D. Eisenhower (1961)
If there weren’t so many of these [handguns] around, why, maybe you could be a little more peaceful.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower (1958)
IN THE DECADE OF SANDY HOOK, San Bernardino, and Orlando, the warnings of our thirty-fourth president against gun violence have been all but forgotten. TV commercials have featured car ads urging us to “celebrate Dwight D. Eisenhower’s interstate highway system,” while a film, The Monuments Men, praised Eisenhower’s role in saving art treasures from Nazi plunder. Not to be outdone, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery, and the Smithsonian Institution displayed documents and works of art honoring Eisenhower. The Metropolitan Museum made him a Fellow for Life, citing him as “soldier, diplomat and statesman, through whose wisdom and foresight irreplaceable art treasures were saved for future generations.” With all that attendant publicity, The Monuments Men posted the third-highest box-office results of its opening weekend, trailing only The Lego Movie and RoboCop. “President Eisenhower might have liked Robo-Cop,” the critic Mick LaSalle commented, “because its villain was the same as his—the military-industrial complex.”
Not a word about Ike’s warning about the “hopes of its children” in the Sandy Hooks and Orlandos to come: “Every gun is a theft!”
Ike targeted other villains as well, including Joe McCarthy and his gang of rabid anticommunists. Ike came to mind after a gun-toting director of the National Rifle Association accused President Obama of being a “communist-nurtured subhuman mongrel.” Ike had cautioned my graduating class of 1950 at Columbia College, “Let’s not be stupid enough to fall into that grave error. Let’s not call anybody a Communist who may be just a little bit brighter than ourselves.”
When Eisenhower was first elected, in 1952, Senator McCarthy was riding high. Biographer Jim Newton reported that two years later, after the Army–McCarthy hearings, which Ike quarterbacked, the president could quip, “It’s no longer McCarthyism. It’s McCarthywasm.”
SIX MONTHS AFTER HIS INAUGURATION IN 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower kept his election pledge by ending the Korean War. He had argued against any land war in Asia: “This world in arms is not spending money alone,” he explained. “The cost of one modern heavy bomber is a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. . . . It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.” Not only bricks and mortar were at stake: the Korean War had taken 54,246 American lives and cost 320 billion of today’s dollars. Ike would have appreciated a recent report from Brown University’s Eisenhower Research Project—a name chosen to honor Ike’s warning against a burgeoning military-industrial complex in the United States. The project reported that, in the first decade after 9/11, our wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan had killed at least 225,000 people overall, among them 6,000 U.S. military deaths. Those wars have cost the United States between $3.2 and $4 trillion, including medical care and disability for current and future war veterans.
But it’s not only guns abroad that kill Americans and rob us of our treasure. Would that Ike were around today to warn us against the non–military-industrial complex! Deaths and injuries due to gun violence have been estimated to cost our economy $40 billion annually. Meanwhile, ammunition manufacturers made a projected $993 million in profits on sales of $11.7 billion in 2013. That’s over $400 billion for the decade on sales of $10 trillion, at a cost of 320,000 lives per year. Every gun is a theft: there have been more deaths from gun violence in the United States since 9/11 than all civilian and military deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran combined. This level of violence, unique to the United States, constitutes a major public health hazard.
IN 1955, IKE HONORED JONAS SALK for sparing countless thousands of American parents from the “agonizing fears of the annual epidemic of poliomyelitis.” Kids were mainly at risk. There had been 38,741 cases of polio with 1,620 deaths in the previous year and an estimated death rate of 1 per 100,000. The White House established an advisory committee that was given broad executive power to assure fair, nationwide distribution of vetted lots of the scarce vaccine.
Well, these days we have an annual epidemic of gun violence, with a death rate ten times that of polio in 1954 and with twenty-fold more people killed each year. But in terms of public health, we are still at the pre-Salk level when it comes to gunshot violence. We know what causes the disease (bullets), we know the vector (guns, rifles, assault weapons, etc.), and we know where in the body the injuries lodge (watch any episode of NCIS). We actually know more about this condition than we know about threats such as cancer of the prostate or leukemia.
We also know some of the scoial factors involved. In the United States, kids are at risk: think Columbine and Sandy Hook. The death rate of blacks in the Unites States from firearms violence is twice that of the general population, with black youngsters ages15–24 particularly susceptible. Britain has a death rate from gun violence of 0.23; in the Bahamas, it’s 22.2. If one compares two cities, Seattle and Vancouver, which have similar populations and overall crime rates, the Washingtonians were 4.8 times more likely to be killed with a handgun than their neighbors to the north. The Canadians have strict handgun control laws. We have a few clues to what might blunt the epidemic here in the United States: it’s clear that the more gun dealers there are in any city, the more firearm deaths are recorded. It’s also well documented that the more rigorous firearm laws are in any given state, the lower the rate of firearm fatalities. Conclusion: stay away from places with lots of guns, lots of gun dealers, and weak gun control laws. Avoid gun-toting Rocker/NRA bullies who still call President Obama a mongrel. But that advice is on a par with 1954 public health warnings to avoid E. coli–infested swimming pools during a polio epidemic.
EVEN BEFORE HIS NAMING OF THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX, Ike had a solid history of spotting bullies in the act of plunder. On May 26, 1944, eleven days before D-day, General of the Armies Dwight D. Eisenhower issued an unusual proclamation, quoted in full in Robert Edsel’s The Monuments Men. Hoping to avoid the destruction of cultural heirlooms in the battle for Hitler’s Fortress Europe, Ike gave his troops a clear command: “Inevitably, in the path of our advance will be found historical monuments and cultural centers which symbolize to the world all that we are fighting to preserve. It is the responsibility of every commander to protect and respect these symbols whenever possible.” Eisenhower’s command was widely respected; it also served as the marching order for the Monuments Men. Ike and his crew of GI monument wardens knew that they were dealing with art-hoarding Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring and that amateur dauber, Reichskanzler Adolf Hitler. In consequence, as Allied troops fought their way from the Channel beaches to the doors of Berlin, the Monuments Men paid attention not only to monuments but also to portable treasures filched from occupied countries and Germany’s own citizens. Thanks to that D-day order, and to the devotion and service of the Monuments Men, thousands of treasures were saved from destruction.
On April 2, 1946, less than a year after war ended in Europe, General Eisenhower was honored at a gala reception hosted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. One of the Met’s own Monuments Men, Director James Rorimer (played by Matt Damon in the movie), greeted his commander as Ike was hailed for his “oversight of the repatriation of artworks stolen by the Nazis during World War II.” Eleven of these are now in the collection of the Metropolitan, given by families whose treasures had been saved; a tour of the lot is online today. Ike told the Met audience what the Monuments Men had unearthed the year before:
There, in caves, in mines, and in isolated mountain hideouts, we found that Hitler and his gang, with unerring instinct for enriching themselves, had stored art treasures filched from their rightful owners throughout conquered Europe. Alongside bar and minted gold were found paintings, statues, tapestries, jewelry, and all else that the Nazis knew mankind would pay much to rescue and to preserve.
The moment is captured in a much-reproduced photo from the National Archives, which shows General Eisenhower at a salt mine near Merkers in
