Lyndon LaRouche
Lyndon LaRouche, February 2006
Born	Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Jr. (1922-09-08) September 8, 1922 (age 101) Rochester, New Hampshire
Other names	Lyn Marcus
Political party	U.S. Labor Party, Democratic
Spouse(s)	Janice Neuberger (1954–1963) Helga Zepp (1977–present)
Children	Daniel, born 1956
Parent(s)	Jessie Lenore Weir Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Sr.

Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Jr. (pronounced /ləˈruːʃ/; born September 8, 1922) is an American political activist, and the founder of several political organizations known collectively as the LaRouche movement. He has been a perennial candidate for President of the United States, having run in eight elections since 1976, once as a U.S. Labor Party candidate and seven times as a candidate for the Democratic Party nomination. He is the founder and contributing editor of the Executive Intelligence Review, and has written prolifically on economic, scientific, and political topics, as well as on history, philosophy, and psychoanalysis.^[1]

He was sentenced to 15 years' imprisonment in 1988 for conspiracy to commit mail fraud and tax code violations, but continued his political activities from behind bars until his release in 1994 on parole. His defenders believe the prosecution was a politically motivated conspiracy involving government officials and a mass-media brainwashing campaign. His appellate attorney, Ramsey Clark, a former U.S. Attorney General, argued that the case represented an unprecedented abuse of power by the U.S. government in an effort to destroy the LaRouche movement.^[2]

LaRouche's supporters see him as a political leader in the tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Martin Luther King, while other commentators regard him variously as a cult leader, fascist, or anti-Semite.^[3] Norman Bailey, formerly with the National Security Council, described LaRouche's staff in 1984 as one of the best private intelligence services in the world, while the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, wrote in the same year that he leads "what may well be one of the strangest political groups in American history."^[4]

Background

Early life

LaRouche was born in Rochester, New Hampshire, the eldest of three children of Lyndon H. LaRouche, Sr. and Jessie Lenore. His father worked for the United Shoe Machinery Corporation in Rochester; the family later moved to Lynn, Massachusetts. LaRouche described his childhood as that of "an egregious child, I wouldn't say an ugly duckling but a nasty duckling."^[5] According to his autobiography, The Power of Reason: A Kind of an Autobiography (1979), he began to read around the age of five, and was called "Big Head" by the other children at school. Third grade was particularly bad; his eyesight was poor and he was made to sit at the back of the class: "The teacher, for her own—undeciphered—reasons, chose to make me her special goat, and put me in the back of the class, where my myopia prevented me from seeing much of anything but blurs ... "^[6]

He was told by his parents, both Quakers—his father had converted from Roman Catholicism, his mother from Protestantism—that under no circumstances could he fight with other children even in self-defense. This advice led to "years of hell" for him from bullies at school. As a result, he spent much of his time alone, taking long walks through the woods and identifying in his mind with great philosophers. He wrote that, between the ages of twelve and fourteen, he read philosophy extensively, embracing the ideas of Leibniz, and rejecting those of Hume, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Rousseau, and Kant.^[7] He graduated from Lynn's English High School in 1940. In the same year, the Lynn Quakers expelled LaRouche's father for reportedly accusing the Friends of misusing funds, writing under a penname, Hezekiah Micajah Jones. His wife and the 19-year-old LaRouche resigned in sympathy.^[8]

University studies, the army, marriage

Template:Quote box4 LaRouche enrolled at Northeastern University in Boston, but left in 1942 after receiving poor grades. He wrote of his teachers that they "lacked the competence to teach me on conditions I was willing to tolerate."^[9] As a Quaker, he was a conscientious objector (CO) during World War II, joining a Civilian Public Service camp, where Dennis King writes he "promptly joined a small faction at odds with the administrators."^[10] In 1944, he joined the United States Army as a non-combatant, writing that he served in India and Burma with medical units and ended the war as an ordnance clerk. He described his decision to serve as one of the most important of his life. While in India he developed an interest in and sympathy for the Indian Independence movement; in his autobiography he wrote that many GIs feared they would be asked to support British forces in actions against Indian independence forces, a prospect he said was "revolting to most of us."^[11]

While still in the CO camp, he had begun discussing Marxism, and while traveling home from India on the SS General Bradley in 1946, he met Don Merrill, a fellow soldier, also from Lynn. Merrill won LaRouche over to Trotskyism on the journey home. Back in the U.S., LaRouche tried to resume his education at Northeastern, intending to major in physics, but left because of what he called academic "philistinism." He returned to Lynn in 1948, and the next year joined the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), adopting the pseudonym Lyn Marcus for his political work to avoid problems with employers or the FBI.^[12] He arrived in New York City in 1953, where he took a job as a management consultant.^[13] In late 1954 he married Janice Neuberger, a member of the SWP. Their son, Daniel, was born in 1956.^[14]

1960s

Teaching and the National Caucus of Labor Committees

By 1961 the LaRouches were living in a large apartment on Central Park West, Manhattan, and LaRouche's activity in the SWP was minimal as he focused on his career. He and his wife separated in 1963, and he moved into a Greenwich Village apartment with his new partner, Carol Schnitzer, also known as Larrabee, another SWP member.^[15] In 1964 he became associated with a faction within the party called the Revolutionary Tendency, which was later expelled from the SWP, and was under the influence of the British Trotskyist leader Gerry Healy.^[16] For six months, he worked closely with American Healyite leader Tim Wohlforth, who later wrote that LaRouche had both a "gargantuan ego," and "a marvelous ability to place any world happening in a larger context, which seemed to give the event additional meaning, but his thinking was schematic, lacking factual detail and depth."^[17]

Template:Quote box4 In 1967 LaRouche began teaching classes on Marx's dialectical materialism at New York City's Free School, and attracted around him a group of students from Columbia University and the City College of New York, asking them to read Das Kapital, as well as Hegel, Kant, and Leibniz. In the spring of 1968, during the Columbia University student protests, he started organizing his supporters under a new name, the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC). The aim of the NCLC was to win control of the university's Students for a Democratic Society branch—the university's main activist group—and to build a political alliance between the students, local residents, organized labor, and the Columbia faculty.^[18]

