Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Weed Harper (talk | contribs) at 22:16, 20 January 2005 (→Recent events: another broken link). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

The neutrality of this article is disputed. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. Please do not remove this message until conditions to do so are met. (Learn how and when to remove this message)

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) is an American political activist who leads political organizations in the United States and other countries. 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 and his followers have never gained significant electoral support. Although he has no formal qualifications, he has written extensively on economic, scientific, political, and cultural topics, and is noted as a theorist of conspiracies.

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. He is regarded by his followers as a brilliant and unfairly persecuted individual.

In 1988 LaRouche was sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment for conspiracy, mail fraud, and tax code violations. He continued his political activities from behind bars. He was released in 1994 on parole after having served five years.

As of 2003, he acts as director and contributing editor of the Executive Intelligence Review News Service, which is controlled by the LaRouche movement.

v t e LaRouche movement
History	Lyndon LaRouche Views of Lyndon LaRouche Lyndon LaRouche U.S. presidential campaigns California Proposition 64 (1986) LaRouche criminal trials
Active organizations	Australian Citizens Party Bürgerrechtsbewegung Solidarität European Workers Party Executive Intelligence Review LaRouche movement National Caucus of Labor Committees Schiller Institute Worldwide LaRouche Youth Movement
Defunct organizations	Curtin Labor Alliance Fusion Energy Foundation North American Labour Party Party for the Commonwealth of Canada U.S. Labor Party
Members	Robert Beltran Adrian Bennett James Bevel Michael Billington Amelia Boynton Robinson Norbert Brainin Anton Chaitkin Jacques Cheminade Billy Davis Sergey Glazyev Paul Goldstein Janice Hart Hulan Jack Kenneth Kronberg Stanislav Menshikov Theo Mitchell Robert James Moon Kesha Rogers Nataliya Vitrenko William Warfield Frederick Wills Helga Zepp-LaRouche
Members who separated from the movement	Nicholas F. Benton Robert Dreyfuss F. William Engdahl David P. Goldman Laurent Murawiec Webster Tarpley
Critics	Chip Berlet Daniel Patrick Moynihan John Rees
Related persons	Jeremiah Duggan Daniel Estulin Erik R. Fleming Roy Frankhouser Victor Gunnarsson Zbigniew Jaworowski Gordon M. Johnson Karen Kwiatkowski Eric Lerner Fred Newman Friedwardt Winterberg J. L. Chestnut
Wikiquote Wikimedia Commons

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 grew up speaking French and German, as well as English. 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 India and Burma. During this period, he read works by Karl Marx and became a Marxist. 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, LaRouche returned to Lynn after dropping out of college and 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.

LaRouche obtained work as a management consultant in New York City, which included 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, the LaRouches 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 an 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, while still in the SWP, LaRouche 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, 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, LaRouche 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, itself very prominent in the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). In the 1988 version of his autobiography, LaRouche writes that he was not really a Marxist when he gave his lecture at the Free School, but that he 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 organized 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, it had no significant connection with the labor movement and viewed intellectuals as the revolutionary vanguard, rather than workers who were to led by the intellectuals.

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

Conflicts with the Left

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." NCLC members allegedly engaged in a series of physical assaults on members of the Communist Party, called "Operation Mop-up." 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 writes that "the FBI was orchestrating its assets in the leadership of the Communist Party U.S.A., to bring about my personal 'elimination',", citing a document obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

Some of LaRouche's most outspoken opponents are to be found among those who remained in the Left, after LaRouche and his followers had departed it. According to Tim Wohlforth and Dennis Tourish:

The parallel between LaRouche's thinking and that of the classical fascist model is striking. LaRouche, like Mussolini and Hitler before him, borrowed from Marx yet changed his theories fundamentally. Most important, Marx's internationalist outlook was abandoned in favor of a narrow nation-state perspective. Marx's goal of abolishing capitalism was replaced by the model of a totalitarian state that directs an economy where ownership of the means of production is still largely in public hands. The corporations and their owners remain in place but have to take their orders from LaRouche. Hitler called the schema "national socialism". LaRouche hopes the term "the American system" will be more acceptable."

Whether or not LaRouche has ever called for a political arrangement similar to fascism is disputed.

