Talk:LaRouche movement/Incidents

Primary sources

• It was Rudd's Bundy-funded faction which launched the first violence against us, at Columbia... Other organized physical attacks against my friends would follow, inside the United States and abroad. Communist Party goon-squad attacks began in Chicago, in summer 1972, and continued sporadically up to the concerted assault launched during March 1973. During 1972, there was also a goon-attack on associates of mine by the SWP.
  • LaRouche (1987), p. 117.

Typical of the evidence on the public record, is an official Nov. 23, 1973 document, an official record of both the New York City office of the FBI and also the higher authorities in the FBI's Washington, D.C. headquarters, stating, that the FBI was orchestrating its assets in the leadership of the Communist Party U.S.A., to bring about my personal "elimination." That FBI document, first released in full in January 1992, coincides with evidence of an ongoing operation which my associates and I had published in March 1973, and of an "elimination" operation, targetting me personally, which we exposed publicly during January 1974. Although those government-related secret operations of 1973 against me are officially dated by that evidence to November 1973, the admissions contained within the document referencing my prospective "elimination," show the true flavor of the operations conducted by the FBI and others, internationally, during the earlier months that same year,[9] and for several more years thereafter.[10]

— 'He's a Bad Guy,

But We Can't Say Why' by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

February 15, 2000 www.schillerinstitute.org/exon/lar_bad_guy.html

"Senior Advisor" Nera Tanden ...at a DC organizing event for the Obama "health care reform" June 11. [..] LaRouche organizer Alan Ogden interrupted Tanden's speech and was forced out of the meeting by several men (who identified themselves as "citizens") as he stood to expose the Hitlerian nature of this "reform." As Ogden was pushed out of the room, Tanden, still grinning, perkily exhorted the audience, "See, this is why we're all here today! So that we can counter these kinds of myths which are floating around out there!" [..] Ogden stood and declared, speaking directly to Tanden, "The truth is, the Obama 'Health' policy is a reenactment of Hitler's T4 policy, written in October, 1939, by Adolf Hitler personally, setting in motion the 'medical' euthanasia of targetted groups, who were denied health care. Baucus has said that under this policy, one-third of spending on medical care will be eliminated. You people are launching the Nazi-style murder of millions, because you cannot eliminate spending on that scale without mass killing. Orzag has called his Nazi policy, 'Quality-Adjusted Life Years.' And you have sent Obama, the President of the United States, to Green Bay to praise that city for its leadership in advance directives and cuts in medical services to the elderly. It's like sending the President to visit Buchenwald while it was still in operation! You can see yourselves portrayed, and all the facts about the intent of this health care reform, in the videos on the Lyndon LaRouchePAC.com website. Lyndon LaRouche has called defeating this Nazi policy of the administration 'an existential question' upon which the future of the nation depends, and he is personally building the movement which will not rest until you are stopped." Most of the room was listening closely; a few were muttering and interrupting Ogden, and the push-out group was pushing, telling Ogden, "You are coming with us." He asked them, "To where, the gas ovens?" Ogden saw a chance to get in one more sentence before going through the back door. "Here's a question for you all to think about: Sen. Kennedy has cancer and he is in his seventies. Do you think he should be denied medical care?"

Outside, in the grand lobby of Union Station, Ogden was talking to a couple of people who had come out of the meeting, one was a lady who told him it was "very rude" to have "disrupted our meeting," and that security should have been called. (She did not think that Nazi genocide was rude, though.) Shortly thereafter, many private security people began hovering around Ogden, watching him talk to another lady who was leaving the meeting early and who wanted to know more about what we are doing, agreeing that cuts in medical care to bail out Wall Street was a horrible idea, and asked for a leaflet. Ogden had already been ordered not to give anyone any leaflets, so he walked outside the Union Station with this lady, and handed her the leaflet there. When he tried to reenter the terminal, he was barred from entrance by a phalanx of security personnel, and he was then accompanied by two plainclothes—apparently private security—men, talking in their walkie-talkies, all that way to his car in the upper level of the parking garage. The security man told him, "With what happened yesterday (at the Holocaust Museum), yeah, we're escorting you all the way to your car." When Ogden asked what that had to do with him, the guard said, "Because of what you said in that meeting." When Ogden observed that the security guard had probably not even been in the meeting, and did not know what was said, the guy replied, "I have a hundred eyewitnesses."