By 1973, the NCLC had over 600 members in 25 cities—including in Europe, mainly West Berlin and Stockholm—and produced what King called the most literate of the far-left papers, New Solidarity.^[19] The NCLC's internal life became highly regimented over the next few years. Members gave up their jobs and private lives to devote themselves to the group and its leader, believing it would soon take control of America's trade unions and overthrow the government. A former member told The Washington Post in 1985 that it was a "seven-day-a-week, 24-hour-a-day total immersion." Another said LaRouche demanded "sycophantic obedience," and made clear he was in complete control of the group. He also developed an internal disciplinary technique known as "ego stripping", intended to reinforce conformity and loyalty (see below).^[20]

1970s

1971: "Intelligence network"

Robert J. Alexander wrote that LaRouche first established an NCLC "intelligence network" in 1971. Members all over the world would send information to NCLC headquarters, which would distribute it via "briefings" and other publications. The information would include political developments about supposed behind-the-scenes processes, though Alexander wrote that they were more often flights of fancy than inside information. Douglas Foster wrote in Mother Jones in 1982 that the briefings consisted of disinformation, "hate-filled" material about enemies, phony letters, intimidation, fake newspaper articles, and dirty tricks campaigns. According to George Johnson, opponents were accused of being gay or Nazis, or were linked to murders, which the movement called "psywar techniques."^[21]

LaRouche organized the network as a series of news services and magazines, which commentators say was done to gain the movement access to government officials under press cover.^[22] LaRouche acknowledged in 1980 that his followers impersonated reporters and others, saying it had to be done for his security.^[23] In 1982, U.S. News and World Report sued New Solidarity International Press Service and Campaigner Publications for damages, alleging that LaRouche members were impersonating its reporters in phone calls.^[24] Norman Bailey, formerly with the National Security Council, said in 1984 that LaRouche's staff comprised one of the best private intelligence services in the world, and government officials told The Washington Post in 1985 that the LaRouche organization had assembled a network of contacts in government and military agencies who were swapping information with them. Bobby Ray Inman, the CIA's deputy director in 1981 and 1982, said LaRouche and his wife had visited him, offering information about the West German Green Party, and a CIA spokesman said LaRouche met Deputy Director John McMahon in 1983 to discuss one of LaRouche's trips overseas.^[25]

Over the next few decades, LaRouche founded several groups and publications. In addition to the National Caucus of Labor Committees, there was the International Caucus of Labor Committees, the Citizens Electoral Council (Australia), the Club of Life, the Committee for a Fair Election, National Democratic Policy Committee, the Fusion Energy Foundation, the Humanist Academy, the International Workingman's Defense Fund, the Lafayette Academy for the Arts and Sciences, the LaRouche Campaign, the National Anti-Drug Coalition, the National Unemployed and Welfare Rights Organization, the Revolutionary Youth Movement, and the U.S. Labor Party.^[26] In 1984 he founded the Schiller Institute in Germany with his second wife, and three political parties there—the Europäische Arbeiterpartei, Patrioten für Deutschland, and Bürgerrechtsbewegung Solidarität—and in 2000 the Worldwide LaRouche Youth Movement.

LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review, founded in 1974, came to be known for its conspiracy theories, including that Queen Elizabeth II was the head of an international drug-smuggling cartel, and that the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing was the first strike in a British attempt to take over the United States.^[27] His other publications included New Solidarity, Fusion Magazine, 21st Century Science and Technology, International Journal of Fusion, Investigative Leads, War on Drugs, The Young Scientist, Campaigner Magazine, American Labor Beacon, New Federalist, Nouvelle Solidarité, Neue Solidarität, and the Schiller Institute's Fidelio. His publishers and printing services included American System Publications, Campaigner Publications, New Solidarity International Press Service, NSIPS Speakers Bureau, Publication Equities Inc., The New Benjamin Franklin House Publishing Company, and Computron Technologies, Computype, World Composition Services, and PMR Printing Company, Inc, or PMR Associates.^[28]

1973: "Operation Mop-Up"

According to LaRouche's 1987 autobiography, violent altercations began in 1969 between his NCLC members and several New Left groups. He wrote that "Communist Party goon-squad attacks" on his members began in Chicago in the summer of 1972, and that during the same year there were attacks on his associates by the Socialist Workers Party. The violence continued, he said, until what he described as a "concerted assault" in March 1973.^[29] Antony Lerman wrote that, in 1973 and with little warning, LaRouche adopted more extreme ideas, a process accompanied by a campaign of violence against his opponents on the left, and the development of conspiracy theories and paranoia about his personal safety.^[30] He began to believe he was under threat of assassination, including from the Soviet Union, the CIA, Libya, drug dealers, and bankers.^[31] Paul L. Montgomery suggested in The New York Times in 1979 that his change of political direction might have been linked to his partner, Carol Schnitzer/Larrabee, having left him in 1972 for a British activist, Chris White (see below). LaRouche apparently spent several months in Germany, and returned with what Montgomery described as a "messianic vision." He spent most of his time in his bathrobe in his New York apartment, and began to suggest there was a conspiracy against him, led by the Rockefeller family and the British.^[32]

Between April and September 1973, during what LaRouche called "Operation Mop-Up," NCLC members began physically attacking members of leftist groups that LaRouche classified as "left-protofascists"; a New Solidarity editorial in April titled "Death of the CPUSA," said of the Communist Party that the movement "must dispose of this stinking corpse...". He wrote: "Immediately readers will obtain a taste of our ruthlessness in the way we proceed to finish off the Communist Party ... This mopping-up operation ... is one of numerous tactical rehearsals of our own membership in the development of those qualities of ruthless leadership necessary to lead the North American working class forces to workers' government in this decade."^[33] Armed with chains, bats, and martial-art nunchaku sticks, they assaulted Communist Party, SWP, and Progressive Labor Party members, on the streets and during meetings.^[34] At least 60 assaults were reported between April and September 1973.^[35] The operation ended when police arrested several of LaRouche's followers in Philadelphia, Boston, Buffalo, and New York City.^[36]

