Self-Inflicted Wounds; From LBJ's Guns and Butter to Reagan's Voodoo Economics

New York: Times Books Random House, 1994. First Edition [stated], presumed first printing. Hardcover. Very good/Good. Bill Snead (author photo). xvi, 447, [1] pages. Notes, Bibliography, index, Presentation copy signed by the author. DJ has a small spine tear at front and minor other wear and soiling. Washington Post columnist Hobart Rowen helped expand the scope of newspaper business pages beyond local news to the world economy - without losing sight of what it all meant to the average reader. "Bart taught a generation of business journalists how to cover economic policy in a more sophisticated way," said David Ignatius, Post assistant managing editor for business news. Rowen's column was nationally syndicated. Rowen covered the economic policies of presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Clinton. Rowen began his professional career as a copy boy for the New York Journal of Commerce and rose to Washington correspondent in 1941. He became Washington correspondent and then an editor for Newsweek magazine, where he wrote his first syndicated column in 1960. Derived from a Kirkus review: Rowen attributes America's economic decline not to unfair trading practices by Japan or other external factors. Rowen examines the men and women who have made economic policy since the Johnson administration. Emerging from WW II as the only country with an industrial base untouched by war, the US was the most powerful nation on earth. Then, from the mid-1960s to the late 1980s, it went from the world's largest creditor to its largest debtor. The current crisis, he argues, was initiated by Johnson's Vietnam adventure, which crippled the Great Society and set up a virulent inflationary cycle in its attempt to have both guns and butter. The blunders of LBJ gave way to Nixon's disastrous wage- and price- control attempts. Ford and Carter were nothing short of inept. By far his harshest criticism is leveled at Reagan's ``voodoo economics.'' Rowen's also gives readers a poignant mini-memoir about the life of a newspaperman covering the powerful.