A Sterling Crisis and the Adenauer–de Gaulle Threat
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He seemed to me to be on the point of taking off into the heights, like some great bird.’ For his part, on his return to Washington, Kennedy was to say in a ‘Report to the American People’ on June 6 that he had found General de Gaulle a ‘wise counsellor for the future and an informative guide to the history that he had helped to make … I could not have more confidence in any man.’ It seems that certain powerful interests in the Anglo-American world were less than enthusiastic over the prospects of such confidence between the French president and his young American counterpart becoming a full-fledged change in direction for United States foreign policy. Lyndon B. Johnson, who became president on November 22, 1963, could never be accused of inspiring similar hopes. As President, Johnson never dared defy the powerful Wall Street interests.5 LBJ soon escalated Vietnam from a CIA ‘technical advisory,’ into a full-scale military conflict, pouring tens of billions of dollars and 500,000 uniformed men into a self-defeating war in southeast Asia. The war kept Wall Street bond markets busy financing a record level of U.S. Treasury debt, while select defense-related U.S. companies kept their profits flowing from the Asian campaign. The persisting U.S. economic stagnation, which worried the politician Johnson, was seemingly ‘solved’ by the boom in war spending, so that he secured a landslide victory over Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964. But he bought his ‘victory’ at a staggering cost. THE BEGINNINGS OF AMERICA’S INTERNAL ROT Faced with the need to address America’s growing urban decay, on August 20, 1964, President Johnson signed the Equal Opportunities Act. In signing it, he boasted, with characteristic bravado, ‘Today, for the first time in the history of the human race, a great nation is able and willing to make a commitment to eradicate poverty among its people.’ The War on Poverty and LBJ’s Great Society program, as he called it, hardly eradicated poverty. But it provided an additional excuse for one of the largest increases of deficit spending and financial looting in modern history, a deficit in effect financed by surplus European dollars. Millions of the nation’s youth were herded into colleges during the mid 1960s as a form of ‘hidden unemployment,’ with the university student population rising from less than 4 million in 1960 to almost 10 million in 1975. It was the excuse for Wall Street to float additional billions of dollars of state-guaranteed public bonds for university
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