First Lieutenant Milo Minderbinder is a fictional character in Joseph Heller's 1961 novel, Catch-22. As the mess officer of Yossarian's squadron, Minderbinder is an entrepreneur during World War II, "perhaps the best known of all fictional businessmen" in American literature. The Minderbinder character is a "bittersweet parody" of the American dream, both a "prophet of profit" and the "embodiment of evil". After learning that Yossarian can have all the dried fruit he wants, which he then gives to friends in the squadron, Minderbinder decides that he can be trusted because "anyone who would not steal from the country he loved would not steal from anyone." However, he continually ignores Yossarian's pleas for help because of his preoccupation with running M&M Enterprises. He ultimately betrays Yossarian by striking a deal with Colonel Cathcart: Yossarian's squadron must fly additional missions, and Minderbinder gets the credit. When Nately's Whore's Kid Sister, a young girl for whom Yossarian comes to care deeply, goes missing, Minderbinder agrees to help him find her, but abandons the attempt in order to smuggle illegal tobacco.
In other media
Minderbinder is portrayed by Jon Voight in the 1970 film adaptation of the novel, and by Daniel David Stewart in the 2019 TV miniseries. The Minderbinder character of the miniseries comes across as more sympathetic and less tyrannical than the earlier representation in the 1970 film or the original in the 1961 book, at least in his personal interactions with Yossarian. He gets the position of mess officer after pitching lamb chops to Major _____ de Coverley in the first episode. His ultra-capitalist business undertakings are taken even further, with M&M presented as ″an unstoppable enterprise″. A running gag is that whenever he explains how he accomplishes his grandiose tasks to other characters, often involving technical acts of treason, it is drowned out and censored by background noise.
Literary significance
Joseph Heller intentionally seeded Catch 22 with "anachronisms like loyalty oaths, helicopters, IBM machines and agricultural subsidies", all of which only appear in the McCarthy Era, in order to create a more contemporary atmosphere. Likewise, Heller created Minderbinder's famous saying "What's good for Milo Minderbinder, is good for the country" (insert Syndicate or M&M Enterprises for Milo Minderbinder) as a parody of Charles E. Wilson, who is often misquoted as saying "What is good for General Motors is good for our country" during a hearing of a Senate subcommittee in 1952. Wilson was the head of General Motors in 1952, but became Secretary of Defense in January 1953, thus being an early example of the military-industrial complex, which the Minderbinder character well represents.
According to Heller, he modeled the character traits of Minderbinder — fast-talking, self-promoting, thoroughly conscienceless — on his Coney Island childhood friend Marvin Winkler (or Beansy to friends). Winkler is described at length in Heller's 1998 memoir Now and Then.
Milo Minderbinder has become an archetypal unabashed war profiteer in the American novel, similar to Charles Holt in the 1863 novel The Days of Shoddy by Henry Morford, and the later characters Marcus Hubbard in the Lillian Hellman play Another Part of the Forest, Joe Keller in the Arthur Miller play All My Sons and Noah Rosewater in the Kurt Vonnegut novel God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.