Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche Jr. (September 8, 1922 – February 12, 2019) was an American political activist who founded the LaRouche movement and its main organization, the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC). He was a prominent conspiracy theorist and perennial presidential candidate. He began in far-left politics in the 1940s and later supported the civil rights movement; however, in the 1970s, he moved to the far-right. His movement is sometimes described as, or likened to, a cult. Convicted of fraud, he served five years in prison from 1989 to 1994.
Born in Rochester, New Hampshire, LaRouche was drawn to socialist and Marxist movements in his twenties during World War II. In the 1950s, while a Trotskyist, he was also a management consultant in New York City. By the 1960s, he became engaged in increasingly smaller and more radical splinter groups. During the 1970s, he created the foundation of the LaRouche movement and became more engaged in conspiratorial beliefs and violent and illegal activities. Instead of the radical left, he embraced radical right politics and antisemitism. At various times, he alleged that he had been targeted for assassination by Queen Elizabeth II, Zionist mobsters, his own associates (whom he said had been drugged and brainwashed by CIA and British spies), in addition to others.
It is estimated that the LaRouche movement never exceeded a few thousand members, but it had an outsized political influence, raising more than $200 million by one estimate, and running candidates in more than 4,000 elections in the 1980s. It was noted for disguising its candidates as conservative Democrats and harassing opponents. It reached its height in electoral success when Larouchite candidates won the Democratic primaries for the 1986 Illinois gubernatorial election and related state offices; this alarmed Democratic Party officials, whose national spokesman called the Larouchites "kook fringe". The defeated mainstream Democratic candidates ran in the general election as members of the Illinois Solidarity Party; the Larouchite Democrats all finished a distant third. Later in the 1980s, as part of the LaRouche criminal trials, criminal investigations led to convictions of several LaRouche movement members, including LaRouche himself. He was sentenced to 15 years' imprisonment but served only five.
LaRouche was a perennial candidate for President of the United States. He ran in every election from 1976 to 2004 as a candidate of third parties established by members of his movement, peaking at around 78,000 votes in the 1984 United States presidential election. He also tried to gain the Democratic presidential nomination. In the 1996 Democratic Party presidential primaries, he received 5% of the total nationwide vote. In 2000, he received enough primary votes to qualify for delegates in some states, but the Democratic National Committee refused to seat his delegates and barred LaRouche from attending the Democratic National Convention.
Early life LaRouche was born in Rochester, New Hampshire, the oldest of three children of Jessie Lenore ( Weir) and Lyndon H. LaRouche Sr. His paternal grandfather's family emigrated to the United States from Rimouski, Quebec, whereas his maternal grandfather was born in Scotland. His father worked for the United Shoe Machinery Corporation in Rochester before the family moved to Lynn, Massachusetts. and .
His parents became Quakers after his father converted from Catholicism. They forbade him from fighting with other children, even in self-defense, which he said led to "years of hell" 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 12 and 14, he read philosophy extensively, embracing the ideas of Leibniz and rejecting those of Hume, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Rousseau, and Kant.For the parents' religions and other details, see , p. 3, and .For "years of hell" and bullying, see .For spending time alone and identifying with philosophers, see .For the particular philosophers he read, see . He graduated from Lynn English High School in 1940. In the same year, the Lynn Quakers expelled his father from the group, for reportedly accusing other Quakers of misusing funds, while writing under the pen name Hezekiah Micajah Jones. LaRouche and his mother resigned in sympathy with his father.For his graduation, see .For his father's expulsion, see .For an entry mentioning LaRouche in Quaker records, see Stattler, Richard. "Guide to the Records of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in New England" , Rhode Island Historical Society, 1997, p. 92.
University studies, Marxism, marriage
LaRouche attended Northeastern University in Boston and left in 1942. He later wrote that his teachers "lacked the competence to teach me on conditions I was willing to tolerate"., p. 3 As a Quaker, he was a conscientious objector during World War II and joined a Civilian Public Service camp in lieu of military service. In 1944, he decided to enlist in the United States Army and served with the Medical Corps in India and Burma during the Burma campaign. At the end of the war, he was working as a clerk in the Ordnance Corps, and later described his decision to enlist as the most important decision of his life. In his 1988 autobiography, LaRouche said that being asked to express his views on the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt to a group of fellow G.I.s led him to define his "principal lifelong political commitment, that the United States should take postwar world leadership in establishing a world order dedicated to promoting the economic development of what we call today "developing nations".
