Abramoff was later fired for mismanaging the organization's funds. During that year, Citizens for America sponsored a meeting in Angola between Angolan, Nicaraguan, Afghan, and Laotian anti-communist rebels. Lehrman personally attended the event, called the "Democratic International". Lehrman stepped down from Citizens for America in September 1986 and was succeeded by Gerald P. Carmen, former ambassador to Switzerland. Position on the gold standard From very early on, Lewis E. Lehrman "became a big fan of Jacques Rueff, Charles de Gaulle's finance minister, and a true believer in the gold standard." Lehrman was a member of the U.S. Gold Commission in 1981 with Congressman Ron Paul. In 1982, they co-authored the book The Case for Gold with a team of economists that included Murray Rothbard. Lehrman's singular point of view appears in many periodicals including The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, National Review, American Spectator and The Weekly Standard. Additionally, Lehrman contributed to Money and the Coming World Order, originally published by the New York University Press and republished by The Lehrman Institute in 2012, and wrote The True Gold Standard (2012). In promoting a return to the Gold Standard, Lehrman was allied to James Grant, editor of Grant's Interest Rate Observer, with whom he testified before the United States House Financial Services Subcommittee on Domestic Monetary Policy and Technology in March 2011 and September 2012. Lehrman launched the Gold Standard Now in 2011 as an aggregator of monetary policy news and to advocate that "America should lead by unilateral resumption of the gold standard." In 2013, Lehrman published Money, Gold and History, a collection of his writings on monetary policy and his advocacy of the gold standard. One commentator noted that "Lehrman is one of a very small group of contemporary gold advocates able to successfully bridge the gap separating practical conservative intellectualism from fleeting, half-baked idealism." Lehrman repeatedly argued that paper currency was injurious to working Americans. "The primary argument upon which I would rest my case for a gold standard," Lehrman said in a 2013 interview, "is that it preserves the purchasing power, the wages, the salaries, of all those who are unable to defend themselves in the halls of Congress in Washington or elsewhere, in citadels of power like Wall Street." The Lehrman American Studies Center In 2005, with Lehrman's funding, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute established the Lehrman American Studies Center. This center, as stated on