market?
NOTE: Eisenhower went on to state his desire for peaceful co-existence with the Soviet Union, but did not indicate any hint at change in the hostile posture of the U.s. against the U.S.S.R. The month before Eisenhower had flatly rejected a proposal Prime Minister Winston Churchill to jointly meet with Stalin’s successors, Minister Lavrentiy Beria, of Internal Affairs; First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, of the Central Committee of the Communist Party; and Premier Georgi Malenkov as of the Soviet Union.
[added 9/15/2022]
Subsequent Events:
References:
James Carroll, House of War: The Pentagon and the disastrous rise of American power, (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 208.
Chance for Peace speech–Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chance_for_Peace_speech#Background