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This article is a biographical article about LaRouche. For a discussion of LaRouche's political views, see political views of Lyndon LaRouche.

Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Jr. (born September 8, 1922), American political activist, leads political organizations in the United States and other countries. Although he has no formal qualifications, he has written extensively on economic as well as political subjects. He is a perennial candidate for President of the United States, having set a record for most consecutive attempts at the office by running eight times. However, he has never gained significant electoral support.

LaRouche is probably the best-known exponent of conspiracy theories in the United States. He is frequently described as an extremist or a cult leader, and is accused of being a fascist and anti-Semite. He denies these charges, and his followers regard him as a major political figure.

In 1988 LaRouche was sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment for conspiracy, mail fraud and tax code violations.

Early life

LaRouche, the son of Lyndon H. LaRouche, Sr. and Jessie Weir LaRouche, was born in Rochester, New Hampshire and grew up in Lynn, Massachusetts, where his father, an immigrant from Quebec, was a shoe salesman. He was raised as a Quaker and besides speaking English grew up speaking French and German as well. He enrolled at Northeastern University in Boston, but dropped out in 1942. As a Quaker, he was at first a conscientious objector during World War II, but in 1944 he joined the United States Army, serving in medical units in Indiaand Burma. During this period he read works by Karl Marx and was converted to Marxism. While travelling home from India on the troop ship SS General Bradley in 1946, he met Don Merrill, a fellow soldier, who was also from Lynn. Merrill won LaRouche to Trotskyism on the journey home. Back in the United States, LaRouche attempted to resume his university education, but again dropped out of Northeastern.

LaRouche and Trotskyism

In 1948, after returning to Lynn after dropping out of college, LaRouche began attending meetings of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP)'s Lynn branch. He joined the party the next year, adopting the pseudonym Lyn Marcus for his political work.

In line with the SWP's policy of "proletarianizing" their members, LaRouche obtained work at a General Electric factory in Lynn. In 1952 he was fired from his job for absenteeism. Twenty years later, LaRouche said of this period (which Fred Newman describes as a "nervous breakdown" ) that he went through a serious period of introspection which involved:

stripping away all the layers of my persona, like an onion. If you take this far enough, you get to the point where you become terrified that there's nothing inside all the peelings-that you're a nobody. This put me in a suicidal state. It was only my tremendous ego-strength, which my parents had provided me, that saved me from suicide.

Following his recovery, LaRouche obtained work as a management consultant in New York City including, paradoxically for a Marxist, advising companies on how to use computers to maximise efficiency and speed-up production. In 1954 he married fellow SWP member Janice Neuberger. By 1961, LaRouche's lived in a large apartment on Central Park West. His activity in the internal life of the SWP was minimal due to his preoccupation with his career.

LaRouche remained in the SWP until his expulsion in 1965. He now maintains that he was soon disillusioned with Marxism, dropped out of the SWP in the mid-1950s, and only resumed his activism at the prompting of the FBI citing national security concerns. In a recent interview on the Pacifica Radio network, LaRouche claims that he returned to the SWP because he believed that only the Left was likely to combat what he calls the "utopian" danger coming from the Right, typified by the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War. His ex-wife and other SWP members from that time dispute this. During these years LaRouche developed his interests in economics, cybernetics, psychoanalysis, business management and other subjects. Janice left him in 1963 (they had one son, Daniel, born in 1956) and, in the late 1960s, she became a leader of the New York City branch of the National Organization of Women.

In 1964 LaRouche, while still in the SWP, became a supporter of a faction called the Revolutionary Tendency, which had been expelled from the party and was under the influence of the British Trotskyist leader Gerry Healy who was leader of the British Socialist Labour League.Those familiar with the left in this period believe that LaRouche was heavily influenced by Healy's catastrophism. For six months he worked closely with American Healyite leader Tim Wohlforth who later wrote:

LaRouche had a gargantuan ego. Convinced he was a genius, he combined his strong conviction in his own abilities with an arrogance expressed in the cadences of upper-class New England. He assumed that the comment in the Communist Manifesto that "a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class..." was written specifically for him. And he believed that the working class was lucky to obtain his services.

LaRouche possessed 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. It was contradictory. His explanations were a bit too pat, and his mind worked so quickly that I always suspected his bravado covered over superficiality. He had an answer for everything. Sessions with him reminded me of a parlor game: present a problem, no matter how petty, and without so much as blinking his eye, LaRouche would dream up the solution.