LaRouche wrote in 2000 that the FBI had been using the Communist Party during this period to bring about his "personal 'elimination'."^[37] He cited an October 1973 document, obtained in 1992 through the Freedom of Information Act, which noted that the Communist Party USA was conducting a background investigation "for the purpose of ultimately eliminating" LaRouche and the NCLC; the memo suggested the FBI help them anonymously. LaRouche wrote that this took place as part of COINTELPRO, a series of covert, and often illegal, FBI projects, which ended officially in 1971, aimed at investigating and disrupting dissident political organizations within the United States.^[38]

1973: U.S. Labor Party

LaRouche founded the U.S. Labor Party in 1973 as the political arm of the NCLC. The party became highly controversial. The New York Times called it a "cult-like right-wing political organization"; a former member, Gregory Rose, said in the National Review that it was a "self-styled Marxist organization"; while the LaRouche movement described it in 1995 as "an independent political association committed to the tradition of Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Henry C. Carey, and President Abraham Lincoln."^[39]

A two-part article in The New York Times in 1979 by Howard Blum and Paul L. Montgomery said LaRouche had turned the U.S. Labor Party—at that point with 1,000 members listed in 37 offices in North America, and 26 in Europe and Latin America—into an extreme-right, anti-Semitic organization, despite the presence of Jewish members. LaRouche denied the newspaper's charges, and said he had filed a $100 million libel suit. His press secretary said the articles were intended to "set up a credible climate for an assassination hit."^[40] The Times alleged that members had taken courses in how to use knives and rifles; that a farm in upstate New York had been used for guerrilla training; and that several members had undergone a six-day anti-terrorist training course run by Mitchell WerBell III, a former Office of Strategic Services and CIA operative, who said he had an ongoing relationship with the CIA.^[41] Journalists and other publications the party saw as unfriendly were harassed, the Times wrote, and it published a list of potential assassins, or what it called "terrorists," that it saw as a threat. According to the newspaper, LaRouche expected members to devote themselves entirely to the party, and place their savings and possessions at its disposal, as well as take out loans on its behalf. Party officials would decide who the member should live with, and if someone left the party, his remaining partner was expected to live separately from him. LaRouche would question spouses about their partner's sexual habits, the Times said, and in one case he reportedly ordered a member to stop having sex with his wife because it was making him "politically impotent."^[41]

The Times wrote that party members were playing a dominant role in a number of companies in Manhattan: Computron Technologies Corporation, which included Mobil Oil and Citibank among its clients; World Composition Services, which the Times wrote had one of the most advanced typesetting complexes in the city and had the Ford Foundation among its clients; and PMR Associates, a printing shop that produced the party's publications and some high school newspapers (see below).^[41]

Blum wrote that, from 1976 onwards, party members were transmitting intelligence reports members of left-wing organizations to the FBI and local police. In 1977, he wrote, commercial reports on U.S. anti-apartheid groups were prepared by LaRouche members for the South African government; student dissidents were reported to the Shah of Iran's Savak secret police; and the anti-nuclear movement was investigated on behalf of power companies. He also wrote that LaRouche was telling his membership several times a year that he was being targeted for assassination, including by the Queen, Zionist mobsters, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Justice Department, and the Mossad.^[42]

"Ego-stripping" and "brainwashing" allegations

According to The Washington Post, LaRouche began writing in 1973 about the use of certain psychological techniques on recruits. In "Beyond Psychoanalysis" (September/October 1973), he wrote that a worker's persona had to be stripped away to arrive at a state he called "little me," from which it would be possible, according to the newspaper, to "rebuild their personalities around a new socialist identity." To become politically potent, the newspaper wrote, his members had to "confront their sexual problems, such as their fear of and desire for their sadistic mothers."^[43]

The New York Times wrote that the first such session was in the summer of 1973, involving a German member, Konstantin George, who had left the movement to live in East Germany. When he returned, according to the newspaper, LaRouche said he discovered during a session with George that a plot to assassinate LaRouche had been implanted in George's mind. LaRouche recorded another of these "ego-stripping" sessions, as he called them, this time with a 26-year-old British LaRouche member, Chris White, who had moved to England with LaRouche's former partner, Carol Schnitzer. In December 1973, LaRouche asked the couple to return to the U.S. to attend a conference; White reportedly broke down during the flight, shouting that the CIA was planning to kill Schnitzer and LaRouche. LaRouche recorded the session that followed, and had his followers send the tape to The New York Times as evidence of an assassination plot. According to the Times, "[t]here are sounds of weeping, and vomiting on the tapes, and Mr. White complains of being deprived of sleep, food and cigarettes. At one point someone says 'raise the voltage,' but (LaRouche) says this was associated with the bright lights used in the questioning rather than an electric shock." During one session, the Times wrote, "Mr. White complains of a terrible pain in his arm," then LaRouche can be heard saying, 'That's not real. That's in the program'."^[44] White ended up confessing that he had been tortured and programmed by the CIA and British intelligence to kill Schnitzer, and to set up LaRouche for assassination by Cuban frogmen.^[45] LaRouche told the Times that White had not been mistreated and that a physician, Gene Inch, a LaRouche movement member, had been present throughout.^[46]

After the White incident, according to The Washington Post, "brainwashing hysteria" took hold of the movement; one activist said he attended meetings where members were writhing on the floor saying they needed de-programming.^[9] In two weeks in January 1974, the group issued 41 separate press releases about brainwashing.^[47] That month, one activist, Alice Weitzman, expressed skepticism about some of the claims. According to The New York Times, LaRouche sent six NCLC members to her apartment, where she was held captive for two days until she alerted a passer-by throwing a piece of paper out of her window asking for help. The members, who were charged with unlawful imprisonment, told police she had been brainwashed to help the KGB, and needed deprogramming. They were charged with unlawful imprisonment, but Weitzman was reluctant to testify and the charges were dismissed.^[48]

