10/21/13 – Michael Swanson – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show.
3,000 interviews in my archive at ScottHorton.org.
And I don't mind being a sellout at all for this one.
Mike Swanson, he's a sponsor of the show, and he's also the author of this incredible book, The War State, The Cold War Origins of the Military-Industrial Complex and the Power Elite, 1945 through 1963, which, of course, I would read and interview him about, even if he wasn't an advertiser on the show, because that's kind of my thing.
Welcome back to the show, Mike.
How are you doing?
Oh, I'm doing great.
It's great to talk to you.
Very good to have you back.
Let me mention real quick, of course, Wall Street Window is one of the primary sponsors of the show here, and that's your primary gig there, investment advice and all that.
WallStreetWindow.com, people check that out.
And then writer Michael Swanson is where they can find out all about this book.
Of course, it's on Amazon.com.
And I know you can get it in Kindle and paperback, but is a hardback out yet too or not?
Or what's the deal with that?
Oh, no, just paper and Kindle.
Okay.
Well, hey, there ain't nothing wrong with that.
I got the paperback here.
It's red, and it's got Ike on the front.
And it's called The War State in big white letters.
And you should get a bunch of them and pass them around.
I was having fantasies as I was driving my truck that, wow, wouldn't it be nice if a bunch of people bought a whole bunch of these and started passing them around everywhere, like brought two copies down to their local library branch and said, hey, I just want to make sure you guys had a couple of copies of this.
And just kind of, you know, I don't know, had their kid bring one to the junior high school where he goes for seventh grade or whatever, and leave these things around and get this thing out.
I actually, Mike, read this kind of ridiculous elitist thing in the Washington Post about Glenn Greenwald and his new media project where he talked about the importance of organs like the Washington Post and deciding which facts people need to pay attention to or not and which actual facts become known truths out in the society and all that.
And that's exactly what I'm talking about.
Only I want this book instead of the Washington Post to be the one that's doing the delivering of the information that everybody is supposed to just know.
What's wrong with America?
Empires.
What's wrong with America?
What's wrong with the economy?
The whole thing is raped and perverted by the Pentagon is what's wrong with the economy, et cetera, et cetera.
And just have everyone agree.
It's so obviously true for anyone who dares to revise history at all.
What happened?
Well, World War Two happened.
And then the reason that was the last time we declared war is because we never stopped warring since.
Simple as that.
Ain't that right?
Yes, it really is that simple.
And the problem, I think, with the American people and the public at large is that we just don't know any history.
And all we think about are like individual events like the Vietnam War, Afghanistan or Iraq or 9-11.
And then the government responds to these things.
But nothing is ever put in any larger context.
People don't know the larger context, which is simple.
We're in a permanent war economy and we have an empire.
And that's as simple as that.
And yes, it's true.
This is what I fantasize about.
People passing out books.
Yeah, I mean, that's how we learn.
I wish they would do it.
I wish people would pass this thing out.
It's really great.
I really love it.
And it's a great read.
And you know what?
I'll go ahead and say this, too.
I strongly discourage people from fighting with their family about politics, especially if you become a hardcore anti-war libertarian type, then you might realize you believe vastly different things than the rest of your family.
And family is the most important thing.
And politics is not even a second place behind family.
So I wouldn't encourage people to get into it.
I mean, if they can talk politics nicely with their family, that's cool.
If people are getting into too heated of discussions, I would say just drop it and don't argue about it.
However, if your mom or your dad, they're kind of interested in your crazy new point of view that you got here with your self there that you think is so right that you're always talking about, this is the kind of thing that you could give to them.
This is for somebody's mom.
This is the war state.
Here's why America's all screwed up.
It's pretty simple.
Here's the answer.
It's a red book with Ike on the front there.
And simple as that.
I think this could be one of those.
This is the kind of thing that, well, I mentioned the junior high school kid, the proverbial junior high school kid bringing it to class.
I think this would be good for his teacher.
Oh, I think so, too.
And the thing about the book, one thing I did is after I wrote it, I had some test readers that don't know me and I don't know them.
I just got on a website called Elance where you can just hire people to do small jobs or something.
I put it out on there and I said, if you're in the military, I want you to read this book and give me your opinion of it.
And I had like five people with armed forces read it and all of them liked it.
I haven't had, I've only had one person disagree with the book and that's someone posted a negative review on Amazon and you could tell they hadn't even read it.
