Childhood & Early Life
LaRouche was born Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche Jr., on September 8, 1922, in Rochester, New Hampshire, to Jessie Lenore and 'United Shoe Machinery Corporation' employee Lyndon H. LaRouche, Sr. He was the oldest among the siblings. His family later moved to Lynn, Massachusetts.
LaRouche graduated from 'Lynn English High School' in 1940 and resigned from the 'Lynn Quakers' group. He did this in sympathy for his father who was expelled for accusing other ‘Quakers’ of misusing funds while writing under the pen name “Hezekiah Micajah Jones.”
LaRouche dropped out of 'Northeastern University' in Boston in 1942. He served as a conscientious objector (CO) during World War II and later joined a 'Civilian Public Service' camp in 1942. In 1944, LaRouche was drafted in the ‘US Army’ and was posted in Burma and India, where he developed sympathy for the Indian independence movement.
He took up a clerical job toward the end of the war. LaRouche was a staunch 'Marxist' and converted to 'Trotskyism' in 1946.
He returned to the US to resume his studies at 'Northeastern University.'
He returned to Lynne in 1948 and joined the 'Socialist Workers Party' (SWP) a year later, under the political pseudonym "Lyn Marcus." He then moved to New York City in 1953, to work as a management consultant.
Back then, LaRouche was under constant criticism for having "fascistic tendencies" despite being a leftist.
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Career
By 1961, LaRouche focused majorly on his career and not on the ‘SWP.’ In 1964, he joined the 'Revolutionary Tendency,' an ‘SWP’ faction that was later expelled from the party, and was led by British ‘Trotskyist’ Gerry Healy.
LaRouche had worked with 'American Healyite' leader Tim Wohlforth, who described LaRouche as someone with a "gargantuan ego" and also claimed that his schematic thinking lacked "factual detail and depth." He later left the ‘Wohlforth’ group and had a brief association with their rival, the 'Spartacist League.'
In 1967, LaRouche taught 'Marxist' dialectical materialism at New York City's 'Free School' and eventually propagated ‘Marxist’ notions among 'Columbia University' and the 'City College of New York' students.
During the 1968 'Columbia University' protests, LaRouche and his supporters formed the 'National Caucus of Labor Committees' (NCLC) to win over the university's main activist group, 'Students for a Democratic Society.' In the subsequent years, ‘NCLC’ became highly regimented and welcomed hundreds of members.
In 1971, LaRouche established an ‘NCLC’ "intelligence network" to have access to government officials under press cover. In 1984, former 'National Security Council' member Norman Bailey stated that LaRouche's ‘NCLC’ had "one of the best private intelligence services in the world." He established several groups and companies from the 1970s to 2010, such as the 'Citizens Electoral Council' (Australia), the 'National Democratic Policy Committee,' the 'Fusion Energy Foundation,' and the 'US Labor Party.'
LaRouche founded the ‘NCLC’ political arm, also known as the 'US Labor Party,' in 1973. It initially preached "Marxist revolution" but shifted to right-wing politics by 1977. In 1973, LaRouche led the "Operation Mop-Up," where ‘NCLC’ members physically assaulted leftist members, whom he termed "left-protofascists."
In March 1975, ‘FBI’ director Clarence M. Kelley declared LaRouche's ‘NCLC’ "a violence-oriented organization of “revolutionary socialists.''
In 1975, LaRouche released 'Dialectical Economics: An Introduction to Marxist Political Economy' under the pseudonym ''Lyn Marcus.''
In 1976, LaRouche had his first presidential run as a left-wing 'United States Labor Party' (now defunct) candidate. Interestingly, by then, he had begun turning his political leanings to the right. He returned with prominent right-wing, anti-Semitic views after a stay in West Germany.
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Around that time, LaRouche's printing services, 'Computron Technologies Corporation,' had 'Mobil Oil' and 'Citibank' as clients, while 'World Composition Services' had 'Ford Foundation' as a client.
