Dwight D Eisenhower

I stumbled across some quotes from Dwight Eisenhower the other day. While this era of history is not my specialty, I found these quotes particularly intriguing.

In today's political world, the GOP would call this a "raving liberal" statement:

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 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane 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, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. 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. [...] Is there no other way the world may live?
-A speech given to the American Society of Newspaper Editors (1953-04-16), "The Chance for Peace"

But then IKE believed in a strong defense:

We must be ready to dare all for our country. For history does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid. We must acquire proficiency in defense and display stamina in purpose.
-First Inaugural Address (1953-01-20)

IKE, in the classic Republican sense, believed in smaller government, but not the abolishment of FDR's New Deal programs:

Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.
-letter to Edgar Newton Eisenhower, his brother (1954-11-08)

IKE probably would have opposed the Patriot Act:

Un-American activity cannot be prevented or routed out by employing un-American methods; to preserve freedom we must use the tools that freedom provides.
-The White House Years, p. 331

The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.
-Speech in Ottawa (1946-01-10)

Interesting how political parties change over time.