Between Guns and Butter

An illuminating study of how foreign and domestic policies have reinforced each other in post–New Deal presidencies.

Studies of presidential leadership tend to separate foreign and domestic policymaking as discrete avenues of inquiry, both empirically and analytically. This “two presidencies” syndrome has especially afflicted the study of the modern presidency. In Between Guns and Butter, Jeremy Strickler breaks this mold and simultaneously examines two significant developments that have shaped the leadership imperatives of the institution: the rise of the national security presidency and the emergence of the executive as steward of the public welfare. Strickler calls this pattern of governance the “warfare-welfare nexus.”

Analyzing the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson, Strickler shows how each, under the pressure of emergencies both at home and abroad, navigated their governing environment by expressing ideas on the tradeoffs between guns and butter through the articulation of “visions of national strength.” FDR directly linked his New Deal programs to national security and defense preparedness, not only through the Social Security Act but also through rhetoric that framed his policy initiatives as efforts to mobilize national strength at home. Truman similarly connected his Fair Deal program to national security in the face of the Korean War, under the assumption that social welfare and national defense were “one package.” While Eisenhower placed greater emphasis on foreign policy, his vision of an economy-security nexus led him to promote federal funding for education as the domestic foundation for fighting the Cold War. Kennedy linked the needs of the economy with Cold War national security, yet advocated more vigorously for unleashing economic growth as a source of national strength. Johnson’s commitments to both his Great Society program and an escalation of the Vietnam War—obscuring the relationship between guns and butter—proved unsustainable, representing the unraveling of the warfare-welfare nexus.

By juxtaposing American domestic and foreign policies, Strickler’s study sheds new light on twentieth-century presidential history.

Jeremy L. Strickler is associate professor of political science at University of Tennessee-Chattanooga.