Summer in South Carolina in 1952 was hot. So we listened to the Republican Convention outside on our car radio. Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio, who would die the following year of cancer, was neck and neck with Dwight Eisenhower.

Have you ever noticed how the establishment always wins the close ones? In 1976 President Ford won a very similar squeaker against Reagan. Taft had been the conservative candidate in 1040, 1944, and 1948, and each time the establishment beat him and put in a semi-Democratic candidate.

Taft represented a point of view which disappeared altogether with his death. He had opposed extreme interventionism in the European War, and he opposed extended American commitments against Communism.

Actually, what he opposed was what I repeatedly called “military welfarism,” a term which is now for the first time being used.

You should y now take it for granted that the same Eisenhower who used the term “military-industrial establishment” was its greatest architect. He wanted American troops on European soil supplied by American taxpayers using weapons made by American industry .

In 1959, when Europe was on its feet industrially, Eisenhower renewed the old post-War contract that drafted American troops at American expense to go to Europe and protect them. By then Western Europe’s economy and its population outstripped the Soviet Union.

But by 1959, with Taft’s death, the Republicans Party upheld military welfarism as part of its Potemkin Patriotic policy.

Ron Paul is considered a real kook for saying that country which is collapsing under debt should not get into war after war.

Paul is throwback, but a very legitimate throwback.