— "Obama Administration In a Paranoid Fit" June 11, 2009 (LPAC) [1]

When fascist Yaron Brook arrived at his first speaking engagement at the Tufts University extravaganza planned for the weekend of Oct. 20-22, where he was scheduled to put forward his genocidal plan to deal with “Islamic Totalitarianism,” the LaRouche Youth Movement (LYM) was ready for him. The campus had been saturated with over 3,000 copies of the LPAC pamphlet “Is Joseph Goebbels on Your Campus?” and LYM members were well situat- ed within the 150-person audience. The LYM did not wait for Brook to finish his rant. In its midst one called out: Isn’t it true that at UCLA you said you wanted to kill thousands of Muslims? When Brooks refused to answer and continued, the LYM member addressed the audience: Can’t you understand that this is fascism? Typical of today’s “go along to get along” culture, the audience defended Brook, even as the LYM member was removed. The situation called for more demonstrative action. LYM member Alex Getachew took the lead. He stood up and gave Brook the Hitler salute, yelling “Heil, Yaron Brook,” and began goose-stepping around the room. Seven more LYM organizers fol- lowed him, demonstrating to the audience exactly what most of them were supporting. But this was only the beginning. A number of LYM members remained behind to challenge Brook, who had claimed that he didn’t even know David Horowitz, [..]

— "LaRouche Youth: We Will Brook No Fascists", unsigned, Is Joseph Goebbels On Your Campus?, LPAC.COM October 2006, www.larouchepac.com/files/media/LP6376_Train.pdf

1970s

1973

Capitol police ejected nine persons from the senate Watergate hearings Tuesday after they began read- ing a statement accusing the CIA of "intervening in domestic political life." [..] At one point several men and women were shouting passages from the statement simultaneously. Chairman Sam Ervin, (D-N. C.) ordered police to remove the demonstrators but not to arrest them. More than 50 other demonstrators marched in front of the Russell Senate Office building chanting and with anti-CIA carrying signs slogans. Police did not interfere. Later, members of the group, identified as the National Caucus of Labor Committee, held a news conference. Tony Chaitkin, who said he is a Labor-Worker party candidate for mayor of New York City, read a statement containing a number of allegations into alleged CIA activities in Newark, N.J., Boston, Detroit, and other cilies.

— "Group Disrupts Bugging Hearing; Criticizes CIA, AP, The Cedar Rapids Gazette, Aug. 8, 1973

Eight persons were arrested today and charged with dis¬rupting the Senate Watergate hearings after they began reading a statement accusing the Central Intelligence Agency of "intervening in domestic political life." They were removed from the hearing room on the orders of the committee chairman, senator Sam J. Ervin Jr. Seven are residents of New York City. They are Elijah Cunningham Boyd Jr., ..; Michel R. Colen, ..; Paul Neil Goldstein, ..; Ian D. Levit, ..; Melanie Doris Saunders, .; Sue J. Wagner,.., and David Myron Wasserman. ...

— "8 Ousted From Room For Disrupting Inquiry" August 8, 1973 The New York Times

Ten members of a group that calls itself the National Caucus of Labor Committees, including its announced candidate for Mayor, were arrested today after a melee in the City Council chmabers. It was at least the third incident in which the group had figured in the last week. The caucus contends, among other things, that Imamu Amiri Baraka aka Assemblyman Anthony Imperiale (one of the black nationalist leader's main foes) and the City Council are all tools of the Central Intelligence Agency. James A. Rotunda, one of those arrested today and the group's announced candidate for Mayor,says that one of the Caucus's aims is to liberate Newark from "fascism". Five members of the group were treated at Martland Medical Center for minor injuries sustained when the police at the order of City Council President Louis M. Trucco moved with billy clubs into a deomastration that turned into a pushing and shouting match. Only two of those arrested in the chamber on a variety of charges--they include fighitng, larceny, using offensuve language and assault and battery on a policeman--idnetified themslves as Newark residents. [..] Six members of the group gave New York addresses; one gave a New Brunswick address and still another identified him-self as living in Boston. Six members of the group gave ages that were in the early to mid-20's and none identified himself as over 30. Two of those arrested were black. The police said there had been at least two fights in the last week between members of the caucus and members of the Kawaida Temple, headed by Mr. Baraka, the black nationalist playwright formerly known as LeRoi Jones. The police said five members of the Baraka group had been' arrested yesterday on charges of possessing fighting sticks in an incident outside the National Caucus offices at 680 Broadway. Accusatory Leaflets "There have been a couple of these things where the Caucus passes out leaflets calling Baraka "Papa Doc" and a tool of the C.I.A. and then the fighting starts" a police official said. Dennis Speed, an announced Caucus candidate for City Council, was arrested outside of, City Hall today as a material witness in yesterday's confrontatlon. The police contended that he had filed an initial complaint about the incident "and then refused to come and sign a formal complaint." The Caucus, which contends that both the police and mem¬bers of the Baraka group have been disrupting its political ral¬lies, came to City Hall today to present what it called an "indictment" of the Council. The police estimated that there were about 100 demonstrators on the City Hall steps before the Council meeting began. When they moved into the Council chambers, there was shouting and foot stamping and the session broke up in total disorder shortly after Mr. Turcco recognized Anton Chitkin as the group's spokesman. The police said that 10 members of the force had been treated for minor injuries suf fered in the melee. Besides Mr. Rotunda and Mr. Tillers, the police identified the others arrested in the Council chamber as the following: Freyda Best Just, Elijah Cunningham Boyd, Richard Freeman, Daniel Corins, KGflstandinos Kalimtgis, Lawrente Sherman, Mr. Chltkin, Mark Kwidfnlski,