So it's real interesting that the basic facts in the book are, you know, I don't think they're really that controversial.
It's just a matter that I've tied them all together with this theme that the government has become or became this, you know, the phrase I use is a war state.
And that's not something that's in people's consciousness.
But the basic facts in the book and the way they're presented, it's hard to argue against a war person could simply say, oh yeah, all this is true, but it's just simply necessary.
Well, look, it's a common joke on this show, as I'm sure you're well aware about how, hey, at least the Soviet Union existed when we're talking about, you know, Bush's Islamo-fascist caliphate that we're supposedly at war with, which never existed outside of bin Laden's attic in Pakistan, where he is hiding in cowardly terror.
And somehow this is the, you know, the giant, you know, the next superpower that we have to defend ourselves from.
And yet, you know, hey, go look at an old globe.
The USSR was a third of the surface of the earth or something, maybe even including the oceans.
It's huge.
It is a horrible, evil, totalitarian empire.
And they did rule Eastern Europe.
And they were, hey, right up on the border of all our democratic friends and allies in Western Europe.
And, Mike, you must be some kind of commie that you just refuse to accept the reality of the danger of a Stalin-led Soviet empire that absolutely had to be contained, even if it meant hiring the Dulles brothers to do the containing.
Come on, man.
How was that?
Pretty good, huh?
Yeah, well, actually, I tend to agree with the basic premise there, and that is, you know, after World War II, the world did split in this bipolar system of the United States and the Soviet Union.
And the advisors under Truman saw the Soviet Union as a threat towards the end of World War II.
And it wasn't because they thought the Soviet Union was going to invade the United States or start a new war or something, although some people would say that.
That was mostly just propaganda.
What they were really afraid of was that we had all these colonial systems that disintegrated after the war.
England had colonies in India and Egypt and all over the world.
And over the next 10, 20 years, the whole colonial system fell apart.
France had parts of Africa and into China and so forth.
And so there's this huge power vacuum that the United States was filling, and so was the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe.
But the people in Washington saw a potential threat from the Soviet Union, because all of Europe had been devastated by World War II, and basically an economic collapse, totally bombed out.
And there is a fear that what will happen is that there is a collapse after World War I in the 30s.
And they were scared that communism with the Soviet Union could send agents to these countries and turn them if you didn't take advantage of this.
So they supported the Marshall Plan and rebuilt Europe.
But I didn't think that was an intelligent thing to do.
But if you look at the person that became the intellectual author of that policy, George Kennan, he claims that by 1949, 1950, the Soviet Union was successfully contained and that we could have actually negotiated with them or really didn't have to do much more.
But instead, Dean Acheson and some advisors around Truman decided that they didn't want to merely contain the Soviet Union.
They wanted to defeat it and make it surrender.
So they started this giant arms race, and they also turned a policy of simply containing the Soviet Union into one that became basically a policy of trying to control the whole world.
And he put that policy on paper in this document, NSC-68, which stated that even if the Soviet Union didn't exist, we would have a problem, a threat of any disorder anywhere in the world.
And the United States looked on any country and had to say, it's got to be our ally.
If it's independent and there's a danger, it'll flip to the Soviets.
So that justified interfering all over the world.
And I think even today, even though the Soviet Union doesn't exist and now we have this so-called war on terror, there's a lot of similarities in the sense that back then, communism became a justification for interfering in countries such as Iran or Guatemala.
As you mentioned, the Dulles brothers were doing that in the 50s.
And today, communism is not a threat, but it's terrorism.
So terrorism has now replaced it as the boogeyman and is being used as a reason to try to maintain order basically all over the world.
It's pretty much a continuum.
Yeah.
Well, you got the great quote in here, and I wish I'd bookmarked it.
I'm flipping through trying to find it now.
But it's such an important part of history and I think mostly goes unnoticed.
And as you say, and I wasn't, I guess, aware of this.
But at the time of the passage of the National Security Act of 1947, the part about the establishment of the CIA went unnoticed and undebated at the time.
They argued all about the formation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the spinning off of the Air Force and the creation of the National Security Council.
But the CIA, what was that?
People started paying attention to that after.
But then there's this beautiful little quote there where, oh, here it is.
To perform, let's see, it gave the CIA the power, quote, to perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct.
In other words, which is just it's such a great little newspeak way of saying the president can authorize this agency to break the law to do whatever he wants anywhere in the world without limit.