In 1965, LaRouche left Wohlforth's group and joined the Spartacist League which had split with Wohlforth. He left after a few months and wrote a letter to the SWP declaring that all factions and sections of the Trotskyist Fourth International were dead, and announcing that he and his new common-law wife, Carol Larrabee (also known as Carol Schnitzer), were going to build the Fifth International.

In 1966, the couple joined the New Left Committee for Independent Political Action and formed a branch in New York's West Village. He began giving classes for the New York Free School on "dialectical materialism" and attracted around him a group of graduate students from Columbia University many of whom were involved with the Maoist Progressive Labor (PL) group which was itself very prominent in the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). LaRouche claims in the 1988 version of his autobiography that he was not really a Marxist when he gave his lecture at the Free School but merely used his familiarity with Marxism as a "passport" in order to win students away from the New Left counterculture which, he claims, was financed for nefarious purposes by the Ford Foundation.

LaRouche's movement was heavily involved in the 1968 student strike and occupation of Columbia and was able to win control of the university's SDS and PL branches by putting forward a political program linking student struggles with those of Blacks in Harlem. His growing following allowed him to create a third tendency within the SDS competing with the two dominant tendencies, the "Action Faction" led by Mark Rudd (which soon became the Weather Underground) and the "Praxis Axis" which saw students as the vanguard of the revolution. LaRouche organised his faction as the "SDS Labor Committee". He criticized SDS, and the New Left in general, for being too oriented toward the counterculture and not enough toward labor. He held meetings in the Columbia area. Wohlforth attended one and writes:

Twenty to 30 students would gather in a large apartment and sit on the floor surrounding LaRouche, who now sported a very shaggy beard. The meeting would sometimes go on as long as seven hours. It was difficult to tell where discussions of tactics left off and educational presentation began. Encouraging the students, LaRouche gave them esoteric assignments, such as searching through the writings of Georges Sorel to discover Rudd's anarchistic origins, or studying Rosa Luxemburg's The Accumulation of Capital. Since SDS was strong on spirit and action but rather bereft of theory, the students appeared to thoroughly enjoy this work.

LaRouche and the NCLC

After its expulsion from the SDS in 1969 the SDS Labor Committee became the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC).

Despite its name the NCLC had no significant connection with the labor movement and viewed intellectuals as the revolutionary vanguard rather than workers whom the intellectuals were to lead.

Initially, the NCLC had a relatively open internal regime in which debates would ensue about the proper course for the group. As the founder of the group and as the most "experienced" member being a generation older than the rest of the group, LaRouche was the group's leading authority and had the title of "Chairman". Following the breakup of the SDS and the decline of the student movement, a factional debate broke out within the NCLC between younger members at Columbia and City College such as Tony Papert and other ex-PLers who argued for an activist approach around local issues and a faction of more experienced members such as LaRouche and his closest followers such as Ed Spannus and Nancy Spannus who argued for a turn towards theory and study. In January 1970 Papert and Steven Fraser, another ex-PLer, proposed orienting the NCLC towards the emerging ecological movement in the United States. A faction fight broke out between LaRouche and his followers and the Fraser-Papert tendency which the LaRouchians dubbed "the Bavarians".

LaRouche and his "Positive Political Tendency" accused "the Bavarians" of being too loose and "ultra-democratic" resisting the need to tighten up the NCLC from a federation of chapters into a disciplined cadre organization.

LaRouche suspended Fraser from the NCLC's executive committee. Papert defected from Fraser's tendency and joined LaRouche. Ultimately, LaRouche had Fraser and his followers expelled from the NCLC for "factionalism". This allowed LaRouche to strengthen his hegemony over the movement and brought to an end any serious possibility of a political or organizational challenge to LaRouche emerging from within the NCLC. The expulsion of Fraser also removed the only serious intellectual rival to LaRouche.

According to Dennis King, NCLC's internal life became more regimented. Members gave up their jobs and private lives and became entirely devoted to the group and its leader. The LaRouche organization developed an internal discipline technique, called "ego stripping," which reinforced conformity and loyalty to LaRouche.

The Move Away from Marxism

According to articles in the Village Voice and other publications, under LaRouche's direction the NCLC adopted violent and disruptive tactics, physically attacking meetings of the Communist Party and later of the SWP and other groups, who were classed by LaRouche as "left-protofascists." "Operation Mop-Up" began with LaRouche's declaration that ""We must take hegemony from the CP-from here on in, the CP cannot hold a meeting on the East Coast. We'll mop them up in two months." NCLC members engaged in a series of well-documented beatings of members of the Communist Party . According to Dennis King, some ex-NCLC members who left the group at this time say that LaRouche was studying the career of Adolf Hitler and consciously adopting the tactics of the early Nazi Party.

