After almost fifty years of publicly announcing that he was a target of assassination plans Lyndon LaRouche died at the age of 96. With his organizations he arranged to have plenty of security and apparently kept all the various forces with international agents trying to kill Lyndon LaRouche at bay.

.

Lyndon LaRouche was a smart man who knew how to read source material on certain subjects and quickly come up with an overarching picture. In his youth he was drawn to Left Wing organizations with formal organizational structures and dues paying members who were supposed to learn the party’s ideas and outlook and campaign on the streets and in print for those ideas.

.

When LaRouche was young the best way for Leftist organizations to reach out to workers and others who might be interested in socialist ideas and organizing a workers party was a party newspaper. The journal would be a weekly or biweekly or monthly, or even ‘occasional’ publication. Members of the group were supposed to help sell or distribute free the newspaper.

.

Activists would go to factory gates before work, to subway stops were there might be crowds, to parks or other public places. Lyndon LaRouche was on the street explaining what the organization thought about topics of the day. LaRouche was a quick study, got the elementary Marxist ideas, and was an effective and confident speaker one-on-one, or in groups. He was sure of himself and attracted people who liked a self-assured intelligent leader.

.

He moved from one Leftist group to another in the 1960’s until he decided to set up his own group – The National Caucus of Labor Committees. The implication of the name was that the group had a Leftwing orientation to the working class and wanted to be in labor unions as a separate caucus advocating a better way for workers to organize to win socialism. LaRouche had learned how to run a disciplined ideologically oriented group.

.

Members where recruited mostly during meetings with clipboard campaigners distributing literature on the street. People where brought to meetings and talked to individually and sounded out about what they thought about things. People who agreed with the ideas of Lyndon LaRouche where encouraged to join the group and campaign on the street and re-orient their lives around the organization that was going to spread LaRouche ideas.

.

The organization learned how to accept people’s credit cards on street sales and at bus stations and airports in the 1970’s and was reported to target older people for ‘subscriptions’ that they then inflated the cost of seeming to hope the victim would not notice extra fraudulent charges or even charges for extra publications they did not realize they were subscribing to.

.

Ex-members spoke of a cult-like atmosphere in the group with a complete focus on LaRouche as some kind of genius savior of humanity who had arrived at this point in history to change things for the better and help us all understand what was going on. The group organized around a newspaper and publications learned how to gather information, send out reporters and investigators, organize information into some understandable order, and present it to the public as a set of political ideas. Perhaps learning from his Leftwing youth LaRouche understood the use of remaining anonymous.

.

Lyndon LaRouche was known as Lynn Marcus when he was a leftwing party member. This tradition carried on with the LaRouche organizations as ‘reporters’ contacted people by phone and in person and lied and said they were reporters from other main stream media outlets.

.

In 1973, during the time of wide protests against the Vietnam War and other social problems, the LaRouche organization decided to eliminate other Leftwing opponents with “Operation Mop Up.” The LaRouche-ites targeted Communist Party USA public meetings showing up with a dozen people to shout and throw chairs and push people to disrupt what they considered false leftists. The main group organizing mass anti-war protests the Socialist Workers Party was also a focus of the LaRouche-ites physical intimidation.

.

After that time rather than becoming the dominant force on the Left as LaRouche had promised the LaRouche-ites seemed to go to the Right. The publications began to read like something from a John Birch Society screed against the Jewish bankers backing the Queen of England and the City of London. The LaRouche investigative team seemed to be cranking out Right Wing propaganda and attacked the positive attention of at least a few Republicans around the Ronald Reagan administration. Apparently some wealthy Right Wingers would pay to have the creepy looking LaRouche come to their company and spout his delusional gobbledy-gook theories and felt they were being let in on a secret worth knowing.

.

In the news paper business they use to say ‘facts are expensive, opinions are cheap.’ So, perhaps LaRouche and his minions actually developed some way to get useful information that others would pay for. One can go to labor union picket lines or public demonstrations and take pictures of people in the crowd that some people would like to have access to. Reporters can attend public meetings and make pertinent reports of what was said to interested parties.

.

So perhaps LaRouche had useful information services to sell. He was making a lot of money somehow. When running for president in 1976 LaRouche sued to be on one of the major networks. When he won in court the network said he must pay in cash. In a matter of hours the LaRouche people brought a brown paper bag with $250,000 in cash. Someone was paying a lot for the subscriptions to LaRouche publications.

.

Did LaRouche have useful information? He predicted economic crashes just about every two years. Like a broken clock, he was bound to be right sometimes. But, he was wrong a lot.

