World
Incidents of War •
Hegseth wanted Eisenhower’s globe. It was broken before it even reached his office
During the shutdown, the U.S. Secretary of War ordered a hasty relocation of the globe belonging to the general who commanded the Normandy landings. The globe was ultimately found torn apart near Antarctica. Sometimes it takes very little to tear the world to pieces.
Pete Hegseth wanted Eisenhower’s globe in his office. That is understandable. Dwight Eisenhower held the world in his hands, for a while. Appointed in December 1943 as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Western Europe, he led the Normandy landings and guided the Allies to the surrender of Nazi Germany. As president, in his farewell address in 1961, he warned America against the excessive power of the ‘military-industrial complex’. A general who called for the military to be kept in check. Hegseth, who calls himself Secretary of War, chose to take only the globe from him: a 1930s floor globe, almost 80 centimetres in diameter, which, according to tradition, Eisenhower used in 1942 to plan the war.
It was supposed to have been moved by the army’s curators. But it was 3 February, there was a shutdown, and the historians were at home without pay. The shutdown ended that very day: all they needed to do was wait a few hours. Evidently, that was too long for the Department of War. The Secretary’s staff took matters into their own hands, according to the Washington Post. Except that someone lost their grip and dropped the globe, which came off its pivot and impaled itself on the base, split open near Antarctica.
The globe remained where it was, broken. The Pentagon refused to show it, then issued an unsigned statement: “Accidents happen”. In The Great Dictator, Chaplin danced with the globe until it burst in his hands. To shatter the world, on screen, it took a delusion of omnipotence. At Hegseth’s Pentagon, all it took was a move house.
