| Week of September 29, 1996 | by F.R. Duplantier |
America's Future Chairman Robert Morris served as a naval intelligence officer during World War II, and as chief counsel to the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in 1950. The former judge, former university president, and renowned geopolitical strategist celebrates his 81st birthday this week!"Our historical commitment and our current strategic position make the United States the central redoubt of human liberty," wrote Robert Morris in a book called Self Destruct: Dismantling America's Internal Security, published in 1979. "If we fall," Morris warned, "the lights of liberty will be extinguished all over the world for the foreseeable future. And those lights have already been extinguished or dimmed in more than half the countries of the world."
Morris made these observations 10 years before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ensuing collapse of the Soviet empire. President Ronald Reagan's unwavering commitment to a strong national defense, and to the Strategic Defense Initiative, deserves much of the credit for this welcome turn of events. While the threat to our security appears to have diminished for the moment, Morris' cautionary words deserve frequent repetition. "The United States must be strong," he asserted. "We must be strong in our military arsenal, continually developing both sophisticated nuclear weapons and conventional arms. We must have a powerful navy and merchant marine, and valor and discipline in the ranks of all our services."
External strength is not enough, however. Morris reminded his countrymen that "we must also be strong in our internal ramparts and in that protective circle that shields us in our sanctuary. We must protect that sanctuary, not only to safeguard our own existence, but also because that sanctuary is, in many respects, the [global] center of influence and of communications, and its penetration and resulting defilement would have grievous consequences in all the nations of the world."
Morris knew firsthand that internal security requires "an intelligence-gathering organization that can assess the strength, the motivation, and the intentions of every real or potential enemy. We must also maintain a counterintelligence force that will preserve us from the misinformation of our enemies, from their penetration of our apparatus, and from the negligence, stupidity, and disloyalty of our own operatives," he observed. "We need an education and information system, not only to inform our intelligence community, but also to induce a broad public understanding of the issues that prevail in the world today."
Robert Morris argued that we should "eliminate from our system what seems to be a neurosis that is forcing us to war on our security forces. We need them," he insisted. "We need the FBI, the CIA, and the counterintelligence forces in our armed services and in our police departments." Morris urged Congress to restore its internal security committees, so that they can "make a record of what subversives are now secretly doing in this country." Such vigilance, he explained, is the price of freedom.
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