He must only justify it to himself and go ahead, scrappy, get him.
Yeah, it is quite amazing when you look back to that document, that paragraph in that document.
It's so innocuous.
And when that bill, the bill that that paragraph is in created the Defense Department.
It reorganized the Armed Services.
So there wasn't an Air Force until that bill was passed.
And at the time, that's what everyone was arguing about.
Are we going to have an Air Force?
Are we going to do this?
Or there is an argument to unify the Armed Services.
They got shot down.
So this was a huge debate in Congress on all these other issues.
And that one little couple line, which was used to create the CIA, was inserted in there.
And what's interesting is that Truman, as World War II came to an end, he made the statement that he didn't even want anything like what we think of the CIA to be created.
There was an organization called the Office of Strategic Services during World War II that engaged in covert action, mainly in Europe, a little bit in Asia.
And Alan Dulles, who became the director of the CIA in the 50s, he was running OSS operations in Europe and Switzerland, talking to German officers and just trying to gather intelligence and do whatnot.
And he had a vision of becoming the director of some giant new intelligence organization.
But the guy that was over him and in charge of the OSS said the same idea.
And he wanted to be the leader of it, too.
And he tried to meet with Truman to set the future of intelligence, because the OSS thing was going to be disbanded.
And Truman wouldn't even meet with him.
Truman told an associate that, I don't want anything like this, because it'll become an American Gestapo.
And the war's over.
We don't need this.
So it's not really clear what, if Truman ever wanted anything like the CIA to come into existence, he suggested that he needed some sort of intelligence unit that could talk to him and tell him what's going on.
Because during the war, it wasn't just the OSS.
You got the FBI, you got military intelligence, all these different intelligence outfits.
And you need a coordinating agency that can tell a president what all these different people are saying.
And it's clear he wanted that.
And George Kennan, actually, with Alan Dulles are the two main characters who created the law in there to create the CIA.
And then George Kennan said this was a giant mistake, like the biggest mistake of his life a couple years later.
Well, and then, didn't Truman end up writing an essay for the Washington Post right after the Kennedy assassination, saying that this thing has gone way out of control, it's not what I ever intended when I signed it kind of thing?
Yeah, he put this editorial in the Washington Post, I think it was a month to the day, I think, you know, after the Kennedy assassination, saying that it had taken on a life of its own.
And it's become something that's creating policies and needed to be changed or put back in control.
You think he meant something by that?
He was kind of making a little mark for history there that he was telling you who fired that shot?
Some people speculate that, but I don't know.
All right, hang on, hang on one second.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Full interview archive at scotthorton.org.
And this will be part two of my interview of Michael Swanson, writermichaelswanson.com.
The book is The War State, The Cold War Origins of the Military-Industrial Complex and the Power Elite, 1945 through 1963.
And so, you know, there's a whole new book out about the Dulles brothers.
Um, so they'll be important to, uh, to talk about here.
Um, but I was kind of hoping that maybe, well, because, you know, time's somewhat limited.
I don't know.
You plan it out however you want to answer.
But, um, I also want to hear about Robert Taft because I think he's a great story of what might have been and, and to show that maybe just because history all happened before we were born doesn't mean it had to be the way that it is now that we're looking back on it, sort of a situation, you know, and, uh, you do a good job of telling the story of Robert Taft, who he was and what he was about.
And I think, you know, most Americans probably don't even know, Mike, that there's an anti-war right.
In fact, the anti-war was always the conservatives.
It's always the liberal do-gooders out changing the world up until Vietnam when the enemy was a left-wing enemy.
And then the protesters ended up being, you know, young and all of that and the new left and then the role switched.
But anyway, so teach him about Bob Taft and then get into the Dulles Brothers too.
And we still got half an hour to go.
So we'll talk about the rise of the CIA and some of their coups and revolutions and, uh, and, uh, Ike's nuclear policy and all this stuff.
Mike Swanson, so.
Sure.
Well, okay.
Robert Taft was a U.S. senator from Ohio that ran for president and came close to winning, uh, when Eisenhower ran there.
The two of them were running for the nomination and Taft was a person who was against, uh, he's basically what we would think of as a libertarian.
He, he probably is the most libertarian Republican besides Ron Paul and, uh, came very close to winning.
And what's, one thing that's interesting about him, if you look at him and these Dulles Brothers, they had actually very similar, uh, backgrounds because the Dulles Brothers and Taft were born into what you would think of as the very, very elite of American society.
