While making his first feature documentary, The Trials of Henry Kissinger, Eugene Jarecki stumbled upon footage of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's farewell address the night before he left the Oval Office.
The speech is a warning to the American public of the growing power of the military-industrial complex, a system that Eisenhower feared would cause the country to enter wars for the wrong reasons. Jarecki soon began exploring how Eisenhower's words are relevant in today's culture, and his latest film, Why We Fight, is an in-depth look at how the military, the defense industry, and Congress are all trapped in a system that inevitably tilts the country toward unnecessary war. We recently sat down with Mr. Jarecki, soon after his appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, to discuss the film, the politics associated with it, and what college students can do to make a difference.
How did you get the idea to make this movie? The spark was Dwight Eisenhower's farewell address, which I had never seen before. It jumped out at me in a way that nothing else did. I had never seen a president talk so earnestly about any subject, let alone a subject so grave. I knew then that it had a tremendous amount of resonance for our contemporary condition. But I also wondered to what extent his warning had come to pass, and to what extent it hadn't. I tried to trace Eisenhower's warnings into today's condition. I'm also a huge fan of Frank Capra, and fan of the films he made during World War II called the "Why We Fight" series. So, I have always wanted to make a film today asking the same question that Capra asked. It strikes me that something about the passage of time has made it that it's harder to answer that question simply today than it was when Capra asked it, and there's a story in that.
Do you think a president could ever speak as candidly to the American public as Eisenhower did in his farewell address? What Eisenhower was afraid of was that these forces would poison our national discourse and our national life and create a culture in Washington in which the interests of the military-industrial class would weigh too heavily on the purity of our policy making environment, so that the people who succeed in Washington end up being the people who are good at playing the system. If you want to go through Washington and stand on principle and reject that kind of financial support, some else is gonna be in your office tomorrow. Politics is unbelievably expensive. That's what Eisenhower meant when he said, "The power of money is ever-present and is gravely to be regarded."
How does this type of system affect the military and our preparedness for war? In the phenomenon of political engineering today, which the film talks about, where the B2 Bombers today have a piece that was made in every single state. You or I, if we were going to start a business to make any product, you would think it would make sense to build it all under one roof, right? No. That's not how the weapon system works. They not only want to build the product, they want to keep the program going. Many outdated weapons systems should be up for review, but what do you do if you're a defense contractor? When that system comes up for review, you make sure that the people in Congress support the continued production of your product. How do you do that? You give them a piece of the action by making sure that you build the product under as many roofs across as many congressional districts as you can. When it comes up for review, the members of Congress fall eerily silent. This is what Eisenhower feared.
Why We Fight examines the relationship between capitalism and democracy. How do you think the two are, or should be, related? Americans have reached a point where I'm not sure if people know the difference between capitalism and democracy. I think they think that having it their way at Burger King is democracy. But in fact, given the power of Burger King to influence our public officials far more than you or I can, that citizen eating that Whopper has already given up that democratic right before even making his choice between flame-broiled or extra mayonnaise. It's an absurd mockery of democracy. Capitalism has it's place, but I don't believe it has a place above democracy.
Is there someone to blame for maintaining the military-industrial complex? I always say that Eisenhower's notion of the military-industrial complex is not a conspiracy theory. He's not saying that there are evil geniuses sitting in dark rooms somewhere doing all this to us. There aren't. But, what he's afraid of is that a society, any society, even with the best of intentions, can lose its way, and you can end up in the pursuit of national security while taking precious resources away from crucial parts of your national life-like education, health care, infrastructure-and diverting those resources disproportionally into the most blunt expression of national power: the military. Then, before long, the society becomes tilted toward militarism. Empire's require permanent preparedness in a way that republics don't. You're the envy of everyone and you need to constantly be on guard. That constant vigilance is expensive, and because it's expensive it becomes the focus of national wealth, and because it becomes that focus it deprives other parts of your national life and skews your society away from its republican origins and toward this more aggressive, imperial expression of national identity. It's an unbelievable analysis that only Eisenhower could have known because he bridged the worlds of military and policy in such a unique and first-hand way as a general-turned-President.
How can college students make a difference in this system? First of all, I'd like to talk to a college audience about the politics of this. I go all over this country, and I'm told by the media that the youth in this country, as they call it, are apathetic. I don't find apathy anywhere on college campuses. What I find is the same thing I find in the rest of the population, in fact I find college kids more engaged. But, they feel helpless. They don't know where to find a handle on the machine to try to slow things down and change things. And I have an idea for them. The idea comes from Dwight Eisenhower, who had been president of Columbia University, who had seen first hand that the military-industrial forces that he feared were taking their toll on the life of our universities, and they were affecting curriculum, and that it's all about the power of money, and the danger of that money to the health of the university and the purity of its studies. So what I urge people to do, and they can look online at our website, under the "Learn More" section of www.whywefight.com, for something we founded called the Eisenhower Project, which carries Esienhower's message about the Free University in America, as he called it. It encourages students to form a chapter of the Eisenhower Project on their campus to follow the money and to look closely at where the money is coming from that comes into their university and what restrictions are places on it. Because a tremendous amount of money that goes into schools in America comes from the Department of Defense and other special interests, with strings attached.
It's only the students who have the access and the authority within a college campus to create the pressure for improved ethics in that landscape and an improved commitment to the purity of education. If every student in this country recognized that, they could compel tremendous change.
At Harvard, recently, the government pressured the school to allow military recruiters on campus who discriminate against gays, and Harvard resisted and resisted and resisted, and finally, they were so blackmailed by the federal government that they caved, in order to not lose their federal funding. And if Harvard caves, what school in this country can resist? And if that's the condition that we face, it is an emergency facing college kids, and they're the only people who can solve it.
The phone number for the Eisenhower Project is 212-352-3060.
Do you have any advice for college students, aspiring filmmakers or otherwise? Don't try to get rich quick and don't try to be successful quick. Take a very scenic route through life, and don't let this misguided culture of success in America pressure you to try to do anything too quickly. I failed for a number of years to get done what I hoped to get done, and that failure was extremely healthy, because it taught me a lot and it caused me to take side roads in exactly the way John Lennon meant when he said "Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans." It 'aint linear.