LaRouche asserts that much of the hostile characterizations of LaRouche and his ideas that came during this period was the result of a coordinated attack on the LaRouche movement, in conjunction with an FBI program named COINTELPRO. This is an excerpt from an interview conducted by LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review with former Minnesota Senator and Democratic Presidential Candidate Eugene McCarthy, on April 10, 2004 :

EIR: Can't the Democratic Party be changed, in the way you tried to change it in 1968, and Lyn is trying to change it now?.

McCarthy: I would hope so, but I doubt it. After 1968, the great fear of the Establishment was that a President might be elected on the basis of a political dialogue of the American people. There was great psychological warfare against me. You know there was great psychological warfare against Lyn.

New policy directions

By the mid-1970s, LaRouche and his movement were no longer promoting a socialist agenda. 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. A key factor in the shift may be found in the published articles of NCLC Executive Committee member Allen Salisbury on Henry Carey and the American System school of political economy, culminating in his book, The Civil War and the American System. The LaRouche organization, after some deliberation and dissent, adopted Salisbury's thesis, that the American System approach was different from, and superior to, either Marxism or Laissez-faire capitalism, and the organization's publications rapidly reflected this re-assessment. Another book was published, a collection of source documents entitled The Political Economy of the American Revolution.

LaRouche became a strong advocate of nuclear energy and directed energy technologies for ballistic missile defense. He 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. ("Fair Comment," under rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court, means that to protect free speech, statements made about a public person, even though untrue and harmful, are fair comment unless the victim can prove the opinions were stated maliciously.)

The LaRouche organization opposed the Reagan Administration's support for 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 LaRouche a grade of 75% and declared that he 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 that state's List of Communicable Diseases subject to Public Health law. Opponents claimed that the measure could have instituted quarantines and sexual contact tracing. After its defeat in 1986 it was reintroduced two years later and again defeated.

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 practise neocolonialism.

LaRouche and Classical culture

LaRouche frequently recounts an incident which took place during his wartime service:

Later, as a young man, shortly after the close of World War II, I first heard a recorded performance by conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, while I was stationed temporarily at an army camp outside Calcutta, India. My recognition of the qualitative superiority of Furtwängler's conducting, an effect which I later identified with his use of the phrase "playing between the notes," had a profound impact, in its contribution to shaping my view of Classical artistic composition in general.

Central to LaRouche's theory of economics (see Political views of Lyndon LaRouche) is the idea that there are certain higher mental capacities, associated with hypothesis formation, that are the essential topic of study in economics, and LaRouche came to believe that classical art, and in particular classical music, provided the most useful domain in which to investigate these capacities. Consequently, classical music has played a central role in the history of LaRouche and his movement, and brought LaRouche into a collaborative relationship with artists such as Norbert Brainin and William Warfield.

LaRouche often disparages the counterculture. In 1978, he wrote that "The Beatles had no genuine musical talent, but were a product shaped according to British Psychological Warfare Division (Tavistock) specifications, and promoted in Britain by agencies which are controlled by British intelligence." ("Why Your Child Became A Drug Addict," Campaigner Special Report, 1978).

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. Former Reagan advisor and National Security Council senior analyst, Dr. Norman Bailey, has said that the LaRouche network was "one of the best private intelligence services in the world." In 1974, LaRouche co-founded the Fusion Energy Foundation and, in 1984, participated in the founding of the Schiller Institute 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 accounts generated by the LaRouche movement and its critics (see Dennis King and Chip Berlet.) LaRouche writes in his autobiography that he developed his ideas in the 1950s and has advocated them consistently ever since. He claims to have pioneered such ideas as the International Development Bank, the Strategic Defense Initiative or "Star Wars," and the so-called Eurasian Land-Bridge. It also claimed that he was used by the Reagan administration as a "back-channel" for negotiations with the Soviet Union.

