The Chance For Peace — President Dwight D. Eisenhower

On the back of the Veterans For Peace hoodie that I wear is a quote from Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 34th President of the United States. He was the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe during WW2. The quote is: I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.

Eisenhower had indeed seen the horrors of war from the cost in lives of the D-Day operations to take back Europe from Nazi Germany and the Axis Powers to the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps after Allied forces liberated them. He truly knew the cost of war.

The reason that I am sharing this with you today comes from the inspiration to dig deeper into today’s Substack Post from Dr. Heather Cox Richardson’s “Letters From An American.” In her analysis of the events of March 10, 2026, she made reference to a speech President Eisenhower gave shortly after the death of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Below is part of the text of that speech (source).

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 50 miles of concrete highway. 

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, I repeat, is 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.

This is one of those times in the affairs of nations when the gravest choices must be made, if there is to be a turning toward a just and lasting peace. 

It is a moment that calls upon the governments of the world to speak their intentions with simplicity and with honesty. 

It calls upon them to answer the question that stirs the hearts of all sane men: is there no other way the world may live?

We are watching the unfolding of an immoral and illegal war that has no budget, no guardrails, and which greedily gobbles up funds which should be used for , as President Eisenhower stated, “bread, butter, clothes, homes, hospitals, schools.” This madness must stop!