— "Newark Police Arrest Ten in Council Chamber Fight", Richard Phalon, September 6, 1973 The New York Times

A group of demonstrators who won widespread public attention when they were thrown right of a meeting of the City Council in Newark two weeks ago invaded a Beame-for-Mayor campaign meetIng yester¬day and encountered the polite indifference of a roomful of demonstration-wise New York City politicians. "Why don't you leave. like nice fellas" suggested Paul R. Screvane, former City Council President and manager of the mayoral campaign of Controller Abraham D. Beame. The Demonstrators. from the New Y.ork Labor party, began drifting into a back room of the Brasserie Restaurant at 100 East 53d Street as Percy E. Sutton. the Manhattan Borough President spoke to about 40 leaders of task forces that will submit reports on municipal issues to Mr. Beame. Apparently the dozen demonstrators thought they were at a news conference. But the room was bare of television cameras and full of New York City politicians and people ac¬tive in civic affairs, inured by long experience to this sort of thing, when the Labor party's mayoral candidate, Tony' Chaitkin, stood and started shouting. He denounced Mr. Beame for: not speaking out against what he called "a slave labor law.": Someone in the crowd, who wondered what Mr. Chaitkin was shouting about, asked one of his supporters, a slim, large ¬eyed girl who replied with a look of wounded intensity, "You don't know?" She explained that the reference was to the work relief program for welfare recipients that takes effect Oct. 1. Mr. Beame's reply, if any could not be heard above the hubbub. After 10 minutes or so the demonstrators left.

— "Beame Backers' Tact Deflates Protest " September 19, 1973 The New York Times

The strident U.S. Labor party stems from the National Caucus of Labor Committees, which contends it has "wrestled left hegemony" from the Communist party, in part by an "Operation Mop UP." Its weekly newspaper "New Solidarity:", says "many CPers have been sent to the hospital after jumping Labor Committee members in the CP's own meetings." Mr. Chaitkin, who became 30 March 11, is quoted by the National unemploymed and Welfare Rights Organization which his group helped set up as declaring "we intend to wreck the campaigns of our major opponents." [..]

At least 33 persons in the National Caucus's disfavor have been injured in a score of violent incidents in New York City, Buffalo, Newark, Philadelphia, Detroit, and other cities ince April 7. Opponents say Caucus members frequently came in with clubs. Caucus members conted they were defending their right to speak [and] retaliate against provocation.

— "Five Independent Candidates Are in Race for Mayoralty" Peter Kihss, October 7, 1973, New York Times

The police have arrested two men in a double stabbing in a street gang dispute on the Lower East Side, and have made two additional arrests of members of a leftist political group charged with interfering with the police. [..] The political group involved was the Revolutionary Youth Movement, identified as an off-shoot of the U.S. Labor Party. [..] The police said members of the Labor Party and the youth movement had attempted to block them when they sought to arrest one of the suspects in the stabbing... He was arrested at the headquarters of the Labor Party and Youth Movement, 102 Avenue B. The police said the suspect had been trailed to the headquarters following an assault on Police Officer Robert R. Cruz, one of the officers investigated the stabbing. Officer Cruz suffered minor injuries when struck with a chuka stick, the police said. [..] While members of the party and youth movement contended the police had used excessive force in entering the headquaters, the police said they had met resistance to the point where two men had to be arrested. They were identified as Allan Salsbury, 24, ... a member of the Labor party, and Richard Brown, 37, ... a member of the Revolutionary Youth Movement. They were charged with having harbored a suspect and having hindered police.

— Two Held in a Double Street Gang Stabbing on Lower East Side, By FRANCIS X. CLINES, New York Times, October 11, 1973, P. 8,

1974

Yet these bands, some of them organized in tiny cells, some with membership running to a thousand and more, have stained the streets of Oakland, Philadelphia, New York and other American cities with death in one ghastly case, with blood in others, and have strewn sidewalks with wounded young men and women. Meetings of opponents have been raided. Heads and bodies have been cracked. While industries — especially the auto manufacturing field — have been targed for disruption. One band known as the National Caucus of Labor .Committees (NCLC) has declared open war on the United Auto Workers union and has dubbed this project "Operation Mop Up Woodcock." This grimly refers to UAW president Leonard Woodcock, whom one of the NCLC leaders sajd the other night, they are out to get. [..] And then there are the sane revolutionaries in the National Caucus of Labor Committees — a split-off from a peel-off from larger Communist and revolutionary organizations. Once some of its leaders were in the SDS. Then they organized the National Caucus of the SDS Labor Committees. Then they left the SDS, joined with defectors from the Progressive Labor Party. They're tough. Their favorite weapon is the two-stick, leather-thonged karate Nunchaku. They are the ultras of the ultra-left. They have raided Communist and Trotskyite meetings. They have injured the opposition — sent at least 12 to hospitals. They claim cells in 23 cities or states — New Jersey, Connecticut, and New York, Bethlehem- Allentown (Pa.), San Francisco Bay area, Detroit and Washington, D.C. Also Niagara (Canada), London, Stockholm and West Germany. It is this NCLC which talks of getting Woodcock, of infiltrating big auto plants, of attempting to provoke a "1934" auto factory strike. Heading this project, they say, is a three-man auto workers' steering committee — two from Detroit and one from Buffalo.

