Lyndon LaRouche
LaRouche circa 1988
Born: Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche Jr.; September 8, 1922; Rochester, New Hampshire, U.S.
Died: February 12, 2019 (aged 96)
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).
Born in Rochester, New Hampshire, LaRouche became sympathetic to socialist and Marxist movements and ideals in his twenties during World War II and by the 1960s 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/or illegal activities. In 1986, his movement reached its height in electoral success when Larouchite candidates won several Democratic primaries for state offices in Illinois. (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, criminal investigations led to convictions of several LaRouche movement members, including LaRouche himself. He was sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment, but served only five years.
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. He also tried to gain the Democratic presidential nomination. In 1996, he got five percent of the total nationwide vote in Democratic primaries. In 2000, he received enough primary votes to qualify for delegates in some states, but ultimately was refused by those delegates at the convention.
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Career
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1970s
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1974: Contacts with far right groups, intelligence gathering
Around the same time, according to Blum, LaRouche was telling his membership several times a year that he was being targeted for assassination, including by the Queen of the United Kingdom, Zionist mobsters, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Justice Department, and the Mossad. LaRouche sued the City of New York in 1974, saying the CIA and British spies had tortured and drugged his associates to brainwash his associates into killing him.[87] According to The Patriot-News of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, LaRouche said he had been "threatened by Communists, Zionists, narcotics gangsters, the Rockefellers and international terrorists." LaRouche later said that,
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1980s
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1984: Schiller Institute, television spots, contact with Reagan administration
Further information: Schiller Institute
Helga Zepp-LaRouche founded the Schiller Institute in Germany in 1984. In the same year, LaRouche was able to raise enough money to purchase 14 television spots, at a cost of $330,000 each, in which he called Walter Mondalethe Democratic Party's presidential candidatea Soviet agent of influence, triggering over 1,000 telephone complaints. On April 19, 1986, NBC's
Saturday Night Live aired a sketch satirizing the ads, portraying the Queen of the United Kingdom and Henry Kissinger as drug dealers. LaRouche received 78,773 votes in the 1984 presidential election.
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