1974–1977: Presidential campaign, alleged harassment of public figures

LaRouche said he met with representatives of the Soviet Union at the United Nations in 1974 and 1975 to discuss attacks by the Communist Party USA on the NCLC, and to propose merging the former into the latter; he denied receiving any assistance from the Soviets.^[49] He made a presentation to a Baath Party conference in Baghdad in 1975 about his "Oasis Plan," a proposal for Arab-Israeli peace based on the construction of water projects; in the same year, New Solidarity began running articles favorable to Iraq, extensively quoting Saddam Hussein. ^{[citation needed]}

In March 1975, Clarence Kelley, director of the FBI, testified before the House Appropriations Committee that LaRouche's NCLC was "a violence-oriented organization of 'revolutionary socialists' with a membership of nearly 1,000 in chapters in some 50 cities." He said that during the previous two years its members had been "involved in fights, beatings, using drugs, kidnappings, brainwashings, and at least one shooting. They are reported to be armed, to have received defensive training such as karate, and to attend cadre schools and training schools to learn military tactics."^[50]

In 1976, LaRouche campaigned for the first time in a presidential election as a U.S. Labor Party candidate, polling 40,043 votes (0.05 percent). It was the first of eight presidential elections he took part in between 1976 and 2004, which enabled him to attract $5.9 million in federal matching funds; candidates seeking their party's presidential nomination qualify for matching funds if they raise $5,000 in each of at least 20 states. The Washington Post wrote in 2004 that LaRouche had never won more than 80,000 votes in any election cycle.^[51]

LaRouche's 1976 platform predicted financial disaster by 1980, and proposed a debt moratorium; nationalization of banks; government investment in industry especially in the aerospace sector, and an "International Development Bank" to facilitate higher food production.^[52] His campaign included a paid half-hour television address, which allowed him to air his views before a national audience, something that became a regular feature of his later campaigns. There were protests about this, and about the involvement of the NCLC in public life generally. William Chapman wrote in The Washington Post in September 1976 that LaRouche was asked how he expected a party with a five-year record of harassment and threats to win the election; he did not deny the incidents, but replied, "We are only engaged in an open political attack. We just want to challenge them in debate."^[53]

Chapman wrote that several public figures on the left had reported threats and intimidation, and said those responsible had identified themselves as members of LaRouche's NCLC or U.S. Labor Party. The linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky was accused of working for the CIA and being a tool of the Rockefellers; meetings he addressed were disrupted, and threats were made. The philosopher Paul Kurtz, editor of The Humanist, received phone calls at 4 am, and was asked during his lectures at the State University of New York why he was practicing genocide. According to Chapman, sociologists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, specialists on urban poverty, were followed around the country having their speaking tours disrupted, and Piven was almost pushed down a flight of stairs by someone calling her a fascist and CIA agent. Environmentalist Lester Brown, president of the Worldwatch Institute, was accused of genocide and told he would be hanged from a lamppost.^[53]

Writing in the Post in the same month, Stephen Rosenfeld said LaRouche's ideas belonged to the radical right, neo-Nazi fringe, and that his main interests lay in disruption and disinformation; Rosenfeld call the NCLC one of the "chief polluters" of political democracy. In addition to the allegations reported by Chapman, he cited a June 1976 article by Charles M. Young in Crawdaddy that said LaRouche members had attacked the SWP Party in Detroit, reportedly beating a paraplegic member with clubs. Rosenfeld argued that the press should be "chary" of offering them print or air time: "A duplicitous violence-prone group with fascistic proclivities should not be presented to the public, unless there is reason to present it in those terms." LaRouche wrote in 1999 that this comment had "openly declared... a policy of malicious lying" and was part of "the fraudulent hate-campaign" against him.^[54]

1977: Second marriage

LaRouche married again in 1977. His new wife, Helga Zepp, was a leading activist in the German branch of the movement. She went on to work closely with LaRouche for the rest of his career, standing for election in Germany in 1980 for his Europäische Arbeiterpartei (European Workers Party), and founding the Schiller Institute in Germany in 1984.^[55] Paul Kacprzak, who worked for LaRouche in the 70s, told The Washington Post that Zepp had a profound effect on the movement, and that it basically became a German organization. "We'd have classes in German," he told the newspaper. "They'd be teaching German language. We'd be reading German poetry." According to Kacprzak, LaRouche sent round a memo saying that, when he was elected president, his wedding anniversary would be a holiday and all workers would be given a week off.^[9]

Ideology: Plato, Aristotle, allegations of fascism, anti-Semitism

Template:Quote box4 According to the Heritage Foundation, LaRouche believed that a super elite was in control of world events, a group that included the Rockefellers, the British royal family, the Anti-Defamation League, the KGB, the National Review, and the Heritage Foundation itself.^[56] George Johnson wrote in The New York Times that LaRouche saw history as a battle between the Platonists, rationalists who believe in absolute truth, and the Aristotelians, empiricists for whom truth is uncertain. In LaRouche's view, according to Johnson, industry, technology, and classical music should be used to enlighten the world, whereas the Aristotelians use moral relativism, psychotherapy, drugs, rock music, jazz, environmentalism, and quantum theory to bring about a new dark age in which the world will be ruled by oligarchs.^[57] The conspirators may not be in contact with one another. "From their standpoint, [the conspirators] are proceeding by instinct," LaRouche said. "If you're asking how their policy is developed—if there is an inside group sitting down and making plans—no, it doesn't work that way ... History doesn't function quite that consciously."^[58]