— "Inside Labor Front", Victor Riesel, THE MORNING HERALD PAGE 4-UNIONTOWN, PA., FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 1974

In addition to its self-proclaimed struggle with the government, NCLC is locked in an ongoing feud with competing socialist organizations, exchanging vitriolic charges and denials of violence and hooliganism. The Communist Party USA accused NCLC last summer of sending in trained-"goon squads" to disrupt meetings and beat members with Japanese-style "numchuk" cudgels. NCLC denies the charges, contending its publicly avowed "Operation Mop Up" to "destroy" the Communist Party and other socialist organizations is not based on violent tactics. It says its members have been forced to defend themselves when others initiated violence against them in verbal confrontations. NCLC acknowledges existence of its elite "defense squad" of 30 to 40 members trained in the "martial arts," including karate, but emphasizes their purpose is solely defensive.

— "NCLC Fights 2-Front Psychic War" THE CAPITAL TIMES.February 25, 1974 p.23

A 24-year-old man among a group of 20 persons who were picketing outside the Lincoln Hospital was shot in the shoulder and three others were injured in a scuffle yesterday, the police [..] reported. They said the pickets were members of the United States Labor party and they had sought to enter the hospital at 141st street and Bruckner Boulevard to seek evidence that a detoxification center at the facility was being used to train members of the so-called Black Liberation Army. Ray Martino, the Labor party candidate for State Attorney General, and the others had been denied admittance by hospital officials. The police said that shortly before noon members of a "community group" began arguing with the pickets and the melee started. During the fight. the police said. Thomas Archer, who said he was the campaign manager for Mr. Martino, was wounded in the right shoulder. The three men who were beaten were identified as Armand Koloian 38 years old: Pavalo Tscharskyj, 18, and Elijah Boyd, 29, [..] The four were taken to Jacobi Hospital for treatment. Mr. Archer's wound was described as superficial. No arrests were made and no weapons recovered, the police said.

— "PICKET AT HOSPITAL IS SHOT IN SHOULDER" New York Times, May 16, 1974

One man appeared unmoved when a labor party member suggested that political assassination might be a part of the Labor Party effort. "We might have to kill Rockefeller," he said fanatically, "maybe that's violence, but it might be necessary."

— "Labor Party Rally Fizzles" LEE MORTIMER, Enterprise Staff Writer, -High Pojnt Enterprise, Wednesday, July 24, 1974

The muckiest opposition, and perhaps also the most perilous, can be heard on the street corners of several of America's largest cities. There, almost any day, members of something called the National Caucus of Labor Committees, pass out literature and empty opinions condemning Rockefeller as an oppressor of the people. Such is the ferocity of the complainers, and the dread reputation of their group, that federal law agencies are said to be "seriously concerned" that the opponents may yet turn their hatred of the Vice President into something violent. The concern may be legitimate. Though outwardly not much more that another of the small hate groups which try the nation's tolerance. NCLC has something else: magnetism. As did the Symbionese Liberation Army, it is able to draw recruits from mainstream America, program them and ever after expect conformity and obedience. The Nazis of Hitler's Germany made the tactic high art: "We can," said Goebbels, "take anyone and make him do anything." So too, reportedly, can the NCLC today. [..] "It's the kind of organization that scares me," says an investigator for the House Internal Security Committee, "who knows what crackpots like that will do?

— "Hate mongers are own worst enemies" TOM TIEDE, Great Bend Tribune, September 8 1974, p. 4

In his first Republican function since being picked by President Kord to be the next vice president. Rockefeller fended off hecklers -critical of his wealth Wednesday night in Newport. R.I. "Let him stay. This is a country of free traditions, of freedom of speech." Rockefeller'implored when an angry guest at the $100-a-platc GOP function bodily carried one of the protestors from the tent. The man, Joseph McDunough, 22, Boston, a member of the U.S. Labor Party, returned, started to interrupt, and was told by Rockefeller, "You'll have your chance." [..] "We came here to speak about how Rockefeller is establishing a fascist economy in the United States." said Steven Desmond, McDonough's companion, after Rockefeller's speech. He too was escorted out by guests when he began distributing mimeographed position statements of the U.S. Labor Parly.

