Who's Lyndon Larouche?

Question

I've heard several references to this person on various episodes of TV shows. I gather he is, or was, a political candidate of some kind. I tried looking it up on Wikipedia, but the page was blank for some reason.

Answer 1

Lyndon LaRouche was born in 1922 in Rochester, New Hampshire, in a Quaker family. He is a political activist who thinks highly of himself and his great ideas. So great that he ran for presidency in the US several times.

He is a curious character, been 5 years in jail for fraud, wrote tons of books, articles, essays, pamphlets about Politics and Economics. To my opinion he is a deranged person , full of nebulous ideas and theories, was a Socialist, dropped from college, thinks he is a genius, found the US Labour party in the early 70s, wrote and argued about everything, had a mass of followers as excited and incoherent as he is, was advocating nuclear energy, made himself remarked by proposing peace plan for the Middle East, was casted as an antisemite by a Court in NY state, ran a hate campaign agains Olaf Palme (who was murdered in 1986 in Sweden), opposed the invasion of Iraq, he is typically portrayed as a paranoid conspiracy theorist. He is indefatigable although to my opinion vain, not credible, dangerous and inconsistent. He has followers and friends all over the world but he is now getting old and must not be taken seriously any longer...
I was once approached by a guy outside the DOT building in Houston Texas who wanted to sell me books and essays by Larouche. When I told him that as an ex journalist I had tried to read one or two of his books and I found them boring and incomprehensible he was so furious that for a while I thought he was going to attack me. But I am tall and strong and I looked at him agressively and he just asid :"Go away you brat !"" IF all LArouche's followers and disciples are like this, it 's not the sort of movement you want to be joining. There was already a movement like this in the 30s, called the NSDAP (National Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeit Partei) or NAZI.

Answer 2

Lyndon Larouche ran for president in 2004. He was actually an economist. I am a very liberal democrat, but the persons I encountered who campaigned for him seemed pretty rabid to me, to the point where they had their own subculture going. They really thought he was going to win the presidency...even though nobody knew who he was.

Answer 3

He was a Dem that went independent and came up with these off-the-wall theories. His "best" was that Queen Elizabeth was the biggest drug dealer int he world.

he ran for the presidency and lost with regularity

Answer 4

Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Jr. (born September 8, 1922 in Rochester, New Hampshire) is an American political activist and founder of several political organizations in the United States and elsewhere, jointly referred to as the LaRouche movement. He is known for being a perennial candidate for President of the United States, having run for the Democratic nomination for President in every election year since 1976, a record of eight attempts.

There are sharply contrasting views of LaRouche. His supporters regard him as a brilliant and original thinker, while his critics in the U.S. regard him as a conspiracy theorist, political extremist, cult leader, or anti-Semite. Lt.Gen. Daniel O. Graham, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, has described him as an "unrepentant Marxist-Leninist." The Heritage Foundation has said he "leads what may well be one of the strangest political groups in American history." LaRouche denies these characterizations.

LaRouche and his organization are active world-wide, and his writings appear in many languages. By the mid-1980s, LaRouche had assembled a "worldwide network of contacts in governments and in military agencies," and had private meetings with Jose Lopez Portillo when he was Mexico's president, Argentine President Raul Alfonsin and the late Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

LaRouche was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment in 1988 for conspiracy, mail fraud, and tax code violations, but continued his political activities from behind bars until his release in 1994 on parole. Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark charged that his case "involves 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."

He is currently listed as a director and contributing editor of the Executive Intelligence Review News Service, part of the LaRouche movement. [12] He has written extensively on economic, scientific, and political topics.

LaRouche is the son of Lyndon H. LaRouche, Sr. (June 1, 1896 - December 1983) and Jessie Lenore Weir (November 12, 1893 - August 1978), a descendant of Elder Brewster from the Mayflower and other prominent Yankee families on his mother's side. He was born in Rochester, New Hampshire, the oldest of three children. He attended the School Street elementary school until 1936, when the family moved to Lynn, Massachusetts, after his father, an immigrant from Quebec, resigned from his job as a shoe salesman at the United Shoe Machinery Corporation in Rochester to set up his own business, becoming, as LaRouche's biography states, "a technologist and internationally active consultant in the footwear industry." [citation needed] LaRouche grew up speaking French and German, as well as English.

According to a biographer, Dennis King, LaRouche has described his childhood as that of "an egregious child, I wouldn't say an ugly duckling but a nasty duckling. King writes that LaRouche had learned to read by the age of five, and was called "Big Head" by the other children at school. He was also bullied, after being told by his parents, who were both Quakers, 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 of which he spent much of his time alone, taking long walks and finding solace in the works of Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant. He later described the bullies in his autobiography The Power of Reason as "unwitting followers of David Hume."

By 1940 the Lynn Monthly Meeting of Friends (Quaker) was discussing censuring LaRouche for spreading libelous material and gossip about other members and in 1941 the Lynn Meeting agreed to expel him, removing him from the group: "We believe Lyndon H. LaRouche [Jr.] is guilty of stirring up discord in this meeting; that he is responsible for circulating material injurious to the reputation of valued Christian workers; and believe that his conduct brings the Christian religion into public disrepute. We recommend the appointment of a committee to deal with him and to endeavor to reclaim him in a spirit of Christian love." His family all resigned in sympathy, asking to be removed from the membership of the meeting in October 1941

His parents later formed and led their own independent congregation in Boston, the Village Street Monthly Meeting, which met from 1964 to 1979, and in which LaRouche was an active member. According to New England Quaker documents, "this was ostensibly as a Quaker meeting, though its relations with New England Yearly Meeting seem to have been decidedly unFriendly. They were never listed in the Yearly Meeting minutes, as most independent meetings were. Lyndon LaRouche, seems to have been a key member."

