The recent action by the superintendent of the Naval Academy, authorizing the removal of several hundred books from that institution’s library, is, like most attempts at censorship, counter-productive in its immediate effects. A list of the books has been widely published; an Annapolis bookstore has featured many of them in its window.

The ostensible target of the purge are books fostering an ideology of racial preference or DEI, but the relation of this endeavor to national defense is, to say the least, tenuous.

While there are a half-dozen or so worthy books on the list, most of them are somnolent doctoral theses that probably should not have been acquired in the first place. It is unlikely that any of them would inspire Naval Academy graduates to enlist in the sea-borne forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the same observation applies to the similar attempted purges at the other military academies and, even more, to the recent firing of the well-regarded Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, who presides over a library required by statute to acquire all copyrighted books.

The Trump administration’s real agenda is the inspiration of fear and the inducement of conformity. When the Eisenhower administration added “security risks” to the loyalty screening program, the effect was to impose a six-month delay on all college students aspiring to enter the federal service; the libertarian Anglo-American journalist Alistair Cooke described it as a charter for conformist slobs, discouraging intellectual exploration among the young.

The Anglo American tradition is not as tolerant as that espoused by French premier Georges Clemenceau, who once said that he would disinherit his son if he were not a communist at age 22 or if he were still one at age 30, but stifling intellectual curiosity among the users of libraries or the patrons of bookstores is not part of our tradition. The political purging of libraries may not be a First Amendment violation, given that selection among myriad available books cannot be, but it is not an activity that any good constitutionalist should engage in. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth needs to be reminded that he took an oath to uphold the Constitution.

It is time to recall the teachings and behavior of a military man whose sense of what he was defending differs from that of President Donald Trump and Secretary Hegseth. General and President Dwight D. Eisenhower was not a political angel and made his share of mistakes, like all who engage in politics. But there are in his record two deeds which, in addition to his coordination of the Allies in World War II, deserve to be remembered. An uncle of mine who served with distinction in the field artillery on the Western Front was in most things an unreconstructed New Dealer.

But he twice voted for Eisenhower because of his decision to admit newsreel recorders to the German concentration camps.

This was not an inevitable decision, but even more than the actions of Presidents Truman, Kennedy, Johnson or even of Martin Luther King, it was what made American racism no longer acceptable to most citizens and leadership groups.

His second action, for which he now deserves to be remembered, was the language he inserted into an otherwise prepared speech at Dartmouth College in June 1953. The president addressed his audience as follows:

“Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed.

Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as that document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship.

How will we defeat communism unless we know what it is, and what it teaches, and why does it have such an appeal for men, why are so many people swearing allegiance to it? It is almost a religion, albeit one of the nether regions.

And we have got to fight it with something better, not try to conceal the thinking of our own people.

They are part of America.

And even if they think ideas that are contrary to ours, their right to say them, their right to record them, and their right to have them at places where they are accessible to others is unquestioned, or it isn’t America.”

George Liebmann (george.liebmann2@verizon.net), writing in his individual capacity, is president of the Library Company of the Baltimore Bar and the author of various works on law and politics, most recently “The Tafts” (Twelve Tables Press, 2023).