— "Rocky Meets With Congress Leaders, Draws Hecklers", UPI Page A4 Thursday, Aug. 22, 1974 THE FRESNO BEE

• The Laborites disrupted the Democratic state convention last month, but they did it with a bullhorn, not a bludgeon.
  • "Go ahead and laugh but they're running", DAN MacDONALD, Syracuse Herald American July 7, 1974

[United Auto Worker's President] Leonard Woodcock's speech today on the University of Wisconsin campus was briefly delayed by a noisy demonstration by two members of the. U.S. Labor Party,... Shouting "Nazi" and "Fascist," a male member of the organization jumped to the stage just as Woodcock was approaching the podium The audience alternately booed and laughed as the man impassionately accused the United Auto Worker's president of being a CIA agent and "in pay of the Rockefellers." After several minutes the man, who appeared to be in his middle 20s, was ushered off the stage by university officials and security guards. As he was being led away, a woman member of the party began shouting the same charges until she too was led from the Historical Society auditorium.

— "Pair Shouts At Woodcock" Mike Dorgan, The Capital Times, MADISON, WIS., Tuesday, September 10, 1974 , p. 21

Labor party candidate convicted DURHAM . (AP)-The . U.S. Labor Party's candidate for chief justice of the North Carolina, Supreme Court was fined 510 in Durham District Court Tuesday after being convicted on an assault charge. The charge against Stanley Ezrol, 23, of Charlotte, stemmed from an altercation involving the Labor Party and about 50 union workers at a tobacco factory in Durham Sept. 20. Judge E. Lawspn Moore acquitted Charles H: Herndon, an American Tobacco Co. employe involved in the case. Ezrol was campaigning at the time of the incident and passing out copies of the Labor Party's newspaper. A scuffle developed between him and Herndon. Martin Donsky. a reporter for The Durham Morning Herald, covered the incident and testified that the scuffle was preceded by name-calling on both sides.

— "Labor party candidate convicted" Associated Press 6.C—THE GA5TONIA GAZETTE. Wed.. Oct. 9, 1974

• Woodhaven Michigan- The police here siad that Peter Signorelli, the United States Labor Party candidate for governor, was arrested today and charged with breach of peace. [..] The authorities declined to disclose details of the incident.
  • "Labor Candidate Arrested" AP, New York Times, Oct. 31, 1974

• The two women said they also devote some of their time to barrassing F.B.I, agents, who "have been harassing workers for years." "We call them in the middle of the night and tell them dirty jokes." said Miss Steinberg. "Like. 'Are F.B.I, agents married, or do they just live together?"
  • "Marxist organizers move into L. Bucks" ED McCONVILLE, "BUCKS COUNTY COURIER TIMES" NOVEMBER 11.1974, p. 5

1975

Three of New Jersey's mayors had warm praise yesterday for Arthur M. Okun, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, who asserted that when the "Federal Government mismanages the overall economy" and "the cities and states get the problems" the cities ought to be reimbursed with revenue aid. [..] Later, two members of the United States Labor party, Anton Chaitkin and Patrick Koechlin were arrested in an anteroom and charged with dis¬orderly conduct ahd criminal trespass after they tried to enter the room as journalists.

— "Newark, Jersey City, Trenton Mayors Hail Economist's Call for Aid to Cities" Fred Ferretti, April 22, 1975 The New York Times

SEATTLE (AP) - The American Civil Liberties Union filed a $5 million, suit against the Seattle Police Department Monday for its alleged interference with the political rights of the U.S. Labor Party. The suit was filed in U.S. District Court and also asks for an injunction prohibiting the police from further alleged interference. [..] Several party members were arrested in June while leaflcting and soliciting funds in downtown Seattle. Charges included obstructing pedestrian traffic, obstructing police officers and criminal impersonation—misrepresentation with an intent to defraud. Police contended the party's soliciting for "relief of rape" was a misleading reference to the organization's belief there is a "rape of the nation by Vice President Rockefeller and the Rockefeller-controlled Central Intelligence Agency." Plaintiffs in the suit are 16 members of the Labor Party.

— "Police sued for $5 million", The Daily Chronicle, 98531, Tuesday. September 9.1975

Caucus cadres, as the Caucusoids call each other in traditional Communist nomenclature, have a reputation for such noisy, unparliamentary behavior that they get tossed out of meetings on their pinky, red ears, and, when they're not being flang outta the hall, they're denouncing every famous face you see on TV as CIA-Rockefeller-Nato agents. No matter, what's interesting is the birth of a new, studiously Marxist, avowedly pro-Russian entity made up of mostly college-educated, young Americans.

— "Lying and betrayal destroys perspective", Nicholas von Hoffman, The Advocate, Newark, Dec. 26, 1975, page 4.

1976

In an address to the annual meeting of the International Press Institute, Sir Robert Mark, whose formal title is commissioner of the Metropolitan police of London... [..] Mark agreed. The discussion was broken at one point by Anton Chaitkin, 33, of Philadelphia who said he was a reporter for a weekly newspaper published by the U.S. Labor party. Chaitkin was trying to draw attention to the party's claim that American law agencies planned to assassinate key party figures. Private security guards took him out of the room. He was not arrested. Chaitkin had broken up a talk by Dr. Bowyer Bell of the Institute of War and Peace at Columbia University, whose main point was that terrorists were manipulating both police and press. He said terrorists had learned what acts of violence to. commit in order to capture attention.

