The Permanent War

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I WAS A CHILD LIVING IN BOSTON the day Ike turned the presidency over to Kennedy. There was a triumphant celebration in the city because Kennedy was a native son. My parents, who shared his middle name, were particularly thrilled.

My mother and father were both born in Boston during the Great Depression. Official unemployment hit 25 percent in 1933, the year my mother was born. My father came from an Irish American family of six children, all boys. There is no way to adequately express the punishment poverty laid upon his family. During the worst years of the Depression, the younger boys, including my father, were placed in an orphanage because my grandparents simply couldn't support them. After a time things improved for my grandfather and the younger boys were retrieved; the older ones had already joined the military to escape the grinding poverty.

The sting of the Depression would affect my parents all their lives. My father parroted the conventional wisdom that World War II was "the only thing that could have gotten the country out of the Depression." The war turned out to be the ultimate jobs program. The results were swell: Not only did it get the U.S. economy revved up, it got all the uneducated, unemployed young men off the streets, put them to work (as cannon fodder), and tamed labor unrest all at the same time.

With the war's dŽnouement at hand, U.S. industrialists feared the return of the Depression. In 1944 Charles E. Wilson, president of General Electric and director of the War Production Board, told the Army Ordnance Association the answer to economic instability was "a permanent war economy." If anyone ever needed proof that imperialism and war are the end results of capitalism run amok, Wilson's speech would be exhibit A.

Soon Wilson and his cronies got their wish. In 1946 George F. Kennan, American charge d'affaires to Moscow, cabled a telegram to President Truman painting the Soviet Union as evil incarnate. The telegram was published a year later in Foreign Affairs and the article helped stir elite opinion against our former allies, the Soviets. Less than a year later Congress passed the National Security Act, the bill that turned Franklin D. Roosevelt's welfare state into Truman's warfare state.

That same year my father joined the Navy at age 17 and was assigned to a squadron that included his eldest brother. My father, too, became a career military man, retiring as a chief petty officer after 29 years. Then he worked another 10 years for the Navy as a civilian.

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