In his Architects of Fear (1983), Johnson wrote that LaRouche's supporters saw themselves as on the side of Bach, Beethoven, Shakespeare, Leibniz, Roosevelt, Mohammed, and Jesus. Left and right were false distinctions for LaRouche; what mattered was the Platonic versus Aristotelian outlook, a position that Johnson said led LaRouche to form relationships with groups as disparate as farmers, nuclear engineers, Black Muslims, Teamsters, pro-lifers, and followers of the Ku Klux Klan—though Johnson also wrote that LaRouche counted the Klan itself among his foes. Other foes included the English empirical philosophers (Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume), Zionists, Nazis, Jesuits, Freemasons, Communists, Trilateralists, international bankers, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Socialist International—all supposedly controlled by the British—as well as Hitler, H.G. Wells, Jeremy Bentham, Voltaire, and the Beatles as representatives of the 1960s counterculture. After Johnson wrote a series of articles about LaRouche, his followers denounced him as part of a conspiracy of elitists that began in ancient Egypt.^[59]

From the mid-1970s onwards, the mainstream press and other commentators alleged that LaRouche had fascist and anti-Semitic tendencies.^[60] Paul Montgomery wrote in The New York Times that the charges dated to around 1976, when LaRouche's U.S. Labor Party began to include Zionist and Jewish groups in its stories about conspiracies. It started a campaign against the Anti-Defamation League of B'Nai Brith (ADL), which included setting up a group called "The Provisional Committee to Clean Up B'Nai Brith." Montgomery wrote that material sold by LaRouche organizers in airports and shopping centers included a book that said Jews dominated the drug trade with the help of Jewish bankers. This, despite the fact that the LaRouche movement had Jewish members who had been recruited from the 1960s student movement.^[32]

LaRouche maintained that he was anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic.^[32] When the ADL accused him of anti-Semitism in 1979, he filed a $26-million libel suit; Justice Michael Dontzin of the New York Supreme Court ruled that it was fair comment, and that the facts "reasonably give rise" to that description.^[61] LaRouche said in 1986 that descriptions of him as a neo-fascist or anti-Semite stemmed from "the drug lobby or the Soviet operation—which is sometimes the same thing," and in 2006 wrote that "[r]eligious and racial hatred, such as anti-Semitism, or hatred against Islam, or, hatred of Christians, is, on record of known history, the most evil expression of criminality to be seen on the planet today."^[62] Antony Lerman wrote that LaRouche used "the British" as a code for Jews, though Johnson argued that this failed to take into account that several members of LaRouche's inner circle were themselves Jewish.^[63] Daniel Pipes wrote in 1997 that LaRouche's references to the British really were to the British, though he agreed that an alleged British-Jewish alliance lay at the heart of LaRouche's conspiracism.^[64]

1980s

National Democratic Policy Committee

From the autumn of 1979, the LaRouche movement conducted most of its U.S. electoral activities as the National Democratic Policy Committee, which drew complaints from the Democrat Party's Democratic National Committee. Democrat Party leaders refused to recognize LaRouche as a party member, or to seat the few delegates he received in his seven primary campaigns as a Democrat.^[65] His campaign platforms included a return to the Bretton Woods system, including a gold-based national and world monetary system; fixed exchange rates; and ending the International Monetary Fund.^[66] He supported the replacement of the central bank system, including the U.S. Federal Reserve System, with a national bank;^[67] a war on drug trafficking and prosecution of banks involved in money laundering;^[68] building a tunnel under the Bering Strait; the building of nuclear power plants; and a crash program to build particle beam weapons and lasers, including support for elements of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). He opposed the Soviet Union and supported a military buildup to prepare for imminent war; supported the screening and quarantine of AIDS patients; and opposed environmentalism, outcome-based education, and abortion.^[69]

"October Surprise" theory

In December 1980, LaRouche and his followers started what came to be known as the "October Surprise" allegation, namely that in October 1980 Ronald Reagan's campaign staff had conspired with the Iranian government during the Iran hostage crisis to delay the release of 52 American hostages held in Iran, with the aim of helping Reagan win the 1980 presidential election against President Jimmy Carter. The Iranians had agreed to this, according to the theory, in exchange for future weapons sales from the Reagan administration. The first publication of the story was in LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review on December 2, 1980, followed by his New Solidarity on September 2, 1983, alleging that Henry Kissinger, one of LaRouche's regular targets, had met Iran's Ayatollah Beheshti in Paris, according to Iranian sources in Paris. Although ultimately discredited, the story was widely discussed in conspiracy circles during the 1980s and 1990s.^[70]

1982–1985: Meetings with world leaders

In 1982, LaRouche had private meetings with Mexican president José López Portillo and the late Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, maintaining frequent contact with the latter until her assassination in October 1984.^[71] George Johnson writes that LaRouche warned Portillo about attempts by international bankers to wreck the Mexican economy, meeting him under the auspices of LaRouche's National Democratic Policy Committee. Both the American Embassy and the Democratic Party issued disclaimers; a Mexican official told The New York Times that LaRouche had arranged the meeting by representing himself as a Democratic Party official.^[72] LaRouche also met President Raul Alfonsin of Argentina in the 1980s, and Turkish Prime Minister Turgut Özal in 1987. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Özal reprimanded his aides who had mistaken LaRouche for the Democratic Presidential candidate.^[73]

Strategic Defense Initiative

In the mid-1980s, the LaRouche campaign supported Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, known as "SDI" or "Star Wars." General Paul-Albert Scherer, a LaRouche supporter and former head of West German Military Counterintelligence, said in 1992 that LaRouche, whom he described as a "scientific-technological strategic expert," had been the originator of the SDI. Scherer also said LaRouche had been involved in backchannel communications between the Reagan administration and the Russian embassy, during the year before Reagan's announcement of the policy in March 1983.^[74] Physicist Edward Teller, a principal proponent of SDI and X-ray lasers, told reporters in 1984 that he had been courted by LaRouche, but had kept his distance. LaRouche began calling his plan the "LaRouche-Teller proposal," though they had never met. Teller said LaRouche was "a poorly informed man with fantastic conceptions."^[75] LaRouche later attributed the collapse of the Soviet Union to its refusal to follow his advice to accept Reagan's offer to share the technology.^[76]