— "Public Accountability Called Crime Weapon" PAGE TWELVE - THE TITUSVILLE HERALD, Titusville, Pa.,Wednesday, May 12, 1976

Not until POST reporterBill Chapman's storu of Sept. 12 did I realize that for some years the NCLC has been terrorizing a broad center-left band of the political spectrum: Noam Chomsky, Marcus Raskin, Frances Fox Piven, Lester Brow, the Communist Party, United Auto Workers and so on.

Then I found two other factual accounts worth reading. Charles Young's "Mind Control, Political Violenceand Sexual Warfare:Inside the NCLC" in the June Crawdaddy, and "NCLC Brownshirts of the Seventies," a pamphlet put out by Counterspy... In a typical detail, reported by Young, NCLC goons in an attack on a Socialist Workers Party meeting in Detroit "beat a paraplegic with clubs."

Perhaps not by chance, the most detailed accounts of NCLC doings have appeared in the underground press. This may be because so many NCLC victims have been on the left, which most "straights" tend to imagine not as the object of violence but s its source. [..] NCLC poses as the urest embodiment of the left but, far from wanting to persuade or co-opt or even to dominate it, it wants to crush the left. The syndrome is familiar to anyone who has studiened the rise of Hitler. [..] A duplicitous violence-prone group with fascistic proclivities should not be presented to the public unless there is a reason to present it in those terms. We should look more closely at its activities and its lavish and secret financing. [..] An FBI spokesman reporting that the bureau is in fact investigating the NCLC, read to me Director Clarence Kelley's testimony of last March in which he characterized it as a "violence-oriented organization of 'revolutionary socialists' with a membershipof nearly 1,000 located in chapters in some 50 cities . . . involved in fights, beatings, using drugs, kidnappings, brainwashings, and at least one shooting. They are reported to be armed, to have recieved defensive training such as karate, and to attend cadre schools and training schools to learn miliitary tactics..." Can anyone recall an instance in which the FBI and the American left have agreed so precisely on a domestic political menace.

— "NCLC: 'A Domestic Political Menace'" Stephen S. Rosenfeld, Washington Post September 24, 1976 p, A15

Politics marched along with the paraders yesterday as thousands-including President Ford's son Stephen and the Democratic Vice Presidential candidate, Walter F. Mondale-stepped up Fifth Avenue in bright. snappy weather to celebrate Columbus Day. [..] North of 57th Street, a contingent trom the U. S. Labor Party tried to join In. Elijah Boyd, their candidate for Senator, boomed into a bullhorn: "… the only political movement that supports the legitimate wage demands of the New York City police . . . oops . . ." The last noise came as the New York City police, their sympathies apparently not aroused, shouldered him unceremoniously up onto the sidewalk.

— "Columbus March Brings Out the Candidates" By MAURICE CARROLL October 12, 1976 The New York Times

For those of our readers who have not yet had the misfortune of being accosted by members of the U.S. Labor Party, an explanation of Michael Gelber's outburst at the recent Jimmy Carter rally is in order. Gelber, the U.S. Labor Party write-in candidate for Congress, was arrested for disorderly conduct when he disrupted Carter's address by accusing him of being "the candidate of nuclear war." [..] With this kind of ideological backdrop, it is understandable that U.S. Labor Party representatives have to harass, and sometimes physically abuse, shoppers to get them to take position papers which read like a Mad Magazine parody of a lunatic fringe political group.. It is also hardly surprising that the party's nominations for office are handed out, like prizes on Let's Make a Deal, to the person who looks and acts most ridiculous. Finally, it is easy to see why Gelber found it necessary to use Carter's audience to spout his own political philosophy. U.S. Labor Party candidates occasionally mount a soap box downtown. Those passers by who have been jostled by party representatives before generally steer clear and the few who stop to listen often are afflicted by fits of laughter.

— "Labor Party Tactics", editorial, Oct 18, 1976 THE POST-STANDARD. Syracuse, N.Y

The U.S. Labor Party, which burst into national prominence with an unprecedented half-hour prime-time election eve broadcast, is an obscure splinter group whose violent harassment of other leftists, bizarre politics and lavish expenditures have long worried much of this country's radical movement [..] The Labor Party has so worried other radicals that one left-wing research group, the Arlington, Va.-based Terrorist Information Project, recently released a long report based on interviews with past and present Labor Party members. TIP did the research in cooperation with the Fifth Estate, publishers of the well-known magazine CounterSpy. According to the TIP report, the Labor Party — or National Caucus of Labor Committees, as it is also known — is a "reflection of Marcus' ego, Marcus' thirst for power . . . Marcus is the key to the NCLC's strategy of harassment and destruction of progressive movements in the U.S., Europe and Mexico." Among the report's other conclusions were these: • During the spring and summer of 1973 the NCLC conducted a series of about 60 violent assaults against members of the Communist Party USA and the Socialist Workers Party. • The NCLC stated in 1973 that it would foment worldwide revolution within five years. • NCLC members are kept on the verge of hysteria with fears of a global holocaust that will be unleashed by Nelson Rockefeller if he faces bankruptcy. • LaRouche relies on a combination of pseudo-Freudian analysis and brainwashing to keep Labor Party members in line with his own thinking.