LaRouche enrolled at Northeastern University, Boston, but left in 1942 after receiving poor grades. As a Quaker, he was at first a conscientious objector during World War II, joining a Civilian Public Service camp where King reports that he "promptly joined a small faction at odds with the administrators," but in 1944 he joined the United States Army as a non-combatant, serving in medical units in India and Burma.

During this period, he read works by Karl Marx and became a Marxist. While travelling home on the troop ship SS General Bradley in 1946, he met Don Merrill, a fellow soldier, who was also from Lynn. Merrill won LaRouche over to Trotskyism on the journey home. Back in the U.S., LaRouche attempted to resume his education at Northeastern, intending to major in physics, but left again because of what he called academic "philistinism."

1948–1968 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. He obtained work as a management consultant in New York City, 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.

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. 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.

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

In 1965, LaRouche left Tim Wohlforth's group and joined the Spartacist League, which had split from 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 used his familiarity with Marxism to win students away from the New Left counterculture.

LaRouche's movement was heavily involved in the 1968 student strike and occupation of Columbia, and attempted 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.

1969–1973 NCLC, and "Operation Mop-up"
A 1973 internal FBI letter recommended that, as part of its COINTELPRO, the FBI provide anonymous aid to a background investigation by the Communist Party USA, which wanted to eliminate LaRouche as a political threat.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. According to Dennis King, NCLC's internal life was highly regimented. Members gave up their jobs and private lives and became entirely devoted to the group and its leader. The movement developed an internal discipline technique, "ego stripping," which was intended to reinforce conformity and loyalty to LaRouche.

Around this time, there were reports in The New York Times and other newspapers of LaRouche members being kidnapped and forced to admit to being brainwashed. [citation needed] The LaRouche group announced at a national conference that it had discovered a brainwashing or assassination plot by the CIA and KGB involving top member Chris White, a 26-year-old British national who had married LaRouche's ex-girlfriend, Carol Schnitzer, before moving with her to London to organize a British branch of the NCLC.

King writes:
...members from across the country had gathered in New York for the conference. The suspense began to mount as alarming rumors emanated from LaRouche's apartment. It was said that White had been tortured and brainwashed in a London basement by the CIA and British intelligence, who had programmed him first to kill his wife upon the utterance of a trigger word and then to finger LaRouche for assassination by Cuban exile frogmen.

LaRouche mobilized the entire NCLC. They passed out fliers on a massive scale in New York and other cities, describing White's alleged tortures in lurid detail. The national office issued over forty press releases in a two-week period. LaRouche and the Whites filed a complaint with the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and launched a lawsuit against the CIA. NCLC members frantically solicited their parents and friends to serve on an Emergency Commission of Inquiry.

Following this, the NCLC adopted violent and disruptive tactics under LaRouche's direction. According to articles in the Village Voice, NCLC members physically attacked meetings of the Communist Party and later of the SWP, and other groups who were classed by LaRouche as "left-protofascists." These attacks were called "Operation Mop-up."

The NCLC argued that they were acting in self-defense, even though all other accounts say that it was the NCLC that initiated the violence. [citation needed] 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'," [18] 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 moved away from Marxism. 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."

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. [citation needed] However, LaRouche consistently denounces the economic and other policies of Mussolini and Hitler in his writings and speeches. He says that the model he advocates is that of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

1971–1979
On December 2, 1971 LaRouche engaged in a spirited debate with leading Keynesian economist Abba Lerner at Queens College, in New York City. The debate pertained to arguments put forward in a leaflet by LaRouche's National Caucus of Labor Committees, specifically on the questions of the wage and price controls and austerity policies being put into place at that time by the Nixon administration, and by Brazil's military regime. Lerner offered a qualified defense of those policies against LaRouche's claim that they represented a revival of the ideas of Hjalmar Schacht. According to the only published accounts, those of the LaRouche organization, Lerner said, “But if Germany had accepted Schacht's policies, Hitler would not have been necessary.” LaRouche supporters claim that Lerner's friend, the famed philosopher Sidney Hook attended the debate and stated, "LaRouche won the debate" but "will lose much more as a result of that." LaRouche interpreted Hook's remark to mean that the "establishment" in economics departments in academia would unite against him and no longer debate him, for fear of another upset.

Also 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). LaRouche argued that his theoretical developments in physical economics made clear that the American System was the system of political economy best suited to make nations credit-worthy producer economies.

In 1971, LaRouche organized the New Solidarity International Press Service as a wire service for his publications. He founded the weekly Executive Intelligence Review and co-founded the Fusion Energy Foundation.

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 also became a strong advocate of nuclear energy and directed energy technologies for ballistic missile defense.

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 political organizations such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, 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. LaRouche has also maintained contacts and meetings with Israeli peace activists including Nahum Goldmann (1978), then head of the World Jewish Congress, and a meeting with Abba Eban, former Israeli representative to the UN. 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.

In 1976, he ran for President of the United States as a U.S. Labor Party candidate, polling 40,043 votes (0.05%). This campaign was the first to broadcast 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.

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."

In 1977, he married Helga Zepp, a German political activist.

LaRouche asserts that much of the hostile characterizations of him 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.

Beginning in 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.