|
|
||
 |
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
|
|
||
|
Politics Resource Center |
 |
|
||
|
|
||||
|
|
||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
June 2, 2008
by Gary North, Ph.D.
The most prophetic Presidential speech in American history ever delivered by a sitting President was made by a man who possessed, at least until the arrival of George W. Bush, the reputation for being the least competent verbal communicator in modern Presidential history. The other speech laid the rhetorical foundations for a foreign policy that has culminated in the worst military disaster in American history. The first speech is Eisenhower's Farewell Address. We call it the Farewell Address in honor of George Washington's Farewell Address. These are the only two departing Presidents' speeches that anyone remembers. Yet Eisenhower's was the only true address. Washington's was never spoken. It was a speech printed in a newspaper. The two farewell addresses are remembered for two phrases relating to the same theme: American foreign policy. The phrase of Washington's that has rung out down through the centuries is this: "no entangling alliances." The phrase of Eisenhower's that is remembered is this: "the military-industrial complex." The concept of no entangling alliances has become the hallmark of Washington's recommended legacy to the nation. It has served as a guiding star to American defenders of a non-interventionist foreign policy. It is a therefore a shame that he never said it. What he said was this:
This does not have the same ring to it, does it? Then who said "no entangling alliances"? Jefferson, in his First Inaugural. The second speech of the century was delivered a little under 70 hours after Eisenhower's: John F. Kennedy's Inaugural Address. We recall its ringing phrase: "And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." And so, my fellow Americans, let us review these two speeches. EISENHOWER'S FAREWELL ADDRESS (Jan. 17, 1961) This speech was as accurate an assessment of what faced the nation as any public address ever delivered by a sitting President. Given what has happened since the evening when he delivered the speech, we can call it near-prophetic. The only document that I can think of that matches it for the accuracy of both its assessment and its predictive accuracy is Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). That document was a lot longer and reached a much smaller audience. Eisenhower began with an assessment of what he had pulled off during the previous six years. He did it graciously. I can think of no one who has ever publicly denied the accuracy of his assessment. Instead, pundits and historians have preferred to ignore it. Eisenhower had faced a Congress controlled by the Democrats for the final six years of his two terms. Yet he had got what he asked for most of the time.
Eisenhower had avoided what could have been six years of confrontation with a hostile Congress. He and they went along to get along. Then he got to the point of his rhetorical legacy to the nation: America's military and economic power.
That was the crucial political issue in 1961, and it remains so today. Eisenhower had bought into the Wilsonian Party Line, which Franklin Roosevelt had also adopted and Truman had extended.
He then referred to the Soviet menace, though not by name. He referred to "the conflict now engulfing the world."
Here was Woodrow Wilson's vision of American foreign policy: "our charted course toward permanent peace and human betterment." It declares a comprehensive, messianic worldview. But Eisenhower, unlike his successors and his predecessors, had counted the cost and then issued a warning. Do not put your faith in miracles at the Federal level, he said.
Then the retired general made an assessment of what had happened during his term in office. A profound transition had occurred.
For a man who had the reputation within the media of a verbal fumbler and golf-playing time-server, this was potent rhetoric. It was not just potent rhetoric. It was a profound insight into the nature of American society. I can think of no greater profundity in any President's speech. Then he escalated his rhetoric.
Next, he referred to the growing influence of the Federal government over scientific and technological research. He used highly effective imagery.
Five years later, Robert Nisbet wrote "Project Camelot and the Science of Man." He drew a bead on one military research project out of tens of thousands as the archetype of what too much money, too much arrogance, and too much Federal power can produce. But he added nothing of substance to what Eisenhower said in his Farewell Address.
This, too, was then and remains a powerful elite. It is a well-funded elite. The Federal government is the primary source of its funding. Then he moved to economics. Specifically, he described the present-orientation of government spending, which is accompanied by unstoppable and irreversible debt.