— "Left group was behind bizarre TV broadcast" By CARL CAPRESCHET Pacific Newsservice, THE CAPITAL TIMES, Wednesday, November 17, 1976, p. 14

A candidate for the U. S. Senate tried to interrupt a speech by Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. Tuesday, screaming that it was "an atrocity" for the governor to address a gathering of state labor leaders. Nick Benton, U. S. Labor Party candidate, was quickly hustled out of the meeting of COPE the political education branch of the AFL-CIO. "It is an atrocity to let this governor speak to this fascist organization," Benton snouted as Brown was preparing to address the group. "This reminds me of the confusion in my own office." the governor said as Benton was escorted from the room. [..]

— "Brown talk nearly interrupted", UPI, The Daily Review. April 7, 1976, p.2

Stan Ezrol, a local member of the U.S. Labor Party, was led from the auditorium where [Georgia State Sen. Julian] Bond spoke after Ezrol rushed toward the platform. The incident occurred during a questioning session after Bond's speech. Bond called the Labor Party "a group of leftwing fascists," and Ezrol headed for the stage. A security guard grabbed Ezrol and ushered him out of the building.

— "Bond Says Ethnic Remark Was Racist" CHARLOTTE (AP), High Point Enterprise. Tuesday, April 27, 1976 5A

The Labor Party is not simply Marxist in its

orientation, it is expressly solicitous for the well-being of the Soviet Union and highly critical of other leftward groups for lack of zeal in this regard. Its parent group is something called the Nalional Caucus of Labor Committees, which FRI Director Clarence Kelley describes as a "violence- ridden organization of revolutionary socialists . . . involved in fights, beatings, using drugs, kidnapings, brainwashings, and at least one shooting."

— "Strange alliance", Stanton Evans, DECEMMK 1. 1976, Pasadena Star-News

1977

The FBI has told local police the USLP is "violence prone," and characterized [Alan] Ogden as a "dangerous international terrorist," according to dossiers obtained via Freedom of Information Act lawsuits. "Do I look like a terrorist?" Ogden asks. He does not; the University of Virginia honors graduate is tall and sturdy, with short hair, button-down collar and print tie. He smokes a pipe

— "Labor party candidate adds color to state race" AP The Bee: Danville, Vo., Thursday. July 21, 1977

• The FBI, fearing the Labor Party was part of a national group bent on taking control of the nation's government, by force if necessary, conducted widespread surveiilance of the Virginia party and its members for years.
  • "Ogden Hopes To Be Spoiler in Va. Race", Bill McAllister, The Washington Post, August 16, 1977 A8

• The FBI, which maintains extensive files on the NCLC, including excerpts from Rees' Information Digest, describes the NCLC in a memorandum as a "clandestinely oriented group of political schizophrenics who have a paranoid preoccupation with Nelson Rockefeller and the CIA." Another FBI memorandum obtained by the Washongton Post calls NCLC a "violence-prone Marxist revolutionary organization." The New York-based group, estimated by various law-enforcement agencies to have 700 to 1,000 hard-core members nationwide, is known for its militancy, authoritarian internal structure, and the almost messianic zeal of its followers.
• "When Left Reaches Right". Paul Valentine, The Washington Post, August 16, 1977 A1

WASHINGTON, Sept. 18-The Justice Department has quietly dropped a seven ¬year investigation of the United States Labor Party, a small left-wing splinter group that developed from the student orotest movement of the 1960's. .According to a department spokesman. the party no longer comes under the guidelines established last year to govern surveillance of domestic political groups. These guidelines, set up under former At¬tomel . General Edward •H. Levi. pern1tt surveIllance only when the Federal' Bureau of Investigation has evidence that a group has been engaged in. a specific illegal act. It bans surveillance purely for intelligence purposes. . Paul Goldstein, an official of the Labor Party, noted in New York that the organization had been described by law-enforcement agencies as "violence prone." This charge, Mr. Goldstein asserted, was "libelous and slanderous:' and was "used to launch financial warfare against our organization!' He charged that while the investigation of the Labor Party had been formally terminated, "lower echelons" of the F.B.I. might continue it. He accused the Federal Election Commission of harassing the party by keeping its candidates off the ballot in various elections. [..]

— "Justice Department Stops Investigation of U .S.Labor Party " September 19, 1977, New York Times

1978

FBI documents warn, for example, that the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC), formed "goon squads" whose members are trained in military tactics and indoctrinated in violence. An internal memo from FBI Director Clarence Kelley tells of "beatings" and "brainwashings." Back in 1974, as Nixon's sun was sinking in the West, the NCLC set up an underground "officers training camp" at Argyle, N.Y.,. where members allegedly'were tutored in military history, close order drill, weapons handling and "small unit tactics and strategy." They have also received instructions, according to the FBI, in the delicate use of the numbachutka: This is a strangulation weapon, a deadly Korean device, composed of two sticks connected by a chain. The NCLC shares the widespread, right-wing obsession that Nelson Rockefeller and the CIA are plotting to take over the U.S. government. But there are others on the NCLC hate list, including Henry Kissinger and Ralph Nader.

