The Time Barbara Walters Tapped My Arm on a Plane

"Roone, you should listen to this guy."

Stay with me on this one.

In the early 80s, soon after getting thrown out of graduate school, I returned to New York City and started working with my brother — he got me the job — at a place called Foreign Transactions Company on 43rd Street, a few blocks from the United Nations. It was a place owned by Jewish émigrés from the then-Soviet Union, Edith and Jacob, and their daughter, Brigitte. FTC brokered technology sales to the Soviet Union from companies like Texas Instruments, Fairchild, and IBM. This technology consisted of transistors, semiconductors, diodes, and circuit boards circa — I kid you not — the 1950s and 60s. I knew nothing about geopolitics, but if the Soviets were the great threat, as Ronald Reagan, our newly elected president, kept telling us they were, the bear in the woods, and they were buying this schlock, even I could tell America had nothing to worry about. I was sending electronics to defense outposts in Vladivostok not any more sophisticated than those found in plastic, portable AM radios. No wonder bin Laden was kicking their ass in Afghanistan.