According to a speech made by LaRouche science advisor Paul Gallagher, LaRouche and his representatives met with Reagan administration Energy Secretary Donald Hodel, Interior Secretary James Watt, Science Adviser Dr. George Keyworth, and State Department official Richard Morris in early 1981. Gallagher also claims that later that year Lyndon and Helga Zepp-LaRouche met with CIA Deputy Director Bobby Ray Inman, and cites the following remarks, made in early 1993 at the National Press Club by former head of German Military Intelligence, Gen. Paul-Albert Scherer:

"In the Spring of 1982 here in the Soviet Embassy there were very important secret talks that were held.... The question was: Did the United States and the Soviet Union wish jointly to develop an anti-ballistic missile defense that would have made nuclear war impossible? Then, in August, you had this very sharp Soviet rejection of the entire idea.... I have discussed this thoroughly with the developer, the originator of this idea, who is the scientific-technological strategic expert, Lyndon LaRouche. The rejection came in August, and at that point the American President Reagan decided to push this entire thing out into the public eye, so he made his speech of March 1983."

Press Conference at the National Press Club, Washington, DC., May 6, 1992; video of Scherer's remarks was broadcast on the "LaRouche Connection" cable TV program throughout the U.S.

In his book, Dennis King identifies Scherer as a long-time LaRouche supporter.

According to the Berlet/Bellman report for PRA, "New Right military specialist, retired General Daniel O. Graham, says LaRouche followers have significantly hampered his work. Graham, Director of Project High Frontier which supports and helped develop President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative plan for anti-missile defense, says the LaRouche groups have 'caused a lot of problems by adopting our issue in an effort to sieze credit for the idea.' 'They also mounted a furious attack on me personally,' says Graham. 'Even today I get mail asking if I'm in league with LaRouche,' he adds wearily." LaRouche countered, "President Reagan's initial version of SDI was consistent with what I had introduced into U.S.-Soviet back-channel discussions over the period beginning February 1982. However, immediately thereafter, the mice went to work. Daniel Graham, the leading opponent of SDI up to that time, now proclaimed himself the virtual author of the policy, and was used, thereafter, to remove all of the crucial elements from the original policy." There is no independent verification outside of LaRouche group media, however, of the claim that LaRouche originated or played a major role in the development of "Star Wars" missile defense.

LaRouche has also had contact with some foreign leaders. On May 23, 1982, he met with Mexican President José López 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 organizations 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.

Dennis King and Chip Berlet

Two writers who have written highly critical material on LaRouche are Dennis King and Chip Berlet. Their criticism is distinguished by their claim that they are exposing a "hidden agenda", and that LaRouche is essentially the opposite of what he professes to be.

The only substantial biography of LaRouche is Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism, by King (Doubleday, 1989). King, an investigative journalist, charges LaRouche with developing an intellectualized version of fascism mixed with political cultism and anti-Semitism (see Political views of Lyndon LaRouche.)

LaRouche polemicists have made much of the fact that King, who is considered a leftist, received funding from the conservative Smith-Richardson Foundation to write his book, but there has been no clear demonstration that this funding influenced the book's content. According to the book's acknowledgments (pp. 399-401), King also received funding and other help from liberal sources such as the Stern Fund. In fact, King's book is largely based on a lengthy series of articles in the Manhattan weekly Our Town, written and published before he obtained funding from any foundation (See Our Town archives, 1979-1980; photocopies of this series available from Political Research Associates.) LaRouche publications claim that King received funding from Smith-Richardson subsequent to meetings at the home of John Train (see LaRouche's critics,) but acknowledge that this occurred several years after the publication of the Our Town series.

The LaRouche movement alleges that Our Town was controlled by the controversial Roy Cohn . The late Cohn did promise pro bono counsel for Our Town and King after LaRouche sued them, but King soon fired Cohn as a result of allegations from confidential sources that Cohn and LaRouche had made a secret deal. (LaRouche dropped the suit shortly after King obtained new counsel.) (See court papers in LaRouche v. Our Town, New York State Supreme Court, New York County, 1979.) King devoted chapter 26 of his book to the byzantine rivalry of LaRouche and Cohn, and is unsparing in his criticism of both. "No two antagonists ever deserved each other more," King wrote (p. 252).

Chip Berlet wrote his first of several articles about LaRouche in 1979 for the Chicago Sun Times. LaRouche sued Berlet and King for defamation, along with NBC News and the Anti-Defamation League, but LaRouche lost the case, and the same jury awarded damges to NBC.