1983: Move from New York to Loudoun County

The Washington Post wrote that LaRouche and his wife moved in August 1983 from New York to a 13-room Georgian mansion on a 250-acre section of the Woodburn Estate, near Leesburg, Loudoun County, Virginia. The property was owned at the time by a company registered in Switzlerland. Companies associated with LaRouche continued to buy property in the area, including part of Leesburg's industrial park, purchased by LaRouche's Lafayette/Leesburg Ltd. Partnership to develop a printing plant and office complex.^[77]

Neighbors said they saw LaRouche guards in camouflage clothes carrying semi-automatic weapons, and the Post wrote that the house had sandbag-buttressed guard posts nearby, along with metal spikes in the driveway and cement barriers on the road. One of his aides said LaRouche was safer in Loudoun County: "The terrorist organizations which have targeted Mr. LaRouche do not have bases of operations in Virginia." LaRouche said his new home meant a shorter commute to Washington. A former associate said the move also meant his members would be more isolated from friends and family than they had been in New York.^[77] According to the Post in 2004, local people who opposed him for any reason were accused in LaRouche publications of being commies, homosexual, drug pushers, and terrorists. He reportedly accused the Leesburg Garden Club of being a nest of Soviet sympathizers, and a local lawyer who opposed LaRouche on a zoning matter went into hiding after threatening phone calls and a death threat.^[9]

1984: Schiller Institute, television spots

In 1984, Helga Zepp-LaRouche founded the Schiller Institute in Germany, together with LaRouche, American Civil Rights Movement leader Amelia Boynton Robinson, and WWII French Resistance leader Marie-Madeleine Fourcade.^[78] In the same year, LaRouche was able to raise enough money to purchase 14 television spots, at a cost of $330,000 each, in which he called Walter Mondale—the Democratic Party's Presidential candidate—a Soviet agent of influence, triggering over 1,000 telephone complaints.^[79]

There was a report in November 1984 that LaRouche and his aides met Reagan administration officials, including Norman Bailey, senior director of international economic affairs for the National Security Council (NSC), and Richard Morris, special assistant to William P. Clark, Jr. There were also reported contacts with the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the CIA. The LaRouche campaign said the report was full of errors.^[80] According to Bailey, the contacts were broken off when they became public.^[81][82] Three years later, LaRouche blamed his criminal indictment on the NSC, saying he had been in conflict with Oliver North over LaRouche's opposition to the Nicaraguan Contras.^[83] According to a LaRouche publication, a court-ordered search of North's files produced a May 1986 telex from Iran-Contra defendant General Richard Secord, discussing the gathering of information to be used against LaRouche.^[84]

1984: NBC lawsuit

In January 1984 NBC's aired a segment on its Nightly News about LaRouche, and in March a "First Camera" report produced by Pat Lynch. In an article for the Columbia Journalism Review in 1985, Lynch wrote that the reports included the allegation that "LaRouche was the leader of a violence-prone, anti-Semitic cult that smeared its opponents and sued its critics."^[85] In interviews, former members of the movement gave details about their fundraising practices, and alleged that LaRouche had spoken about assassinating U.S. President Jimmy Carter. The reports said an investigation by the IRS would lead to an indictment, and quoted Irwin Suall, the Anti-Defamation League's (ADL) fact-finding director, who called LaRouche a "small-time Hitler." After the broadcast, according to The Washington Post, LaRouche members picketed NBC's New York office carrying signs saying "Lynch Pat Lynch," and the NBC switchboard said it received a death threat against her. Another NBC researcher said someone placed fliers around her parents' neighborhood saying she was running a call-girl ring from her parents' home.^[86] Lynch said LaRouche members began to impersonate her and her researchers in telephone calls, and called her "Fat Lynch" in its publications.^[85]

LaRouche filed a defamation suit against NBC and the ADL, arguing that the programs were the result of a deliberate campaign of defamation against him.^[87] The judge ruled that NBC need not reveal its sources, and LaRouche lost the case. NBC won a countersuit, the jury awarding the network $3 million in damages, later reduced to $258,459, for misuse of libel law, in what was called one of the more celebrated countersuits by a libel defendant.^[88] LaRouche failed to pay the damages, pleading poverty, which Federal District Judge Claude M. Hilton described as "completely lacking in credibility."^[89] LaRouche said he had been unaware since 1973 who paid the rent on the estate, or for his food, lodging, clothing, transportation, bodyguards, and lawyers. The judge fined him for failing to answer. After the judge signed an order to allow discovery of LaRouche's personal finances, a cashier's check was delivered to the court to end the case.^[90] When LaRouche appealed, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, rejecting his arguments, set forth a three-pronged test, later called the "LaRouche test," to decide when anonymous sources must be named in libel cases.^[91]

1985–1987: AIDS, electoral success

LaRouche met with Argentine President Raúl Alfonsín, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, and Mexican President José López Portillo in 1985.^[81] A Mexican official told The New York Times that LaRouche had arranged the meeting with Portillo by representing himself as a Democratic Party official.^[92] Portillo continued to maintain a relationship with LaRouche, and endorsed his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1999, according to the LaRouche movement in 2004.^[93] Turkish Prime Minister Turgut Özal reportedly met with LaRouche in 1987, then reprimanded his aides who had mistaken LaRouche for the Democratic Presidential candidate.^[94]

In 1986, LaRouche proposed that AIDS be added to California's List of Communicable Diseases. Sponsored by the "Prevent AIDS Now Initiative Committee" (PANIC), it came to be known as the "LaRouche Initiative." The proposal, Proposition 64, qualified for the California ballot in 1986, with the required signature gatherers mostly paid for by LaRouche's Campaigner Publications. Opponents said the measure could have required universal testing and the quarantine of infected individuals, while proponents denied this, arguing that it simply allowed for standard public health measures to be taken. It was defeated, reintroduced two years later, and defeated again. AIDS was a leading plank in LaRouche's platform during his 1988 presidential campaign. He vowed to quarantine its "aberrant" victims who are "guilty of bringing this pandemic upon us."^[95]

