"In 1965 influential Democrats like Frank Church, Henry (Scoop) Jackson, Warren Magnuson, and George McGovern—signed a blunt letter to President Lyndon Johnson accusing him of letting America’s gold industry die. Gold, they said, “is the only commodity held down to a price established 31 years ago and compelled to sell only to the imposer of this strangling restriction—the Federal government.” Since the nineteen-thirties, Treasury was the only domestic entity that could legally buy investment gold. Badly needed reform, they added, was being blocked by Treasury’s “negative attitude.” These words were just short of a threat that the senators would take action on gold with or without the Administration’s support. It was in this atmosphere, which Barr described as “more heated than usual,” that he trekked to Capitol Hill that September day. Barr later said that at the meeting he had “a stroke of inspiration.” Instead of maintaining the government’s hard line, he suggested that “possibly the Government could assist in this area by some sort of an R&D approach in the discovery of deposits and in the extraction processes.” Operation Goldfinger was born... http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-strange-secret-history-of-operation-goldfinger
