Language in Chains

From a 36-year-old volume by newspaperman and speechwriter Frank Mankiewicz, "Perfectly Clear: Nixon from Whittier to Watergate":

Men achieved high rank in [the WWII] years, beyond their abilities and wildest ambitions, and were understandably loath to return to selling automobiles or settling insurance claims. Fortunes were made selling equipment and weapons to the services by men and companies to whom the swelling figures on the bbalance sheet compensated for the loss of whatever morals and ethics they may have brought to the enterprise.

Politicians discovered the great truth that if "defense" or "national security" is involved, or can be made to seem to be involved, rational arguments can be easily overcome. So long as a permanent crisis exists, national priorities can be permanently reversed. . .

The very change of name of the old Departments of War and Navy to a neew Department of Defense symbolizes the shift. As Eugene McCarthy has pointed out, once a department of government is called 'Defense,' it has no effective limit. A war department after all, is to wage wars, and if there are no wars, it is hard to increase its budget. But defense? There can never, by definition, be enough defense. If one is not for defense, then one must want the country to be defenseless or undefendable. . .

. . . this made for a sort of 'CIA-ization' of domestic life and politics . . . In the 'civilian' branches of government, the methods of the soldier and the spy became the standard operating procure. 'Secret,' 'Top Secret,' and 'Eyes Only' memoranda proliferated in places like the Department of Agriculture. The bureaucrat whose paper could carry no higher classification than 'Confidential' could safely be ignored. Cable traffic to and from posts overseas multiplied and became filled with code, military-sounding abbreviations, and 'hard-nosed' technical language. Software, infrastructure, interface, signoff, quantify -- everyone wanted to sound like a crisp air traffic control operator or a weary but experienced colonel seeking 'intellegence' from a series of dangerous patrols . . .

Against this backdrop of concealment and reversals of meaning, it's easy to incite many to fury, who think that by malicious & brutal explosions, they demonstrate that they're "real people".