The 'LaRouche' movement led most of its US electoral activities from the autumn of 1979, such as the 'National Democratic Policy Committee' (NDPC).
In 1980, LaRouche defeated California governor Jerry Brown in the 'Democratic' presidential primary in Connecticut. In 1983, he, along with his wife, moved from New York to Loudoun County, apparently to save himself from a conspired terrorist assassination.
In 1984, LaRouche and his second wife, along with three other political parties (‘Europäische Arbeiterpartei,’ ‘Patrioten für Deutschland,’ and ‘Bürgerrechtsbewegung Solidarität’), founded the 'Schiller Institute' in Germany. By the mid-1980s, LaRouche was at the peak of his power.
He worked for the 'Prevent AIDS Now Initiative Committee' (PANIC) or the 'LaRouche Initiative,' which sponsored his proposal of adding AIDS to California's 'List of Communicable Diseases.' AIDS became a prominent agenda during his 1988 presidential campaign.
In March 1986, 'LaRouche National Democratic Policy Committee' candidates Mark Fairchild and Janice Hart won the 'Democratic' primary, which brought all the national attention to LaRouche. In a press conference later, he accused the Soviet and British governments, international bankers, drug dealers, and journalists of being involved in conspiracies. He accused the Soviet Union of conspiring his assassination.
In October 1986, LaRouche's Virginia and Massachusetts offices were raided. He and some of his associates were accused of credit card fraud and obstruction of justice. In his 1988 autobiography, he mentioned that the raid was a conspiracy of Russian activist Raisa Gorbachev, along with the Soviet Union, because he had invented the 'Strategic Defense Initiative.'
LaRouche liked classical music up to the period of Brahms and loathed popular music, as stated by him in 1980. His movement members protested at several opera performances by anti-Semite artists and banned many who played contemporary music.
In 1989, LaRouche advocated the "Verdi pitch," a pitch that Italian opera composer Verdi suggested as optimal. The initiative was supported by over 300 opera stars, to which 'Opera Fanatic' said that they might not have been aware of LaRouche's politics.
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In 1989, LaRouche began his 15-year sentence at the 'Federal Medical Center' in Rochester, Minnesota, for conspiring fraudulence against the 'Internal Revenue Service.' It damaged the 'LaRouche' movement to an extent but did not end it.
He ran for 'Congress' from his prison, representing the 10th District of Virginia in 1990. However, he lost. He ran his presidential campaign from jail in 1992.
Upon his release in 1994, LaRouche announced his presidential run for 1996. He received enough votes in Virginia and Louisiana, but 'Democratic National Committee' chairman Donald Fowler projected LaRouche as a non-bona fide ‘Democrat’ and loathed his explicitly racist and anti-Semitic political views. Hence, Fowler influenced other state parties to disregard his votes.
He ran again in 2000 and 2004. LaRouche established the 'Worldwide LaRouche Youth Movement' (WLYM) in 2000. By 2003, the danger of his assassination furthered and he moved to a "heavily guarded" rented house in Round Hill, Loudoun County, Virginia.
In 2007, LaRouche started a national petition to restore the 'Glass-Steagall Act' to save the US banking system. He also proposed a 'Homeowners and Bank Protection Act,' which required a federal agency to protect federal- and state-chartered banks.
In 2009, during a US health care reform discussion, LaRouche advocated a "single-payer health care" bill.
By 2015, LaRouche projected himself in complete opposition to Obama.
Family, Personal Life, & Death
LaRouche married Janice Neuberger, a psychiatrist and ‘SWP’ member, in 1954 and had a son, Daniel, in 1956. The two separated in 1963. Following this, LaRouche began a live-in relationship with another ‘SWP’ member, Carol Schnitzer, in a Greenwich Village apartment.
LaRouche married a leading activist of his movement, Helga Zepp, in 1977. She was 27 years younger than him and worked closely with him for the rest of his career.
LaRouche died on February 12, 2019. The death was announced on one of his organizations' websites, but neither the place nor the cause of his death was mentioned.
