The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #122794   Message #2697370
Posted By: Joe_F
10-Aug-09 - 08:41 PM
Thread Name: Lyr Add: Eisenhower Blues (J. B. Lenoir)
Subject: RE: Lyr Add: Eisenhower Songs
I should have looked it up. There were (as I remembered) two Charles E. Wilsons in Eisenhower's administration: Charles Erwin Wilson ("Engine Charlie" of GM), Secretary of Defense, and Charles Edward Wilson ("Electric Charlie" of GE), head of the Office of Defense Mobilization. The former is the one who said "What was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa", widely & maliciously (but not altogether unfairly IMO) shortened to the "vice versa" part. Neither, however, said "The right to suffer is one of the joys of a free economy"; that was one Howard Pyle, an aide of Eisenhower's, in order to buck up the unemployed in Detroit.