According to Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons:

"Though often dismissed as a bizarre political cult, the LaRouche organization and its various front groups are a fascist movement whose pronouncements echo elements of Nazi ideology. Beginning in the 1970s, the LaRouchites combined populist antielitism with attacks on leftists, environmentalists, feminists, gay men and lesbians, and organized labor. They advocated a dictatorship in which a 'humanist' elite would rule on behalf of industrial capitalists. They developed an idiosyncratic, coded variation on the Illuminati Freemason and Jewish banker conspiracy theories. Their views, though exotic, were internally consistent and rooted in right-wing populist traditions."

Chip Berlet & Matthew N. Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America, p. 273.

See also LaRouche's critics

LaRouche and the press

LaRouche has had an antagonistic relationship with the American news media throughout his career. In a September 24, 1976 op-ed in the Washington Post, entitled "NCLC: A Domestic Political Menace," Stephen Rosenfeld wrote: "We of the press should be chary of offering them print or air time. There is no reason to be too delicate about it: Every day we decide whose voices to relay. 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." During the 1980s, the print and electronic media rarely mentioned LaRouche's name without the prefix, "political extremist." The LaRouche campaign in 1988 attempted to poke fun at this practice by broadcasting a national TV spot which featured a montage of clips of different TV announcers, all saying "political extremist Lyndon LaRouche." During this period, the theories of Dennis King and Chip Berlet also received some coverage in the mainstream press.

In March of 2000, the Los Angeles Times printed a facsimile of the Democratic Presidential Primary Ballot with LaRouche's name airbrushed out. However, more recently these practices appear to have largely died out.

Presidential bids

In 1971, LaRouche founded the U.S. Labor Party as a vehicle for electoral politics, maintaining that both the major parties had abandoned the American System economic policies that the LaRouche organization had embraced (LaRouche names Republican Abraham Lincoln and Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt as exemplars of this school of thought.). In 1976, he ran for President of the United States as a U.S. Labor Party candidate, polling 40,043 votes (0.05%). According to LaRouche supporters, the major accomplishment of the campaign was the broadcast of a paid half-hour television address, which gave LaRouche the opportunity to air his views before a national audience. This was to become a regular feature of later campaigns during the 1980s and 1990s.

Since 1979, the LaRouche movement has also conducted some of its activities within the framework of the Democratic Party, despite the disapproval of the Democratic National Committee. LaRouche has run for the Democratic nomination for President in every election year since, even in 1992 while he was in prison.

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

Criminal conviction

Beginning in the late 1970s, the Heritage Foundation, the Anti-Defamation League, and The New York Times began publishing material highly critical of the LaRouche organization, which LaRouche claims was part of a "defamatory campaign laid the political groundwork for a later, new wave of corrupt Justice Department operations launched at, once again, the instigation of Henry Kissinger." In 1981, journalists Russ Bellant, Chip Berlet, and Dennis King released a set of documents to the press which they claimed revealed a pattern of potentially illegal activity by LaRouche and his followers. They called for government investigations.

By the 1980s, LaRouche and Helga Zepp-LaRouche had built an extensive political network, including the Schiller Institute in Germany, headed by Zepp-LaRouche, and branches in several other countries. The LaRouche organization devoted much of its energy to the sale of literature and the soliciting of small donations at airports and on university campuses. It also solicited donations by phone. Critics charged that this fundraising activity sometimes involved tax law violations, the conversion of publication sales into donations for LaRouche political campaigns that were then matched by the Federal Election Commission, and fraudulent soliciting of "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. LaRouche and six associates were charged with conspiracy and mail fraud related to fundraising. 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.

One of his cellmates during his incarceration was disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker. Bakker later devoted a chapter of his book, I Was Wrong, to his experience with LaRouche, in which he expressed his astonishment at LaRouche's detailed knowledge of the Bible. LaRouche served five years of his sentence and was paroled.