The NCLC claimed that they acted in self-defense, even though all other accounts say that it was the NCLC that initiated the violence. LaRouche supporters claim that a document obtained through the Freedom of Information Act shows that the FBI encouraged the CPUSA to attack the NCLC. According to a court judge who reviewed classified FBI files as part of an unrelated lawsuit by the Socialist Workers Party against the US government, the FBI sent the NCLC a list of SWP members and their home addresses, presumably in the hope that the NCLC would attack these individuals.

By the 1980s readings of Marx and Lenin were off the reading list of LaRouche's followers, to be replaced by texts by Alexander Hamilton, Friedrich Schiller and Plato. LaRouche had became a strong advocate of nuclear energy and ballistic missile defense. LaRouche maintains that it was his version of the policy that was later adopted by Reagan, as the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). He also claims that he posed the policy as a means for ending adherence to the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (M.A.D.), and also as a science driver to rejuvenate the industrial economies of both the East and West blocs. Despite having become a registered Democrat LaRouche was harshly critical of Jimmy Carter in the November 1980 election.

The NCLC engaged in activity such as defending alleged Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk (who was acquitted by the Supreme Court of Israel) and associating with the far-right Liberty Lobby (documented by researcher Scott McLemee). The New York Supreme Court ruled that it is "fair comment" to describe LaRouche as an anti-Semite.

The LaRouche organization opposed the Reagan administration's support for Great Britain in the Falklands-Malvinas War, arguing that Reagan's policy was in violation of the Monroe Doctrine. LaRouche also strongly opposed the Reagan Administration's arming of the Nicaraguan Contras. The group also opposed the zero-growth policies of the Club of Rome and formed a countergroup named "Club of Life" on the issue. In its 2004 assessment of presidential candidates the National Right to Life Committee gave him a grade of 75% and declared that LaRouche is "pro-life in every way (against euthanasia, capital punishment, etc)".

In the 1980s LaRouche launched the Proposition 64 initiative in California which would have placed AIDS back on the State List of Communicable Diseases subject to Public Health law. Opponents claimed that the measure could have instituted quarantines and sexual contact tracing.

LaRouche has opposed the United Nations and other international organizations in cases where he says they interfere with the concept of the Westphalian state and the Platonic ideal of a "perfectly sovereign nation-state republic". This holds especially true for their conduct toward the nations of the Third World, where LaRouche argues that they practice neocolonialism.

Berlet claims that the shift in the NCLC's politics and the change in its internal regime was prompted by a personal crisis in LaRouche's life which led to his having a nervous breakdown.

Biographical issues

In 1971, LaRouche organized the New Solidarity International Press Service as a wire service for his publications. In 1974, he founded the weekly Executive Intelligence Review, of which he is Contributing Editor. He co-founded (1974) of the Fusion Energy Foundation, and participated in the founding of the Schiller Institute (1984) with his current wife, Helga Zepp-LaRouche.

He has written numerous articles, pamphlets, and books published mostly by his own press. These include his autobiography The Power of Reason (1980), There Are No Limits to Growth (1983) and a second autobiography, The Power of Reason 1988. His 1984 textbook, So, You Wish To Learn All About Economics, circulates internationally in several languages as does his 1991 The Science of Christian Economy.

Separating fact from fiction in LaRouche's biography is made difficult by the barrages of conflicting propaganda generated both by LaRouche and his critics (see Political views of Lyndon LaRouche/LaRouche's critics.) According to LaRouche's supporters he developed his ideas in the 1950s and has advocated them consistently ever since. His followers claim he is a respected economist and commentator on world affairs. He is credited with pioneering such ideas as the International Development Bank, the Strategic Defense Initiative or "Star Wars," and the so-called Eurasian Land-Bridge. It has been claimed that he regularly meets with world leaders and that they listen respectfully to his ideas. It also claimed that he was used by the Reagan administration as a "back-channel" for negotiations with the Soviet Union.