Then he called for international disarmament. Consider the context. John F. Kennedy had barely defeated Richard Nixon. He had offered only one substantive issue: an alleged missile gap between the United States and the Soviet Union. There was no such gap, and Kennedy did not again refer to it. He had played the "weapons of mass destruction" card. He bluffed. It had worked. Eisenhower called for the elimination of such a weapons gap, not by accumulating more weapons of mass destruction but fewer.
Eisenhower was trapped between Woodrow Wilson's messianic vision for America and the costs of implementing it. Wilson's vision was a systematic and self-conscious secularization of the Presbyterian postmillennialism that his father, Rev. Joseph Ruggles Wilson, the Stated Clerk of the Southern Presbyterian Church, had held dear. Eisenhower waxed uncharacteristically eloquent in his praise of the younger Wilson's vision.
Three days later, his successor waxed even more eloquent in the defense of this vision. KENNEDY'S INAUGURAL ADDRESS (Jan. 20, 1961) Kennedy began with a declaration: this coronation event was strictly nonpartisan. This could easily be dismissed as political business as usual, yet it was an accurate assessment. Eisenhower three days before had articulated a similarly nonpartisan declaration of dedication to Wilson's vision.
This is covenantal language -- the language of covenant renewal. Every covenant has five sections: a declaration of sovereignty, a doctrine of institutional representation, a system of law, a system of institutional sanctions -- positive and negative -- and a system of succession. Every covenant rests on a public oath before God. Covenant renewal is an aspect of the covenantal oath: point four of the covenant model. For a church, covenant renewal is the Lord's Supper. For a civil government, it is voting. In the United States, the Inaugural Address of a President is the supreme act of national covenant renewal. It is the celebration of succession. Kennedy's speech writers fully understood this, just as Franklin Roosevelt's speech writers had in 1933. But Kennedy's language was far more self-conscious than even Roosevelt's had been.
This oath has always been exclusively secular. Its legal foundation is the United States Constitution.
From the day that George Washington put his hand on a Bible supplied by the Freemasons of New York City -- the very same Bible used by Harding, Eisenhower, Carter, and George H. W. Bush at their inaugurations -- a national deception has gone on every four years. At the inauguration of a new President, the imagery of biblical covenantalism is invoked for the sake of easily deceived voters. A man puts one hand on a Bible, which is not required by the Constitution, raises his other hand toward the heavens, from where no alleged Dweller is allowed to impose a political test oath to Himself, and swears allegiance to the Constitution. That event is the last time that he pays any attention to the Constitution unless he is re-elected four years later. Kennedy then celebrated the sovereignty of man. This was the continuing theme in his address. He began with an assertion of the existence of a technological new world order -- one very different from 1789.
So, his speech began with two mutually conflicting affirmations: the sovereignty of mankind and the sovereignty of God. He affirmed that supreme earthly power is lodged in the hands of mankind. Every covenant invokes sanctions, both positive and negative. Man has the power of eliminating poverty or destroying himself as a species. However, the rights of man -- legal immunities from the state -- come from God. This was powerful rhetoric. It rested on theological schizophrenia. It is the supreme schizophrenia in American political history since 1788. Every covenant has a system of inheritance. Kennedy's next words invoked inheritance.
This is Woodrow Wilson's covenant. It is all-encompassing.
More? How much more? A lot more. As much as Congress, the President, and the Federal Reserve System can fund by extracting wealth from the American electorate. He referred obliquely to the entangling alliances that had been created under Truman, beginning in 1949 with NATO. American textbooks never mention this inconvenient fact: after the Treaty with France of 1778 lapsed with the replacement of the Articles of Confederation by the Constitution in 1788, the United States did not enter into a military defensive treaty until NATO.
Then he announced his commitment to a system of international relations that officially renounces colonialism. It is a system that today involves at least 737 American military bases inside foreign nations.
