‘Oscar Likes Ike’ or
‘And the Winner is…the 1950s?’
James Der Derian

A specter is haunting Oscars night. In the 1940’s he helped save Western democracy from the Nazi war machine In the 1950’s his first act was to prosecute big oil; his last was to warn against the rise of a home-grown war machine. In the 1960’s, Procter and Gamble added the twinkle of a pirate’s earring to his iconic image to sell the premier kitchen product of the 1960s, ‘Mr. Clean.’

Dwight D. Eisenhower has come back from the graveyard of Dead Presidents to become the unlikely hero of Hollywood. George Clooney’s Oscar-nominated ‘Good Night, and Good Luck’, a damning re-enactment of CBS-reporter Edward Murrow’s war on the Red Scare, ends with the grainy image of Eisenhower speaking in defense of habeas corpus. Guantanamo Bay, anybody?

Eugene Jarecki’s acclaimed documentary, ‘Why We Fight ’ (whose absence also haunts this year’s Oscars), opens with Eisenhower’s famous televised warning against the ‘unwarranted influence’ of a ‘military-industrial complex.’ Not a few viewers caught the analogy: The Long War on Terror as Cold War redux.

The Resurrection of Ike is happening in Washington as well as Hollywood. In January Al Gore opened a stemwinder speech (honest) to the American Constitution Society with a quote from Eisenhower: "Any who acts as if freedom's defenses are to be found in suppression and suspicion and fear confess a doctrine that is alien to America."

The battle for Ike’s ghost resumed a month later, when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made a rare outing to the Council on Foreign Relations to justify the DOD’s beleaguered ‘Information Operations’. He started with an anonymous quote: ‘we are in a media battle in a race for the hearts and minds of Muslims.’ These were not, said Rumsfeld, the words of ‘some modern-day image consultant in a public relations firm in New York City.’ The speaker, it turns out, was Osama bin Laden’s chief lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Rumsfeld closed his peroration for taking the media war to the enemy with – yes, a quote (liberally excerpted) from Eisenhower. He sets up the reference by noting how Eisenhower’s take on the “long twilight struggle” of the Cold War has - despite some differences - ‘has resonance even today’. Rumsfeld then channels (and liberally excerpts) Eisenhower’s word: ‘We face a hostile ideology -- global in scope. . . ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. . . to meet it successfully [we must] . . . carry forward steadily, surely, and without complaint the burdens of a prolonged and complex struggle -- with liberty the stake.”

Seeking to make even more explicit the link between the Long War and the Cold War, Rumsfeld traveled last week to Independence, Missouri to deliver a major policy speech at the Truman Presidential Museum and Library. After WWII, many wished for a return to America’s isolationist past. But Truman held fast against the Cold War naysayers. America now faced a Long War against terrorism, an even more insidious kind of threat, one, said Rumsfeld, that ‘you couldn’t make a movie about.’ Oliver Stone, busy making a movie about the 9/11 attack, might beg to differ.

In a doppelganger war of nostalgia, Hollywood and Washington each claim the 1950s for their own. But let’s face it: as likable as Ike might have been, and as unappealing as the current global reality is, the 1950’s cannot be reduced to ‘Happy Days’ - or to the End Days. Nor does the present imbalance of terror inspired by a jihadist figurehead hiding in a cave compare to a Cold War balance of terror produced by two empires with thousands of nuclear warheads in silos. Indeed, making an icon of Ike now might just be the political equivalent of the Fonz jumping the shark: the official as well as popular narrative of the Long War being the successor to the Cold War has already peaked.

If the hallucinatory Penguins march away with the Best Documentary Award, and the Brokeback Cowboys ride off with Best Film, perhaps ‘50s nostalgia will give way to the ‘60s flashback; or worse, to ‘Flashback’ (understandably not nominated in 1990), in which the burnt-out radical played by Dennis Hopper uttered the movies’ singularly memorable line: ‘The '90s are going to make the '60s look like the '50s’. True enough, until Elvis left the White House. Stuck inside those military-industrial-media-entertainment blues again, the ‘50s - whatever way you slice and dice them - make the ‘00s look like a very bad trip. It’s time to fast-forward.

James Der Derian directs the Global Security Program at the Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University, and is the author of Virtuous War