They all, uh, I know Taft went to Yale, Taft was in Skull and Bones, um, and I don't think the Dulles Brothers went to Yale, but they're, you know, I mean, if you go into Skull and Bones, you're at the top of the elite, you could say.
Um, and both of them during World War I, uh, went to, um, uh, Versailles during the peace negotiations.
Uh, Allen Dulles went over there acting as something like a spy.
John Foster Dulles, his uncle was Robert Lansing, uh, who is Wilson's Secretary of State.
And Taft went over there with, uh, Herbert Hoover, who is running relief, um, operations in Europe.
So, I mean, these are young people just out of college doing these kinds of things.
I mean, I don't know anyone who would go with that kind of background.
You could be in their twenties and running around with future presidents and secretaries of state and so forth.
And they all know each other.
In fact, Taft married, uh, a woman that actually, uh, was courted by John Foster Dulles.
Uh, and so, you know, they were friends throughout their whole lives.
So, what's interesting, though, is that they take different views when it comes to foreign policies as they get older.
And I think it has to do with their backgrounds.
Uh, the Dulles brothers went into corporate law on Wall Street and, uh, joined this firm called Sullivan Cromwell, uh, which was the premier law firm for American corporations.
It had put together the deal for the Panama Canal, uh, the U.S. Steel Trust.
Um, and they, you know, they, Allen Dulles went to Europe, uh, in the twenties and thirties and did business deals over there.
So, these are people on the peak of Wall Street, uh, corporations and operations and so forth.
And Taft did something different.
He moved back to Ohio and became, uh, a big city lawyer and did business with, um, his brother-in-law who had a, you know, a large companies and operations in the United States.
But he mainly dealt with business people that weren't international corporations, the regular people.
So, I think that gave him a different outlook on government and in life in general.
So, with the Dulles brothers, exponents of empire, you can say, and, uh, international trade and the United States having a big role in the world and covert operations and all this kind of business, Taft was always someone that was more, uh, libertarian-orientated who feared, his biggest fear was that the government would grow in size and that would lead to higher taxes, uh, more inflation and centralized power in the executive branch, which all these things would be a threat to liberty.
And I think that's, of course, exactly what has happened.
So, he was a prophet of the future.
And, um, and was smeared and red-baited by the nation.
That's right.
And they called him an isolationist and, um, Mr. Republican.
He's just, he can't face up to the dangers of the red menace, I guess.
What would he, why would he be concerned about such a thing as that?
Well, he wasn't just a Republican.
He was the most important Republican in the Republican party in the early 1940s and in the late 30s.
He was, well, basically the face of opposition to the New Deal.
And he wasn't like a Southern, one of these Southern, you know, racists or rednecks or whatever you want to call them.
He was a mainstream guy.
And the Republican party was split in two.
And he was the leader of a small government, libertarian, opposition to the New Deal, mostly in the Midwest, not in the South, because at the time the South was controlled by the Democratic party.
It is not the Democratic party today.
It was a Southern Democratic party.
So, half allies were mostly in the Midwest.
And then the other half, the Republican party, was basically led by Wendell Willkie.
He was based in New York with what you would call the Eastern establishment Republicans.
And those were people like the Dulles brothers.
They were actually very close to him, and they helped manage his campaign.
And he tried to run for president against, I think it was Truman, and he lost.
And then he was rumbling to do it again in the election of Stevenson Eisenhower.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry.
We got to go, because we got music coming up.
But we'll be right back to talk about that, because it's interesting how they stole the nomination from Taft and, well, anyway, the rise of NATO and then Ike as Taft Light, sort of.
Hold tight.
We'll be right back after this with Mike Swanson, The War State.
Okay.
So, we're talking with Michael Swanson.
He's the author of The War State.
And this will be part two of his interview.
And I think there will probably be four, maybe five, before we're done getting through all the topics in this book and the way I want to cover them best we can here.
But so, we've talked about Robert Taft, Mr.
Republican, the conservative, anti-Cold Warrior, or somewhat Cold Warrior.
I don't know how to characterize.
I'll turn that back over to Mike here in a second.
But then, of course, there's the rise of the Dulles Brothers, lawyers for the Rockefellers, basically.
One became the Secretary of State.
John Foster became the Secretary of State.
His brother, Alan, became the head of the CIA.
And in the Ike years, boy, they went to work.
