The Permanent War

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I AM A BENEFICIARY OF Charles Wilson's vision of a permanent war economy. My first eight years were spent in "the projects" while my father was away on sea duty most of the time. The neighborhood was dangerous, and my mother was anxious to get herself and her four kids out. We finally got transferred to sunny California, where, courtesy of the U.S. Navy, the government put a roof over our heads, food on our table, and a car in our garage.

There are millions of Americans whose livelihoods depend on the permanent war economy. You rarely hear it mentioned, but there is a substantial militarist class in the United States -- people who make their living preparing for war. This group consists of not only military personnel but also people who work for companies like General Electric (the nation's 11th-largest defense contractor in 2002 and owner of NBC and media conglomerate Vivendi-Universal), Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Honeywell, Raytheon, Exxon, Bechtel, and even the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In his 1961 farewell speech, Eisenhower estimated that there were about 3.5 million people employed by the defense establishment, not including military personnel. By 1988, aided by Ronald Reagan's evil-empire rhetoric, their numbers had doubled. These folks quickly became alarmed and angry when the Justice Department began conducting a large-scale investigation into widespread corruption in the Pentagon and the defense industry.

My family bid farewell to rusty old Roxbury the same year Eisenhower gave his farewell speech. I joined the burgeoning California teen culture and became a Beach Boys fan. My new friends and I hadn't a clue that the carefree lives and good times the brothers Wilson celebrated in song were courtesy of the permanent war economy. In fact, Los Angeles and the suburban lifestyle the Beach Boys sang about were built on the aerospace industry. The nucleus of the Beach Boys consisted of three teenage brothers -- Brian, Dennis, and Carl Wilson. Their father, Murry Wilson, made airplane parts for Boeing bombers. During the war years, aircraft manufacturing had become the largest defense industry in the United States, and it still is. As of 2002 the top three defense contractors were Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman.

My own father's connection with death and destruction was a little more overt: He loaded rockets, bombs, and missiles onto jet fighters aboard the frantic carrier deck of the USS Oriskany, just off the coast of Vietnam. My dad -- a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat -- was completely gung ho. He couldn't understand why President Johnson didn't just "drop the big one" and get it over with.

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