Autobiography - The Galindo Group

Ram Galindo THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN Page 80
malaise but didn’t recognize that he and his policies were the principal cause of the
problem. My awareness of where the battlefronts in the fight for freedom were continued
to evolve. The war had to be waged not only in Washington and the hot fronts of the
cold war, but also right in my new hometown as well – in everyone’s hometown.
Blessedly though, in America by and large the war is still a war of ideas, in peace and in
order, within the rule of a universally accepted law.
I began taking a high profile in supporting candidates who saw the new president under
the same light I did and were prepared to confront his side if elected. In my view Carter
clearly was bad for America. Here was the proof that the “born in America” qualification
to hold the office of President was of ambivalent wisdom. However, even though I
thought the president was excessively flawed, I was comforted by the belief that he saw
himself acting in good faith. The big-city liberal media were very sympathetic to him,
dressing his misguided foreign policy and confusing domestic leadership in a robe of
coexistence with totalitarian communism necessary to avoid nuclear Armageddon.
Domestically, actions such as deregulating an industry (airlines) while over-regulating
another (oil and gas) didn’t do much to foster credibility, an essential ingredient for
business development.
Later events demonstrated that Carter perceived America as militarily dangerous to his
evangelical view of how the world should be. He thought we should not be so strong as
to cower the Soviet Union into submission, for fear the world would become lopsided
and be overrun by a ruthless military-industrial power elite. In his view, the presence of
a strong adversary, not a mortal enemy, would be good for humanity. His distorted
sense of fair play drove him to willingly give up any advantage he perceived we had, in
the process sacrificing allies and friends at home and abroad. It appears to me that he
naively thought he could bring the communists from the self-declared rank of mortal
enemy to the level of fair-playing adversary. To induce this change he needed to make
us weaker, not stronger. He was convinced that appeasement was the best route.
I believed that strength induces respect and that if America was to be respected and the
world saved from tyranny we needed to get stronger, not weaker, but never abusive and
never over-confident. One of his disarming moves was to eradicate from the Central
Intelligence Agency most of the “human spy” programs it had, yielding an incalculable
advantage to the Soviets and unwittingly sacrificing many of our agents. He vetoed the
construction and deployment of the neutron bomb in Europe. At the time the Warsaw
Pact had more than 20,500 tanks in the European Theater and NATO had fewer than
7,000. Contrary to what the press promoted, the neutron bomb is not a weapon of
unmeasured mass destruction. This weapon can kill life within restricted areas, such as
in a battlefield, without reducing everything to rubble and without long-term after effects.
It could neutralize Moscow’s tanks. We had this bomb. The Soviets did not yet. At least
we could have extracted many concessions in other parts of the world in exchange for
not deploying it. Even the Christian Socialists in Germany were astonished at this
decision, which finally evolved into making the neutron artillery but not deploying it. All
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