And so then, on the other hand, you do sort of portray Ike Eisenhower as a little bit of a half of Robert Taft, if not, you know, I mean, I guess he wasn't from Connecticut, like the Bushes or something, was he?
Well, basically, what kind of happened is, in that election, you had Robert Taft, and then it looked like he was going to get the nomination.
And he wasn't, you can't, he wasn't an isolationist, or even if you take a look at Ron Paul today, Ron Paul would talk about bringing everyone back home and dismantling the national security state or whatever.
That's nothing Taft ever said, anything like that.
Taft's argument was, we've got to have a balanced budget.
Truman went to Korea without declaring war.
We can't, you know, we've got to follow the Constitution.
We've got to have a balanced budget.
And all we need to do is have a small military or a smaller military budget and just fund nuclear bombers, and that's all we've got to do to be safe.
So we don't need to be, we don't even necessarily even need NATO.
And essentially, what happened was, people around Wendell Willkie feared that if Taft won, they'd lose control of the Republican Party, and then people, let's say the Council for Foreign Relations group or the Dulles brothers, did not like Taft's ideas either, and they searched out a candidate that they knew would beat them, and they got Eisenhower to run.
And Eisenhower's kind of like a blank slate military hero to the American people, or he was a hero, and they got him to run, and he took the nomination away from Taft and became the president.
When he served as president, he essentially gave Allen Dulles, who rose now to become head of the CA, a blank check.
It basically allowed him to do anything he wanted, but Eisenhower was concerned, too, with having a budget that's under control.
He also feared that deficits would lead to higher taxes, inflation, and harm the economy and lead to a garrison state.
So he shared those same sort of concerns that Taft did when it came to the amount of money the government spent, but he gave Dulles a blank check because he thought that these CIA operations that Allen Dulles launched in various countries, Iran and Guatemala being the most famous, were cheap, and they didn't cost anything.
It only cost about $10 million to overthrow Iran, and probably a similar amount in Guatemala.
The problem is, of course, that we're living with the results of those operations today, so they cost a lot more than $10 million, but that's another story.
Right.
Well, I mean, no, it isn't.
It's the story.
In fact, like Chalmers Johnson pointed out, I believe that the term blowback comes from CIA documents surrounding the coup in Iran.
Yeah, this worked well, but we're going to have some blowback coming down the line.
And there was a bit of a, you know, it's a strange story because Eisenhower, he gave these guys a blank check, or he gave Allen Dulles a blank check, but he didn't trust neither.
He commissioned a study, he did this twice, he asked people to investigate what Allen Dulles was doing, and then, you know, make a report about it.
And two different times, they basically told him that he's just, he's incompetent, that he's pretending to have these great successes when most of the things are failures.
He's got Iran and Guatemala, but that's it.
And he's spreading lots of lies about what he's doing, and everyone belongs incompetent, and he doesn't even know what's going on himself.
And, you know, despite the examples of Iran and Guatemala, if you look, almost everything the CIA did was a disaster.
They, or I mean, we can say those are disasters too, but they didn't even succeed in what they were trying to do in their operations.
The most, one of the most famous examples of that is right at the beginning of the creation of the CIA, and they're running these operations, a guy, the guy in charge was someone named Frank Wisner, who, ironically, his son became a go-between just a couple of the other year between the United States and these generals in Egypt.
That's how this stuff gets passed down.
But he had been in the OSS, and he had started to become one of the top people in the CIA, and he was running these covert operations in Eastern Europe, where he would get refugees after World War II and try to get them to go behind the Iron Curtain and infiltrate and, you know, take some arms or something and prepare in case there's World War III, and they'd pop up and become an insurgency, and all these people would end up getting caught.
And he sent people into China doing this, and I can't remember the exact number off the top of my head, I think it was like 100 people or so, and every single one of them got caught.
And this guy ends up falling into, Frank Wisner ends up getting depressed and kills himself.
So that's the kind of stuff that was going on in the CIA operations.
And then you've got Allen Dulles basically going to cocktail parties and hobnobbing the people and acting like he's some sort of genius or something.
Well, you know, when all your failures are classified, I guess you get to do that, right?
Exactly.
So let's talk about this new look policy of Eisenhower's.
You really focus on, and I guess it's really important, huh, that this guy really liked playing cards, and he figured everybody else was just playing cards too.
And so what he would do is he would have the government build 18,000 nuclear bombs.
And then that way he could be a small government conservative on the militarism issue.
