Eight-time candidate for president a study in paranoia, bigotry
Lyndon LaRouche, the quixotic, apocalyptic leader of a cultlike political organization who ran for president eight times, once from a prison cell, died on Tuesday. He was 96.
His death was announced on the website of his organization, La Rouche/Pac. It did not specify a cause or say where he died.
Defining what LaRouche stood for was no easy task. He began his political career on the far left and ended it on the far right. He said he admired Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan and loathed Hitler, composer Richard Wagner and other anti-Semites, though he himself made anti-Semitic statements.
He was fascinated with physics and mathematics, particularly geometry, but called concerns about climate change “a scientific fraud.”
He condemned modern music as a tool of invidious conspiracies — rock as a particularly British one — and found universal organizing principles in the music of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart.
Some called him a case study in paranoia and bigotry, his mild demeanor notwithstanding. One biographer, Dennis King, in “Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism” (1989), believed that LaRouche and his followers were a danger to democratic institutions.
LaRouche denigrated a panoply of ethnic groups and organized religions. He railed against the “Eastern Establishment” and environmentalists, who he said were trying to wipe out the human race. Queen Elizabeth II of England was plotting to have him killed, he said. Jews had surreptitiously founded the Ku Klux Klan, he said. He described Native Americans as “lower beasts.”
Even so, LaRouche was able to develop alliances with farmers, the Nation of Islam, teamsters, abortion opponents and Klan adherents.
He operated through a dizzying array of front groups, among them the National Democratic Policy Committee, through which he received millions of dollars in federal matching money in his recurring presidential campaigns. His forces also sponsored candidates at the state and local levels, including for school board seats.
His movement attracted national attention, especially in 1986, when two LaRouche followers, Mark Fairchild and Janice Hart, unexpectedly won the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor and secretary of state, respectively, in Illinois.
In 1987, after an FBI investigation, LaRouche was convicted in Virginia on charges of scheming to defraud the Internal Revenue Service and of deliberately defaulting on more than $30 million in loans from thousands of his supporters. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
The conviction hurt his movement but did not end it. He was released in 1994. He immediately announced that he would run for president in 1996. He ran again in 2000 and 2004.