In March 1986, LaRouche NDPC candidates Mark Fairchild and Janice Hart won the Democratic primary for state-wide offices in Illinois, bringing LaRouche national attention.^[96] The New York Times wrote that Democratic Party officials were increasing their efforts to identify candidates affiliated with LaRouche in order to alert voters, and asked the LaRouche organization to release a full list of its candidates.^[97] The Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Adlai Stevenson III, withdrew his nomination rather than run on the same slate as LaRouche movement members. The LaRouche candidates lost in November.^[98] A month later, LaRouche held a press conference to accuse the Soviet government, British government, drug dealers, international bankers, and journalists of being involved in a variety of conspiracies.^[99] Flanked by bodyguards, he said, "If Abe Lincoln were alive, he'd probably be standing up here with me today," and that there was no criticism of him that did not originate "with the drug lobby or the Soviet operation ..." He said he had been in danger from Soviet assassins for over 13 years, and had to live in safe houses. He refused to answer a question from an NBC reporter, saying "How can I talk with a drug pusher like you?" He called the leadership of the United States "idiotic" and "berserk," and its foreign policy "criminal or insane." He warned of the imminent collapse of the banking system and accused banks of laundering drug money.^[100] Asked about the movement's finances, he said "I don't know. ... I'm not responsible, I'm not involved in that."^[101]

1988: Criminal conviction

In October 1986, hundreds of state and federal officers raided LaRouche offices in Virginia and Massachusetts. A federal grand jury indicted LaRouche and 12 associates on credit card fraud and obstruction of justice; the charges included that they had attempted to defraud people of millions of dollars, including several elderly people, by borrowing money they did not intend to repay. LaRouche at first warned law-enforcement officials not to arrest him, saying any attempt to do so would be an attempt to kill him; a spokesman would not rule out the use of violence against officials in response.^[102] LaRouche disputed the charges, alleging that the trials were politically motivated.^[103] A number of LaRouche entities, including the Fusion Energy Foundation, were taken over through an involuntary bankruptcy proceeding in 1987; the government's use of the sealed order was regarded as a rare legal maneuver.^[104]

On December 16, 1988, he was convicted of conspiracy to commit mail fraud involving more than $30 million in defaulted loans; 11 counts of actual mail fraud involving $294,000 in defaulted loans; and one count of conspiring to defraud the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. He was sentenced to fifteen years, but was released on January 26, 1994. The judge called his claim of a political vendetta "arrant nonsense," and said "the idea that this organization is a sufficient threat to anything that would warrant the government bringing a prosecution to silence them just defies human experience."^[105] Thirteen associates received terms ranging from one month to 77 years for mail fraud and conspiracy.^[103] Defense lawyers filed unsuccessful appeals that challenged the conduct of the grand jury, the contempt fines, the execution of the search warrants, and various trial procedures. At least ten appeals were heard by the United States Court of Appeals, and three by the U.S. Supreme Court. Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark joined the defense team for two appeals, writing that the case involved "a broader range of deliberate and systematic misconduct and abuse of power over a longer period of time in an effort to destroy a political movement and leader, than any other federal prosecution in my time or to my knowledge."^[106]

1990s

Imprisonment and release on parole

LaRouche began his jail sentence in 1989, serving it at the Federal Medical Center in Rochester, Minnesota. From there he ran for Congress in 1990, seeking to represent the 10th District of Virginia, but received less than one percent of the vote. He ran for President again in 1992 with James Bevel as his running mate, a civil rights activist who had represented the LaRouche movement in its pursuit of the Franklin child prostitution ring allegations. It was only the second-ever campaign for president from prison.^[107] For a time he shared a cell with televangelist Jim Bakker. Bakker later wrote of his astonishment at LaRouche's detailed knowledge of the Bible. According to Bakker, LaRouche received a daily intelligence report by mail, and at times had information about news events days before they happened. Bakker also wrote that LaRouche believed their cell was bugged. In Bakker's view, "to say LaRouche was a little paranoid would be like saying that the Titanic had a little leak."^[108]

LaRouche was released on parole in January 1994, and returned to Loudoun County. The Washington Post wrote that he would be supervised by parole and probation officers until January 2004.^[109] Also in 1994, his followers joined members of the Nation of Islam to condemn the Anti-Defamation League for its alleged crimes against African Americans, reportedly one of several such meetings since 1992.^[110] In 1996, LaRouche was invited to speak at a convention organized by the Nation of Islam's Louis Farrakhan and Ben Chavis, then of the National African American Leadership Summit. As soon as he began speaking, he was booed off the stage; one delegate said it was because of his actions against African Americans in the past.^[111]

In the 1996 Democratic presidential primaries, he received enough votes in Louisiana and Virginia to get one delegate from each state, but before the primaries began, the Democratic National Committee chair, Donald Fowler, ruled that LaRouche was not a "bona fide Democrat" because of his "expressed political beliefs ... which are explicitly racist and anti-Semitic," and because of his "past activities including exploitation of and defrauding contributors and voters." Fowler instructed state parties to disregard votes for LaRouche.^[112] In 1999, China's press agency, the Xinhua News Agency, reported that LaRouche had criticized the Cox Report, a congressional investigation that accused the Chinese of stealing U.S. nuclear weapons secrets; he called it "intrinsically fraudulent," and "a reflection of the kind of scientific illiteracy" of its writers.^[113] On October 13, 1999, during a press conference to announce his plans to run for president, he predicted the collapse of the world's financial system, stating, "There's nothing like it in this century.... it is systematic, and therefore, inevitable." He said the U.S. and other nations had built the "biggest financial bubble in all history," which was close to bankruptcy.^[114]

2000s

2000: Worldwide LaRouche Youth Movement

LaRouche founded the Worldwide LaRouche Youth Movement (WLYM) in 2000, saying in 2004 that it had hundreds of members in the U.S. and a lesser number overseas. During the Democratic primaries in June 2000, he received 53,280 votes, or 22 percent of the total, in Arkansas. In 2002, in a speech to the Zayed Center for Coordination and Follow-Up, he discussed his proposal for a "Eurasian landbridge". Afterwards, he said the September 11 attacks could not have taken place without connivance from someone inside the Bush administration. According to the Anti-Defamation League, he also referred during the question-and-answer session to "Jewish gangsters" and "Christian Zionists" who were "bought by money, the so-called Zionist money."^[115]