He would just have 18,000 nuclear bombs.
And then that way China and Russia, at the very least, would mess with us and probably most of the time would do what we wanted to.
Certainly in the case of China, a couple times that you detail there.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
What happened was, if you look at Eisenhower's background, he was not a dumb person by any stretch of the imagination, despite what I made it sound like he was doing with the Dulles brothers.
This was a man with tremendous experience in the war.
I mean, you don't manage the D-Day invasion and the alliance without becoming a great politician.
And he kind of hid his political savvy when he was president by playing golf and not really giving any—try not to give any opinions or rock the boat or say as little as possible to the American people and just be calm all the time.
But behind the scenes, you know, all sorts of stuff was going on.
And one of his big interests was managing the armed forces in the military.
And he actually advised Truman when he was president, and he becomes president.
But his big issue was he feared that in armed services there would be inter-service rivalry where each branch of the military would want its own budget, and they would compete with each other for their own importance.
And that would lead to wasteful spending and redundancy, which is all true.
But he wanted to fight that and try to control military spending and not let everything go nuts.
So he came up with this policy of focusing on the nuclear forces—nuclear bombers and the development of nuclear missiles—with the idea that, well, we can't afford to compete with the Soviet Union in Europe with conventional forces because they're there, and we're all across the ocean.
So if there was a real war, how are we going to send everyone over there?
Just like the Russians can't—you know, they're not going to bring an invasion fleet over here.
And the service chiefs, the army and the navy, you know, they would want to try to do it, but he just said, well, that's impossible.
So we'll focus on the development of nuclear weapons.
And then to justify that, he comes up with this new look policy, which states that—he makes the statement that we're going to treat nuclear weapons as any other weapon, implying that, you know, we won't hesitate to use them if our interests are threatened.
So he makes a bluff against China.
What happened there is Taiwan—there was a Chinese civil war between Chiang Kai-shek and the communists.
The communists win.
Chiang flees to Taiwan and creates a military dictatorship there, and China's sitting there, and they're both threatening each other and so forth.
China starts to shell these two little islands that no one's living on them, but they're trying to make a show of force that are part of Taiwan.
And Eisenhower basically says that if this continues or if you invade Taiwan, he hints that we'll use nuclear weapons, and China backs down.
They don't have any nuclear weapons, so they can't engage in some sort of fight like that.
And that's the most well-known use of that policy.
But what ends up happening is that these new look policies create critics inside the military.
The Air Force loves it, but the Army doesn't in particular, and they start to make leaks.
Different generals make leaks to the press that this policy can endanger national security.
It's not preparing us for wars that are more likely.
We're not likely to have a nuclear war.
We're more likely to have a smaller conflict, and this policy really isn't workable.
And there's a movement to try to increase the military budget beyond what Eisenhower even wants, and that's pretty much allied with the Army.
To try to control these people, Eisenhower holds a study.
He commissions a secret study that's just for the White House about what are the Soviet capabilities, what are our capabilities, and he's expecting this study to kind of help him out politically.
What ends up happening is the same guy that essentially did the legwork for this NSC-6EA's name is Paul Nitz.
He is the guy behind this study, too, and he doesn't really have any hard information one way or the other, but he claims that the Soviet Union is going to build all these nuclear missiles in the next couple years.
I think it's by 1960, 1961, overtake the United States, put us in a huge strategic disadvantage, and would have the capability to launch a first strike and wipe us all out.
Well, it's all pretty much made up.
In a draft Paul Nitz made of this document, there's paragraphs where he writes, this is real.
Who knows?
They don't even care.
They just want an argument for what they want, and when they present this report to Eisenhower, Eisenhower gets very angry at him and basically cusses him out the room.
So then Nitz leaks this to the press, and they've got all kinds of allies in Congress to now start attacking Eisenhower as being soft on defense, and the Democratic Party attacks him.
When Kennedy runs for president, this is the basis of the missile gap, and the whole thing is basically a giant fraud.
So as Eisenhower finally ends his presidency, he's kind of in a fit of anger, and he holds National Security Council meetings as part of one.
He tells the people there that if this type of talk continues, if the military budget keeps growing, and what we're facing is a problem with special interests and a democracy, can we have a democracy and these special interests in the military, and are we going to be able to continue on this road?
How can we do this and face the Soviet threat?
What's the future of our country?
And then the result of these thoughts is his famous farewell address.