LaRouche wrote that, while in the conscientious objector camp, he discussed Marxism, and while traveling home on the SS General Bradley in 1946, he met Donald Merrill, a fellow soldier, also from Lynn, who converted him to Trotskyism. Back in the U.S., he resumed his education at Northeastern University but dropped out. He returned to Lynn in 1948 and the next year joined the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) to recruit at the GE River Works there, adopting the name "Lyn Marcus" for his political work.For how he adopted Marxism and Trotskyism, for his studies, and joining the SWP, see . For his use of Lyn Marcus, see . He arrived in New York City in 1953, where he worked as a management consultant.For his work as a management consultant, see , p. 4. In 1954 he married Janice Neuberger, a member of the SWP. Their son, Daniel, was born in 1956., pp. 8–9.
Career 1960s Teaching and the National Caucus of Labor Committees
By 1961, the LaRouches were living on Central Park West in Manhattan, and LaRouche's activities at that time were mostly focused on his career and not on the SWP. He and his wife separated in 1963, and he moved into a Greenwich Village apartment with another SWP member, Carol Schnitzer, also known as Larrabee., p. 9. In 1964 he began an association with an SWP faction called the Revolutionary Tendency, a faction later expelled from the SWP, and came under the influence of British Trotskyist leader Gerry Healy..
For six months, LaRouche worked with American Healyite leader Tim Wohlforth, who later wrote that LaRouche had 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." Leaving Wohlforth's group, LaRouche briefly joined the rival Spartacist League before announcing his intention to build a new Fifth International., undated.
In 1967, LaRouche began teaching classes on Marx's dialectical materialism at New York City's Free School, and attracted a group of students from Columbia University and the City College of New York, recommending that they read Das Kapital, as well as Hegel, Kant, and Leibniz. During the 1968 Columbia University protests, he organized his supporters under the name National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC). The aim of the NCLC was to win control of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) branchthe university's main activist groupand build a political alliance between students, local residents, organized labor, and the Columbia faculty.Fraser, Steve. "NCLC Frame Up", Great Speckled Bird, February 22, 1971.Also see , p. 116.The NCLC was at first called the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) Labor Committee.For LaRouche's teaching, see , pp. 13–14. By 1973, the NCLC had over 600 members in 25 citiesincluding West Berlin and Stockholmand produced what LaRouche's biographer, Dennis King, called the most literate of the far-left papers, New Solidarity., pp. 17–18.Also see Rose, Gregory F. "The Swarmy Life and Times of the NCLC", National Review, March 30, 1979. The NCLC's internal activities became highly regimented over the next few years. Members gave up their jobs and devoted themselves to the group and its leader, believing it would soon take control of America's trade unions and overthrow the government..
1970s 1971: Intelligence network
Robert J. Alexander writes that LaRouche first established an NCLC "intelligence network" in 1971. Members all over the world sent information to NCLC headquarters, which would distribute the information via briefings and other publications. LaRouche organized the network as a series of news services and magazines, which critics say was done to gain access to government officials under press cover., p. 189. The publications included Executive Intelligence Review, founded in 1974. Other periodicals under his aegis included New Solidarity, Fusion Magazine, 21st Century Science and Technology, and Campaigner Magazine. His news services and publishers included American System Publications, Campaigner Publications, New Solidarity International Press Service, and The New Benjamin Franklin House Publishing Company. LaRouche acknowledged in 1980 that his followers impersonated reporters and others, saying it had to be done for his security."LaRouche Says His Supporters Take Covert Roles in Campaign" , The New York Times, February 15, 1980: "Lyndon H. LaRouche, the former head of the U.S. Labor Party who is now running as a Democrat, has said that his campaign workers impersonate reporters and others, contending that the covert operation is needed for his security." Other publications included International Journal of Fusion, Investigative Leads, War on Drugs, The Young Scientist, American Labor Beacon, New Federalist, Nouvelle Solidarité, and Neue Solidarität. In 1982, U.S. News & World Report sued New Solidarity International Press Service and Campaigner Publications for damages, alleging that members were impersonating its reporters in phone calls.
U.S. sources told The Washington Post in 1985 that the LaRouche organization had assembled a worldwide network of government and military contacts, and that his researchers sometimes supplied information to government officials. 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. A CIA spokesman said LaRouche met Deputy Director John McMahon in 1983 to discuss one of LaRouche's trips overseas. An aide to Deputy Secretary of State William Clark said when LaRouche's associates discussed technology or economics, they made good sense and seemed qualified. Norman Bailey, formerly with the U.S. National Security Council, said in 1984 that LaRouche's staff comprised "one of the best private intelligence services in the world. ... They do know a lot of people around the world. They do get to talk to prime ministers and presidents." Several government officials feared a security leak from the government's ties with the movement.For Bailey's comment in 1984, see .