The media today delight in roasting George W. Bush's less felicitous verbal commitment to this same vision. But Bush has what Kennedy lacked after the Bay of Pigs fiasco of 1961 was followed by the October Crisis in 1962 over the use of weapons of mass destruction: a willingness to back up his rhetoric, however garbled, with concentrated military force. Bush has said nothing in defense of his foreign policy that Kennedy did not say in defense of his. He has acted decisively to enforce Wilson's covenant. Kennedy called the nation to make this same commitment.
He then affirmed his commitment to the United Nations Organization.
That a brand-new President could publicly affirm with a straight face his faith in that toothless institution of tax-free lifetime employment indicates just how universal the Wilsonian covenant was inside the Beltway in 1961. In contrast to Eisenhower's call for disarmament, Kennedy called for an escalation of the arms race.
But then he offered an olive branch of peace. He did so with a rhetorical flourish that reminds me of Rev. Jesse Jackson.
He called for a specific form of disarmament: the disarmament of nations. But in order to accomplish this, the covenant's authority to impose sanctions had to be transferred. To what? To a new world government.
This was Woodrow Wilson's covenant. And, like former Ruling Elder Wilson, Kennedy invoked the language of the prophets.
Every new covenant requires a new legal system. As the New Testament says, "For the priesthood being changed, there is made of necessity a change also of the law" (Hebrews 7:12). Kennedy proposed a change in the law, as befits a new priesthood.
Once again, he invoked the language of covenant renewal.
This was a new national covenant. It broke with the old one of 1788 as surely as the new covenant of 1788 had broken with the old covenant of 1781.
The liberal media today ridicule George W. Bush, which they did not do from September 12, 2001 through late 2003. But President Bush is merely the latest bearer of the torch which Kennedy said must be passed down through the ages.
This is truly fire in the minds of men. This brings us to the capper.
CONCLUSION Americans live today under a new covenant. While there is constant jostling for access into the priesthood within the tribe of political Levites, this covenant guides the policy-makers who establish the terms of public discourse. There are insiders and outsiders. There are backbenchers, to use an analogy from the House of Commons. There are ranking committee members of Congress and committee chairmen. But there is a single national civil covenant. There are two great teams. I do not mean the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. I mean Council on Foreign Relations Team A and Council on Foreign Relations Team B. On both teams, there are varsity players -- neoconservatives -- who are trying mightily to keep from being consigned once again to the junior varsity. But all of the players have invoked an oath of allegiance -- not to the Constitution of the United States but to Woodrow Wilson's covenant. Afghanistan in 1984 was not Charlie Wilson's war. It was Woodrow Wilson's war. It has been one long war since 1917. We need a better covenant. "Moreover I will make a covenant of peace with them; it shall be an everlasting covenant with them: and I will place them, and multiply them, and will set my sanctuary in the midst of them for evermore" (Ezekiel 37:26). Until that day, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask instead what your country has been doing to you and is likely to keep doing to you for as long as it can buy with fiat money the votes of a majority. Dr. Gary North earned a Ph.D. in history and is one of America's keenest economic analysts and commentators. He supports the Austrian school of economics and is a previous assistant to libertarian congressman Dr. Ron Paul. Visit his website at http://garynorth.com. To subscribe to Gary North's Reality Check go to http://www.dailyreckoning.com/sub/GetReality.cfm If you enjoyed this essay and would like to read more of Gary's writing please visit his website at http://www.garynorth.com or http://www.freebooks.com
|
|
|
Enrich your life with a book about politics and current events...
|
|
|
|
It
is one of the oddest facts in American history that
the two most important American political speeches
in the twentieth century were delivered about 70
hours apart.
|
|
||
|
|
||
[Homepage] [Newsletter] [Search] [Support the Academy] [Link to Us] [Contact the Academy] [Citing Articles from Our Website] [Privacy Policy & Disclaimer]
Copyright 1998-99, 2000-01, 2002-03, 2004-05, 2006-07, & 2008 by The Radical Academy. All Rights Reserved.