So that address he gives is basically a result of being criticized by the Democratic Party and interests in the military-industrial complex that claim he's soft on defense, even though he has built so many nuclear missiles and bombs that it's pretty much unimaginable.
And he knows, he has the real intelligence, too, of what the Russian capabilities are.
He's commissioned U-2 spy planes to fly over the Soviet Union and take pictures, and he knows they basically have nothing.
They don't even have a nuclear missile that can reach the United States until Kennedy's president.
Well, and you know, that is just so instructive, too, to think Ike Eisenhower, who, you know, single-handedly defeated Nazism, who was the great American hero, and you like Ike, and I like Ike, and we like Ike, and everybody likes Ike, and what a personality he was.
I mean, I guess they sort of lampooned him as a little bit George W. Bush-y in the brain at the time or something like that, but, I mean, what I'm getting at is this is a guy who had a lot of political capital when it came to respect from the American people, and especially, you know, if it came to the kind of thing where he wanted to pick a fight with other forces inside the government that you even talk about, he gave a speech directly to the American people going, hey, look, this is the budget.
This is important, so you have to take my side on this, and they did, but it was everything this guy could do to try Ike Eisenhower, super president or something, you know, 10 feet tall.
It was everything he could do to try to restrain the power of this military-industrial complex, and the way you put it, like, by the time he gave that speech on the way out the door in 1960, he was mad as hell, and that was his kind of fighting back that, well, at least I'm going to tell everybody about who you guys are and what you're up to and how they ought to not trust you and whatever, but that was after eight years of really, I mean, I guess partially succeeding in stopping them in some ways, but I don't know.
It sure was a pretty big world empire he was passing off to JFK by the time he left complaining about it.
Yeah, it's tough.
It's a good question.
What is his ultimate legacy when it comes to, I mean, he gives this famous speech.
That's what we all remember him for.
That's what's on the cover of my book, and, you know, it's for the most recognizable events of the 50s, but when you really look at it, I mean, he engaged in an arms race.
He did increase the military budget, and he didn't give them as much as they wanted.
He had to fight them to do what he did, but what he did by escalating the arms race, I think, leads to some very dangerous situations in the 1960s.
We'll get to that later, you know, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and I think the Vietnam War all originated in this giant arms race that he basically created, and, of course, we have the legacy of these covert operations in these different countries that he wholeheartedly supported.
So, you know, it is amazing.
My thinking is that, you know, my whole book is basically the notion that this war state came into being, and our government fundamentally changed the system of government with the creation of this national security state, this military industrial complex, and by power elite, I mean the politicians and bureaucrats and business people that are all linked up to that.
But the thing is that I think this was a gradual transformation that basically was completed by the time Eisenhower gave that speech, and I think everything that has come after that speech is essentially, you know, the effects of this creation that we're living with today.
Right.
I mean, that's the funny thing.
It's hard sometimes to understand that, you know, the corruption is not just, you know, like I see prison abuse stories and people say, well, you know, privatized prisons.
Well, you know, there were already problems with the prisons before they were all privatized.
As bad as that is, it's not the root of the problem.
The problem is the state and a director.
I mean, think of somebody like J. Edgar Hoover, right?
What did he need with millions and millions of dollars?
He had all the power in the world, right?
He had blackmail on every congressman and senator and everybody they were related to, too, and whatever he wanted.
So and that was back in the old days before it was all high tech, the way it is now.
And so that's the thing about it.
Like Anthony Gregory says, Barack Obama, you know, if you ask the liberal lefties who they all hate, they might point at a banker or Lockheed or something if they're smart.
But Barack Obama is the only real trillionaire in the world.
And look what he does with it.
You know, it's actually the state agencies themselves, the Pentagon, first and foremost among them, the CIA second, I guess, who they're the ones with all the power.
What do they even need with money?
That's all the money's good for anyways, pal.
Yeah, that's one thing about this history or the topic is how do you interpret all this stuff?
And there's basically two schools of thought in one would say, if you take the Dulles brothers as an example, that these people are truly represented as a big business, that everything they're doing is on the behalf of their business clients, their business interests, and it's all about making more money.
However, I don't really think in the end that that's true at all.
But yeah, sure, there is corruption.
But I think that corruption is just a mechanism for them to have more personal power.
And that's what these people are really about.
And if you take, you know, these generals in the military or, you know, someone that's a lower level in the CIA or something that they're not in it for money, they believe they're doing the right thing.