The convictions of LaRouche and his associates were a defining moment in the history of the LaRouche network. LaRouche supporters insisted that LaRouche was jailed, not for any violation of the law, but for his beliefs. On September 18, 1996, a full-page advertisement appeared in the New Federalist, a LaRouche publication, entitled "Officials Call for LaRouche's Exoneration" (see text); signators included Arturo Frondizi, former President of Argentina; figures from the 1960s American Civil Rights Movement such as Amelia Boynton Robinson, James Bevel, and Rosa Parks; former Minnesota Senator and Democratic Presidential Candidate Eugene McCarthy; Mervyn Dymally, who chaired the Congressional Black Caucus; and artists such as classical vocalist William Warfield, and violinist Norbert Brainin, former 1st Violin of the Amadeus Quartet. Amelia Boynton Robinson was at that time a board member of the LaRouche-affiliated Schiller Institute, which paid for the ad; James Bevel and William Warfield went on to become active in various LaRouche organizations.

The following quote appeared in an endorsement pamphlet produced by LaRouche's 1992 Presidential campaign:

"Perhaps LaRouche's greatest quality is his passion for seeking the truth and fighting for it even if it means going to prison..." .

--Prof. Dr. Norbert Brainin, O.B.E., London, England, December 13, 1991

The jury foreman in the Virginia case, however, told the Washington Post (12/17/1988) that it was the failure of LaRouche aides to repay loans that swayed the jury, and that the jury "all agreed was not on trial for his political beliefs. We did not convict him for that. He was convicted for those 13 counts he was on trial for."

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

Recent events

LaRouche resumed his political activity upon his release from prison in 1994., concentrating much of his attention on Third World nations. He was invited to Brazil by members of the city council of São Paulo, and was 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 Economics Committee of the Russian State Duma and the Russian Academy of Sciences, most recently in 2001.

LaRouche and his organizations opposed the US invasion of Iraq. LaRouche was cited by an op-ed in the Syria Times as "mong the US voices of reason" for asserting that the war is the result of a "1996 Israeli government policy that is being foisted on the President by a nest of (pro-Israel senior officials) inside the U.S. government." LaRouche critic Chip Berlet suggests that the commentary on Iraq by LaRouche-affiliated publications, which is incorporated into some Arab and Muslim commentaries, represents conspiracism and anti-Semitism, especially through the use of what Berlet describes as "stereotyped descriptions of the neoconservative network and their power."

During the Monica Lewinsky scandal, LaRouche mobilized his supporters in defense of Clinton. They formed a group called the "Committee to Save the Presidency," which petitioned nationwide against resignation or impeachment. LaRouche asserted that the same people and institutions that had attacked him were behind the attacks on Clinton.

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. He 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.

A 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.

International publicity about LaRouche was sparked in 2003 and 2004 after Jeremiah Duggan, a Jewish student from the UK who was attending a conference and "cadre school" in Germany organized by the Schiller Institute and LaRouche Youth Movement, died in mysterious circumstances in Wiesbaden. LaRouche publications claim Duggan was suicidal, but a British court ruled out suicide, and decided that Duggan died while "in a state of terror".

Books about Lyndon LaRouche and his movement

• Gilbert, Helen (2003) Lyndon LaRouche: Fascism restyled for the new Millennium, Red Letter Press, ISBN 0932323219
• Beyes-Corleis, Aglaja (1994) Verirrt: Mein Leben in einer radikalen Politorganisation, Herder/Spektrum, ISBN 3451042789
• King, Dennis (1989) Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism, Doubleday, ISBN 0385238800

External links

LaRouche publications:

• LaRouche Political Action Committee
• Executive Intelligence Review: LaRouche Publications
• Schiller Institute
• Twenty First Century Science and Technology – LaRouche-affiliated Science organization
• Philippine LaRouche Society
• "He's a bad guy, but we can't say why" LaRouche response to the various accusations against him
• The Bizarre Case of Baroness Symons – LaRouche response to the recent Independent and Washington Post articles

Other links:

• The Cult Controversy includes a 1995 series on LaRouche by John Mintz and links to other Washington Post articles on LaRouche
• Larouche Exposed – Pasadena City College
• Letter on LaRouche Youth Movement – UC San Diego forum
• The Weekly Dig Boston paper
• Articles about LaRouche from Political Research Associates by Chip Berlet and others.
• 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.
• No Joke (the effect LaRouche has on young recruits) – Washington Post, October 2004
• The cult and the candidate by Terry Kirby, July 2004 (The Independent of London)
• 2003 Personal Financial Disclosure for Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. (PDF)

• United States presidential candidates
• Conspiracy theorists
• Octogenarians
• 1922 births
• Journalists