2003 Death of Jeremiah Duggan

LaRouche's movement came to international attention in March 2003 when Jeremiah Duggan, a British-Jewish student attending a LaRouche conference and cadre school in Wiesbaden, Germany, died after running down a motorway and being hit by several cars. The German authorities declared his death a suicide. A British coroner rejected a suicide verdict, and said Duggan had died while "in a state of terror." The family believes he died as a result of an attempt to recruit him; LaRouche said in 2006 that the allegations amounted to a press hoax. In May 2010, the High Court in London ordered a second inquest, which was opened and adjourned. The coroner passed evidence the family said it had collected to the Metropolitan Police's serious crime directorate, and invited the LaRouche organization to attend the inquest and view the evidence as an interested party.^[116]

LaRouche again entered the primary elections for the Democratic Party's nomination in 2004, setting a record for the number of consecutive presidential campaigns.^[117]

Overseas reception

Iqbal Qazwini wrote in the Arabic-language daily Asharq Al-Awsat in 2003 that LaRouche was one of the first to predict the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1988 and German unification. He said LaRouche had urged the West to pursue a policy of economic cooperation similar to the Marshall Plan for the advancement of the economy of the socialist countries. According to Qazwini, recent years have seen a proliferation of LaRouche's ideas in China and South Asia. Qazwini referred to him as the spiritual father of the revival of the new Silk Road or Eurasian Landbridge, which aims to link the continents through a network of ground transportation. In November 2005, an eight-part interview with LaRouche was published in the People's Daily of China, covering his economic forecasts, his battles with the American media, and his assessment of the neoconservatives. The interviewer wrote that LaRouche was "quite famous in mainland China today," and seemed to be better known overseas than in America.^[118]

Tatiana Shishov interviewed him for Russia Today in 2008, describing him as "the greatest American economist, a prominent politician, one of the first to struggle with the financial oligarchy and its major institutions—the World Bank and IMF. He has no equal in the field of economic and financial forecasts." LaRouche gave an interview in 2009 to China Youth Daily, which wrote that he had warned in July 2007 that unless the United States stopped monopolizing world finances, and united with China, Russia, and India to reorganize the world financial system, a new global credit crisis would be unavoidable.^[118]

2007: Death of Kenneth Kronberg

In April 2007, Kenneth Kronberg, a longtime associate of LaRouche and co-founder of the Schiller Institute's Fidelio magazine, committed suicide. Kronberg was president of LaRouche's PMR Printing Co. and World Composition Services Inc. in Sterling, Virginia. He was reported to be in arrears with tax payments, because groups within the movement were late with their payments for his services. On April 11, he leapt off an overpass shortly after seeing the movement's "morning briefing," a summary of material members are expected to read. The briefing attacked "baby boomers" like Kronberg, and singled his print shop out for criticism, adding, "The Boomers will be scared into becoming human, because you're in the real world, and they're not. Unless they want to commit suicide." Kronberg's widow filed suit against LaRouche and others in August 2009, saying they had libeled her by implying that her support for the re-election of George W. Bush drove her husband to suicide, and that she had committed perjury at LaRouche's trial in 1988 to help secure his conviction.^[119]

2008–2009: LaRouche on financial crisis and Obama

In 2008, LaRouche was credited by press in Italy as having forecast the financial crisis of 2007–2009. In December 2008, Ivo Caizzi of Corriere della Sera referred to him as "the guru politician who, since the nineties, has announced the crash of speculative finances and the need for a New Bretton Woods." The article said Italian Economics Minister Giulio Tremonti was "an attentive reader" of LaRouche's anti-Free Market and anti-Marxist writings. Italian Senator Oskar Peterlini, in a July 2009 speech before the Senate, called LaRouche an expert in the field who had predicted the crisis.^[120]

In 2009, during discussion of U.S. health care reform, LaRouche compared President Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler, and the proposed health-insurance reform to Hitler's Action T4 euthanasia program. He said Americans must "quickly and suddenly change the behavior of this president ... for no lesser reason than that your sister might not end up in somebody's gas oven." The movement printed pamphlets showing Obama and Hitler laughing together, and posters of Obama wearing a Hitler-style mustache. In Seattle, police were called twice in response to people threatening to tear the posters apart, or to assault the LaRouche supporters holding them. During one widely reported public meeting, Congressman Barney Frank referred to the posters as "vile, contemptible nonsense.^[121]

2010: Kesha Rogers election win

In 2010, Kesha Rogers, a member of the LaRouche Youth Movement, won the Democratic Party primary election in Texas's congressional district with 7,467 votes (53 percent). Time magazine wrote that she was seen during the campaign carrying one of the movement's portraits of Obama with a Hitler mustache, and campaigned to "Save NASA. Impeach Obama." She supported colonizing the moon and Mars, using the slogan, "I will take our troops out of the war zone and put them into space!" She opposed Obama's dismantling of the space program, his healthcare reforms, the bailouts for Wall Street, and budget cuts that she said would increase death rates among the poor, sick, and elderly, and said she was leading a war against the British empire. Time wrote that the state's Democratic Party adopted a resolution denying support for Rogers, citing the LaRouche movement's alleged racism and discriminatory views, allegations that Rogers, an African-American, rejected. Party officials struck district 22 from its online list of congressional races. However, the chairman of the Harris County Democratic Party in Houston conceded that much of LaRouche's economic thinking is similar to that of Franklin D. Roosevelt, citing investment in public works, separating commercial from investment banking and opposition to corporatism. He expressed the hope that the LaRouchites could turn out more young people to vote for Democrats.^[122]

Selected works

Notes

References

Books or chapters about LaRouche

Books (general)

News articles

Journal and other papers, records

LaRouche publications

Further reading

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