Profiting Off Nixon’s Vietnam ‘Treason’
Exclusive: The notion of Wall Street bankers meeting in private to discuss profiting off a plot to extend the Vietnam War and risk the lives of thousands of American soldiers may sound like a conspiracy movie script, but it is a tragic reality reflected in once secret White House documents, reports Robert Parry.
ConsortiumNews
March 4, 2012
As I pored over documents from what the archivists at Lyndon Johnson’s presidential library call their “X-File” – chronicling Richard Nixon’s apparent sabotage of Vietnam peace talks in 1968 – I was surprised by one fact in particular, how Johnson’s White House got wind of what Johnson later labeled Nixon’s “treason.”
According to the records, Eugene Rostow, Johnson’s Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, got a tip in late October 1968 from a Wall Street source who said that one of Nixon’s closest financial backers was describing Nixon’s plan to “block” a peace settlement of the Vietnam War. The backer was sharing this information with his banking colleagues to help them place their bets on stocks and bonds.
In other words, these investment bankers were colluding over how to make money with their inside knowledge of Nixon’s scheme to extend the Vietnam War. Such an image of these “masters of the universe” sitting around a table plotting financial strategies while a half million American soldiers were sitting in a war zone is a picture that even the harshest critics of Wall Street might find hard to envision.
Yet, that tip – about Nixon’s Wall Street friends discussing his apparent tip on the likely course of the Vietnam War – was the first clear indication that Johnson’s White House had that the sudden resistance from South Vietnamese President Nguyen van Thieu to Paris peace talks may have involved a collaboration with Nixon, the Republican candidate for president who feared progress toward peace could cost him the election.
On Oct. 29, Eugene Rostow passed on the information to his brother, Walt W. Rostow, Johnson’s national security adviser. Eugene Rostow also wrote a memo about the tip, reporting that he had learned the news from a source in New York who had gotten it from “a member of the banking community” who was “very close to Nixon.”
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http://consortiumnews.com/2012/03/04/profiting-off-nixons-vietnam-treason/
I hear you, patrice. These warmongers and traitors get promoted. Peaceful, loving folk become victims and cannon fodder.
Vietnam was necessary to defend the American Way of life -- that is of the 1-percent's 1-percent.
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