.

He died at 96. Yet he claimed to be perpetually in fear of his life from shadowy enemies who had picked him out of all the people of the world for death because of his unique insights and threat to powerful forces holding back humanity. But, despite all the enemies trying to get LaRouche he live to be older than most of humanity. Does that just prove he was a messiah?

.

LaRouche’s death was announced on the website of one of his organizations. He died on February 12, 2019, at age 96. Neither the place nor cause of his death was specified.

.

The New York Times had an obituary:

Lyndon LaRouche, Cult Figure Who Ran for President 8 Times, Dies at 96

Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. speaking at a news conference in Trenton in 1984 in advance of the New Jersey primary as he sought the Democratic presidential nomination. It was one of his eight campaigns for the White House as a fringe candidate.

By Richard Severo Feb. 13, 2019

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. The statement did not specify a cause or say where he died. Defining what Mr. 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, the 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 — he saw 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), maintained that Mr. LaRouche and his followers were a danger to democratic institutions. Mr. 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, Mr. LaRouche was able to develop alliances with farmers, the Nation of Islam, teamsters, abortion opponents and Klan adherents. Acolytes kept Mr. LaRouche’s political machine going by peddling his tracts and magazines in airports, and by persuading relatives and friends to donate large sums to help him fight his designated enemies. 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. Adlai E. Stevenson III, the Democratic candidate for governor of Illinois that year, was appalled. He denounced the LaRouche group as “neo-Nazis” and refused to run with Mr. Fairchild and Ms. Hart, organizing a third-party bid instead. He, as well as the LaRouche supporters, lost to James R. Thompson, the Republican incumbent. Some voters said they had voted for Mr. Fairchild and Ms. Hart because they had been endorsed by Mr. LaRouche’s National Democratic Policy Committee, which they thought was affiliated with the mainstream Democratic Party. Image Matt Guice, center, a field organizer for Mr. LaRouche’s political action commitee, distributed fliers in Manhattan in 2013. By the mid-1970s, the LaRouche organization had 37 offices in North America and 26 in Europe and Latin America. Critics of Mr. LaRouche said he had used that committee to deceive people abroad as well. In 1982, he managed to arrange a meeting with President José López Portillo of Mexico, evidently because Mexican officials thought Mr. LaRouche represented the Democratic Party. “I’m as American as apple pie,” Mr. LaRouche once said. Whatever he was, he received thousands of votes in his campaigns for president. In 1980, he outpolled Gov. Jerry Brown of California by a thousand votes in the Democratic presidential primary in Connecticut. In 1986, the candidates fielded by his National Democratic Policy Committee received 20 to 40 percent of the vote in local elections in California, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas. Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche Jr. was born on Sept. 8, 1922, in Rochester, N.H., to Lyndon and Jesse (Weir) LaRouche. He grew up in the Quaker tradition. His father was a traveling salesman for the United States Shoe Machinery Corporation, and his mother once ran a Quaker meeting in Boston’s Back Bay. His was not a happy childhood. Boys would pick on him, he said, but he refused to fight them, which only brought more disapprobation. It got no better after the family moved to Lynn, Mass. He regarded himself there as an outcast and had few friends in high school. He was not an “ugly duckling,” he said, “but a nasty duckling.” When World War II began, Mr. LaRouche declared himself a conscientious objector, citing his pacifist Quaker upbringing. But toward the end of the war he enlisted in the Army, despite his mother’s objections. After the war, he enrolled in Northeastern University in Boston but “resigned,” he said, because the university was not challenging his superior intellect. He said he had been able to become the century’s leading economist without formal college study. He married Janice Neuberger in the early 1950s and had a son, Daniel, by her in 1956. The marriage failed, and he never talked publicly about his son and his former wife in his later years. Mr. LaRouche’s political roots were Marxist. From 1948 to 1963, he was active in the Socialist Workers Party, a Trotskyist group. His own group surfaced during the student unrest at Columbia University in the late 1960s as a faction of the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society. It evolved into the National Caucus of Labor Committees, an organization largely made up of young upper-middle-class people who espoused Mr. LaRouche’s Marxist views. He first ran for president in 1976 as the candidate of the left-wing United States Labor Party, now defunct. By then, though, his politics had already begun moving to the right. And after spending much time in West Germany, he returned with right-wing, anti-Semitic views. Many of his followers made the shift with him. George Johnson, the author of “Architects of Fear: Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia in American Politics” (1983), wrote that Mr. LaRouche had developed a conspiracy theory that stretched back to the beginnings of civilization. Archive