12. Legal Bribery
It was President Roosevelt, in the early years of the Second World War, who recast America as ‘the great arsenal of democracy’. Before the attack on Pearl Harbor the US had been supplying its allies with arms and matériel behind the scenes. Between 1939 and 1945 America became an arsenal of unprecedented scale, first supplying others and then, in the wake of the Japanese attack, using force herself. Not only were America’s population, resources and industrial capacities marshalled to this end, but the war effort became the driving force in a far-reaching transformation of American society.
The historian D. W. Brogan suggested in 1944 that ‘war is a business, not an art ... and the US is a great, very great, corporation.’ The Second World War witnessed an industrial explosion in the US, with manufacturing output doubling between 1940 and 1943. Arms production increased eightfold between 1941 and 1943, to a level nearly that of Britain, the Soviet Union and Germany combined. As the film-maker Eugene Jarecki observed, the conflict wove the idea of war inextricably into the American way of life. It saw an ever-increasing proportion of national resources diverted into the military and engendered unprecedented closeness between the federal government and corporate America. This gave the defence apparatus a life of its own in influencing public policy and exerted damaging influence on the separation of powers. It produced a symbiosis between the executive branch and corporate America in which each simultaneously shelters and empowers the other, producing a climate of decreased transparency and accountability and, ultimately, of unchecked executive power. During his years in the White House FDR transformed the executive branch into an office of far greater power, secrecy and autonomy than had ever been contemplated before.
The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ordered by President Harry Truman, strategic efficacy aside, were an extreme case of a kind of self-perpetuating militarism. The US-driven victory in the war unleashed the forces of executive overreach and militaristic aggression that would shape American policy and society for decades to come. Since this time defence industry executives have played powerful roles in influencing both domestic and foreign policy in directions that suit the needs of their companies.
After the boom years of the war, defence spending plunged from $908bn in 1945 to $141bn in 1947. Yet the growing Soviet threat would soon compel a renewed military build-up. The US replaced the UK as the pre-eminent Western global power. And the domino theory set the Truman Doctrine in motion, the most significant expansion of American foreign policy since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. Truman argued that in the shadow of communism, a threat to free people anywhere was a threat to the United States and that the US should protect these free people anywhere at any time. In so doing he blurred the lines between peacetime and war, calling for permanent military preparedness. And through the National Security Act of 1947 increased war-making power was concentrated in the executive branch.
The creation after 1947 of a national security state, which shifted power from the State Department to the Department of Defense, was a godsend to the arms industry. Since 1947, the Department of Defense has become the gravitational centre of a vast system of recruitment centres, military bases, laboratories, testing grounds, command centres, defence-related corporations and academic institutions. And the Cold War brought the military and industry into an unprecedented level of cooperation with one another, compounding their cumulative level of influence over policy: the military-industrial complex (MIC) as described by Eisenhower.
Speaking to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on 16 April 1953, less than three months into office and as the US started again to spend more on defence than on human needs, President Eisenhower delivered his ‘Chance for Peace’ speech: ‘Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.’
Despite these sentiments, Eisenhower’s administration conducted several covert operations in foreign countries, most notoriously Guatemala and Iran. While the intention was to gain geo-strategic ground in the struggle against communism, with increasing frequency the economic interests of corporations were also involved. Major General Smedley Butler, two-time Medal of Honour recipient and the most decorated marine in US history, said of his own participation in profit-driven US military action around the world: ‘I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.’
What was new in the covert operations initiated under Eisenhower was the use of the CIA to invisibly implement the plans hatched in private consultations between the executive, select advocates in Congress and their cronies in industry, especially the weapons business. The establishment of the CIA in 1947 helped to create a new layer of secrecy and reduce accountability, blurring the line between America’s national interest and the private interests of corporations friendly to the US government.
This same nexus of interests accused Eisenhower, despite his remarkable military career, of being soft on the Soviets and falling behind the USSR in the arms race. This criticism took the form of two lines of negative propaganda, known as the ‘bomber gap’ and the ‘missile gap’, both of which showed the insidious intertwining of the interests of the military, Congress and the defence-industrial sector.
The bomber gap was a political canard promoted by an alliance of Air Force brass and defence contractors seeking money to build more bombers. They claimed that the USSR was surpassing the US in its production of jet-powered strategic bombers, and that these bombers were capable of delivering a nuclear attack on the US. Despite evidence refuting the claim, it was popularized by members of Congress, especially Missouri’s Democratic Senator, Stuart Symington, who had served as the first Secretary of the Air Force. He is the prototype of the role played by many members of Congress today in lobbying and fear-mongering for the desires of the military-industrial complex, leading Eisenhower to suggest that ‘each community in which a manufacturing plant or a military installation is located profits from the money spent and jobs created in the area. This constantly presses on the community’s political representatives to maintain the facility at maximum strength.’ Despite being shown to be false, the bomber gap achieved its desired effect, with a massive expansion of the Air Force’s air power.
The notion of a missile gap emerged after the launch of Russia’s first spacecraft, Sputnik 1. Again it began with Senator Symington and a defence contractor executive – who had been his PA when Symington was Secretary to the Air Force – whose company wanted to produce missiles at $1.5m a piece to overcome the gap. As the defence contractor Boeing and Douglass (as it then was) fanned the missile gap flames, Eisenhower was moved to remark that he was ‘getting awfully sick of the lobbies by the munitions ... You begin to see this thing isn’t wholly the defence of the country, but only more money for some who are already fat cats.’ Kennedy used the missile gap claim to embarrass Eisenhower and then Nixon. Later, as President, Kennedy would have to admit it...