LaRouche has had some contacts with low-level officials of the Reagan Administration. Between 1981 and 1985 LaRouche met with Norman Bailey, then a member of the National Security Council (NSC), and with some other NSC and Central Intelligence Agency officials. This followed a concerted campaign by LaRouche to develop close relations with the Reagan Administration. Bailey later said that LaRouche was able to provide him with useful information, gathered by LaRouche's network of affiliates in many countries, but other intelligence officials deny the Administration gained any useful intelligence from LaRouche. The contacts between LaRouche and the administration ended after protests from former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and other prominent Republicans.

LaRouche has also had contact with some foreign leaders. On May 23, 1982, he met with Mexican President José Lopez Portillo, and advised him to suspend foreign debt payments (which was done in August 1982), and to declare exchange controls and nationalize Mexico's banks (done in September 1982). Years later, on December 1, 1998, while sharing the podium with Helga Zepp-LaRouche before a meeting of the Mexican Society of Geography and Statistics in Mexico City, former President Lopez Portillo said "It is now necessary for the world to listen to the wise words of Lyndon LaRouche."

In 1974 a former member of LaRouche's U.S. Labor Party, Gregory Rose, published an article in National Review alleging that LaRouche had established contacts with Palestinian terrorist organisations such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and also with the Iraqi mission to the United Nations in New York. These contacts culminated in LaRouche's visit to Baghdad in 1975, during which he made a presentation to the Baath Party conference on the topic of his "Oasis Plan," a proposal for Arab-Israeli peace based on the joint construction of massive water projects. During 1975 LaRouche's newspaper New Solidarity began running articles favourable to Iraq, and extensively quoting Saddam Hussein, at that time Iraq's vice-president. Rose also alleged that LaRouche at this time was in contact with Soviet diplomats.

The only substantial biography of LaRouche is Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism, by Dennis King (Doubleday, 1989). King is not a historian or a political scientist, and his book is avowedly hostile to LaRouche. King's thesis is that LaRouche is both a fascist and an anti-Semite (although expressing these views in coded language), and that his organization is the spearhead of a dangerous "new American fascism." LaRouche polemicists have made much of the fact that King received funding from the conservative Smith-Richardson Foundation to write the book, but there has been no clear demonstration that this funding influenced the content of the book.

Presidential bids

From the late 1970s to the present, LaRouche has pursued a dual strategy. He has continued to promote his apocalyptic conspiracy theories and to make regular predictions of imminent economic catastrophe. At the same time he has sought to enter the political mainstream by contesting elections and primary elections. In 1971 he founded the U.S. Labor Party as a vehicle for electoral politics, but this achieved no success and was wound up in 1979. In 1976 he ran for President of the United States as a U.S. Labor Party candidate, polling 40,043 votes (0.05%).

Since 1979, LaRouche and his supporters have also conducted some of their activities within framework of the Democratic Party. In 1979, Larouche formed a Political Action Committee called the National Democratic Policy Committee (NDPC), a name that many regard as being designed to convey the impression that it is an official part of the Democratic Party. LaRouche has run for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States seven times, beginning in 1980. His current Political Action Committee is called "LaRouche PAC."

The Democratic National Committee asserts that LaRouche is not a Democrat, but the U.S. electoral system makes it impossible for the party to prevent LaRouche followers entering Democratic primaries. LaRouche himself has polled negligible vote totals, but continues to promote himself as a serious political candidate. In 1999, however, a court ruled that the Democratic National Committee had the right to keep LaRouche from electing delegates to the Democratic National Convention, based on a party requirement that a Democratic nominee must be a registered voter. LaRouche, as a convicted felon, is not eligible to be a registered voter in the state of Virginia, where he lives.

Some of LaRouche's followers have achieved moderate electoral success in Democratic primaries for lesser offices, and have even occasionally won them. The best known example was in 1986, when two LaRouche candidates, Janice Hart and Mark Fairchild, won the Democratic primary elections for the posts of Secretary of State and Lieutenant-Governor of Illinois. The Democratic gubernatorial candidate, former Senator Adlai Stevenson III, refused to run on the same ticket as Fairchild and formed the Solidarity Party for the election. Fairchild's victory was attributed to low voter turnout and a poor "regular" candidate, but may have also reflected some genuine (if transient) support for LaRouche's anti-establishment message. NDPC candidates have won several other Democratic primaries in various states, but LaRouche's organization has never succeeded in entering the mainstream.

