Profiting Off Nixon's Vietnam 'Treason'

March 4, 2012

 

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.


By Robert Parry

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.