And I think that's real critical.
These opponents are critics of Eisenhower.
They believe in what they were saying.
And a great example of how this kind of works is the debates over the military budget.
What would happen is every time there'd be a military budget, the army would say, well, look, we're the most important force.
We're not going to have a nuclear war.
We need flexible response and come up with tactics to do conventional wars.
And the Air Force would say, oh, we've got to have nuclear weapons.
And then, to make a long story short, every branch of the armed services would come up with justifications for their own increased power and importance.
And the people advocating them believed the stuff, you know.
It was like they believed what was in their own best interest, not simply because they were greedy or something, but, you know, they rationalized all this stuff and thought they were right.
Yeah.
Well, you know, as simple as it is, I think that's really the bottom line that is hard for people to accept.
And I only think just based on my own experience where, you know, especially if you go to government school around, you're taught that ultimately all this is decided by the democracy, which means the majority of the people.
And how could they all be wrong?
Or how could the majority of the people be wrong?
At least most of the time they do it right.
And so this is the way it is because this is the way people want it to be.
It's the ultimate legitimacy.
You know, it's better even than being sanctified by God.
Really, it's sanctified by you.
Even if you voted no this time, you still love it kind of, you know?
Well, the thing about all this, these policies, this history, NSC-68, which I think basically is a document justifying the United States becoming an empire.
We talk about the New Look policy or the creation of the CIA, a couple lines in a bill, essentially.
None of these things are voted on by the American people.
The American people, in fact, didn't know anything about them.
Well, they wouldn't know about the New Look, but the other two things weren't really reported in the newspaper.
NSC-68 was classified to the 70s.
So all these decisions are made essentially in secret.
You know, we didn't know anything about Guatemala or Iran or any of this stuff.
It's not decided upon by voters.
All we get to vote on is one or two candidates that are picked for us, essentially.
Well, and you know, I mean, it really is, it's still hard for me to wrap my mind around the idea of nuclear weapons lobbyists, you know, in or outside of government, the guys that are working for the companies, the contractors that make the hydrogen bombs or, you know, their liaisons within the Pentagon and the different generals and colonels and whoever competing for power inside those divisions of the different branches and whatever.
It just, you know, only because I really want to, Michael.
I like believing that, oh no, they're professional, competent men in charge of those nukes and in charge of the policy too, because how could it be otherwise?
You know, how could anyone say that, you know, start two, I'll be damned if you're going to pass start two, not without a bunch of rioters that give me a bunch more money to make more nukes.
I mean, how could it be that anyone, I mean, they could get other jobs, especially if they're so brilliant, they're making nuclear bombs for a living.
Like, geez, what if the policy was we didn't want to have nukes anymore, but no, they insist because that's their livelihood.
So, I mean, that kind of thing to me is, I want to not believe it, it's too obviously true, but it's no different than lobbyists for any other cause in America, for any other special interest in America, the nuke lobby.
And in fact, like who the hell was in charge of deciding we needed 18,000 of these things in the first place?
They couldn't threaten communism with less than 18,000 nukes, Mike?
I mean, come on.
Well, I mean, especially if you're talking about the 1950s, they did not have the capability to even attack the United States.
It wasn't until like 56 or 57 that the Soviets had a nuclear rocket, and all it was was an upgraded B-2 rocket, which is what the Germans were shooting during World War II at England.
They just upgraded it so they could reach Europe or parts of it.
So, it's completely amazing when you think of it like that.
And Eisenhower tried to negotiate, actually.
He made an attempt to negotiate with the Russians and tried to end, actually, the arms race in the Cold War.
He reached out to them, and then as soon as he did it, the U-2 plane exploded in the Soviet Union, and Khrushchev had to face his own hardliners.
So, it's the hardliners on both sides kind of fed off each other.
Yeah, well, you know, the first I ever heard of that was a conspiracy theory about when I was a little kid that the CIA deliberately got him shot down to scuttle those talks representing corrupt interests in the Cold War.
I don't know if you have an opinion about that.
In fact, we're out of time.
Maybe we'll start with, what was his name?
Gary Powers, right?
Start with the U-2 flight next time on the show.
Thank you very much, Mike Swanson.
Sorry to end your interview with that ridiculous thing.
Oh, no problem.
I don't know.
All right, Michael Swanson, The War State, writer michaelswanson.com, and wallstreetwindow.com, of course.
Thanks very much.
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