For more information see Lyndon LaRouche U.S. Presidential campaigns

Criminal conviction

By the 1980s LaRouche and Helga Zepp-LaRouche had built a extensive political network, including the Schiller Institute in Germany, headed by Zepp-LaRouche, and branches in several other countries. The size of the LaRouche empire led to investigations of the source of its apparently extensive financial resources. The LaRouche organisation devotes much of its energy to the sale of literature and the soliciting of small donations at airports and on university campuses. It also solicits donations by phone. LaRouche was accused of fraudulently soliciting "loans" from vulnerable elderly people.

In October 1986 the FBI and Virginia state authorities raided the LaRouche headquarters in Leesburg in search of evidence to support the persistent accusations of fraud and extortion made against LaRouche. He and six associates were charged with conspiracy and mail fraud, and LaRouche was also charged with conspiring to hide his personal income since 1979, the last year he had filed a federal tax return. In December 1988 a federal jury in Alexandria, Virginia convicted LaRouche and his associates, and LaRouche was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, of which he served five.

LaRouche and his associates maintained their innocence. After the release of LaRouche from prison, full page advertisements paid for by the LaRouche organization appeared in papers such as the New York Times and Washington Post (see text of the statement.) The statement was endorsed by a number of prominent individuals from around the world (partial list) and called for LaRouche to be exonerated. LaRouche's supporters maintain that a worldwide conspiracy framed him, and that this conspiracy has attempted to execute him at least three times.

• For more information on the case see United States v. LaRouche

Recent events

Upon being released from prison in early 1994, LaRouche immediately resumed his political activity, concentrating much of his attention on Third World nations. He was invited to Brazil by members of the city council of Sao Paolo, and made an honorary citizen of that city on June 12 of that year. In 2001 and 2003 he toured India, speaking at various conferences and university seminars. He has also traveled to Russia, where on several different occasions he has addressed both the Duma and the Russian Academy of Sciences.

He and his movement opposed the US invasion of Iraq. LaRouche recently described China as having "probably one of the best governments in the world today, in terms of quality of leadership, the kind of leadership required to get through a crisis," because of its government's policy of grand infrastructure projects.

LaRouche entered the primary elections for the Democratic Party's nomination in 2004, even though as a convicted felon he is not permitted to vote. The Democratic Party did not consider his candidacy to be legitimate and ruled him ineligible to win delegates. LaRouche gained negligible electoral support.

LaRouche was present in Boston during the 2004 Democratic National Convention but did not attend the convention itself. He held a media conference in which he declared his support for John Kerry and pledged to mobilize his organization to help defeat George W. Bush in the November presidential election. He also waged a campaign, begun in October 2002 , to have Dick Cheney resign, or be dumped from the Republican ticket.

Perhaps the most significant change in the LaRouche organization since LaRouche was released from prison has been the development of the "LaRouche Youth Movement" (LYM) beginning in 1999. The recruitment of young people in the 18-25 year old age bracket has reportedly brought more members into the Larouche organization than at any time in the past.

See also

• North American Labour Party
• Party for the Commonwealth of Canada
• Citizens Electoral Council (Australia)
• LaRouche Youth Movement

External links

• Executive Intelligence Review: LaRouche Publications
• Schiller Institute
• Twenty First Century Science and Technology -- LaRouche-affiliated Science organization
• The Cult Controversy includes a 1995 series on LaRouche by John Mintz and links to other Washington Post articles on LaRouche
• The cult and the candidate by Terry Kirby, July 2004 (The Independent of London)
• The Bizarre Case of Baroness Symons - LaRouche response to Independent article
• Larouche Exposed - Pasadena City College
• Articles about LaRouche from Public Research Associates by Chip Berlet
• Partners in Bigotry: The LaRouche Cult and the Nation of Islam by Nizkor Project
• Lyndon Larouche/Executive Intelligence Review Series of articles from the Rick A. Ross Institute for the Study of Destructive Cults
• Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism ~ Review of Dennis King's book
• Lyndon LaRouche - Disinfopedia article
• Pre-1990 Larouche quotes, from primary-source documents
• LaRouche: Sex Maniac & Demagogue by Clara Fraser, a former colleague of LaRouche in his Trotskyist days - reproduced in the second part of this email to the Marxmail e-list.
• True History of Lyn Marcus (Lyndon LaRouche) and the Labor Committees 1975 article published by the International Workers Party whose members joined LaRouche's NCLC for a period in the early 1970s.
• Lyndon LaRouche: Fascist Demagogue: A '60's Socialist Takes a Hard Right by Tim Wohlforth who worked closely with LaRouche in 1964 and 1965 and also observed him afterwards.