"This causes one to wonder," speculates the FBI report, "if a deranged or overzealous NCLC member would take out his frustration on one or more of these individuals." The FBI has also worried that the leader, Lyndon LaRouche, might attempt to convert the NCLC into a terrorist force. "The result," warns the report, "could be catastrophic." [..] The NCLC started out on the far left, harassing FBI agents Then the group moved to the far right and began "cooperating" with the FBI. But the cooperation consisted of burdening the FBI with tips about wild conspiracies that existed only in their minds. The FBI describes LaRouche as paranoid. "He reports that key aides were programmed for his assassination. His concept of his own destiny is grandiose. The fate of the world is riding on his shoulders," declares the memo. Footnote: An NCLC spokesman said that our article is "part of an overall intelligence operation" and that the group has been militant only to protect itself from political attack. He would neither confirm not deny the weapons training program in upstate New York.

— No title. Jack Anderson and Les Whitten, Jan 30, 1978, Chillicothe Constitution Tribune

He had a1ready attacked the United Auto Workers, pouring out literature calling its 1eadership corrupt and perverted, fi1led with CIA and FBI agents, and incompetent to represent its membership. He had begun publication of his newspaper under the name SOLIDARITY, the name of the UAW paper, and only after the institution of a lawsuit eventua11y to inc1ude a number of other charges and to total $30 million dollars, did he change his to New SOLIDARITY (the New a1ways printed sma11 and in light type). He had attacked the National We1fare Rights Organization (NWRO) and finally came up with his own National Unemployed Welfare Rights Organization (NUWRO). But before he initiated the Operation MOP UP against the Communist Party (CPUSA) described above, in the January 15-19, 1973, edition of New SOLIDARITY he published an open 1etter to that organization making what amounted to a merger offer around the welfare rights issue--explaining that a refusal would imperi1 the CPUSA's status with its own "militant pro-working class members" and would actua11y lend "support to Nixon's scheming inside NWRO." [..] And it sent its organizers into the field to observe the activities of anti-nuclear activist groups -- and to try to pass out its own literature. Sources on the Left soon began to com¬plain that NCLC was "spying on nuclear foes" and reporting on them to the police. These charges, in such publications as the Maoist-oriented Guardian and the Socialist Workers Party's The Militant, were, of course, accompanied by the usual rhetoriC-¬about NCLC being "an obvious ultra-right group with links with various police agencies." There were also some rather convin¬cing bits of evidence that the NCLC had volunteered minor amounts of information -- had, in fact, apparently sought out law en¬forcement agencies to provide information to them.34 It also appeared that the type of information being provided was no more than the police could easily obtain for themselves -- mostly from literature circulated publicly by the anti-nuclear activists. Conversations with law enforcement intelligence divisions who had been contacted "by NCLC confirmed this opinion.

— Francis M. Watson, "U.S. LABOR PARTY" Institutional Analysis #7, Heritage Foundation, June 1978 www.heritage.org/Research/GovernmentReform/IA7.cfm

• Labor also gets the party's attention. The United Auto Workers is claiming that the NCLC harassed UAW members by calling their homes 30 or 40 times a day and accusing relatives of homosexuality.
  • Business Week. "The U.S. Labor Party's radical crusade". October 2, 1978.

1979

Several NCLC members were arrested in New York in January 1974 for allegedly kidnapping a dissident mcmber and holding her against her will. (The woman later dropped the charges.) [..] Those who publicly dissent from this world-view may find themselvesa, t some point, targetso f the NCLC. An NCLC leaffet dated April 4, 1974 attacks various members of the New York AFL-CIO Central labor Council as "homosexuals," "perverts," and "criminals." These unionists and their families were subjected to a campaign of obscene and threatening phone calls by NCLC cadres, orchestrated by the NCLC Security Staff in New York. Another NCLC leaflet referred to the president of a UAW local in Toledo in terms the mildest of which was "Woodcocksucker." He and his family were also subjected to obscene and harassing phone calls. The father of an NCLC member, who was attempting to persuade his daughter to leave the organization, was greeted one morning by a hearse whose driver and attendant had been told "to pick up the body," an unmistakable threat. I have been repeatedly attacked in the pages of New Solidarity. and have received threatening phone calls from NCLC members. [..] The NCLC was originally a New Left-dilettante study group; it first adopted violent tactics in the spring of 1973 with a series of physical attacks on the Communist Party U.S.A. and other left groups in an effort to prove itself more left than the Left. In the summer of 1973, the NCLC began organizing the now-defunct Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) among ghetto youth-gangs, primarily in New York, Newark. and Detroit. In 1974-75 the violence was extended to attacks on trade unionists. Local leaders of the United Auto Workers, United Steelworkers, United Mine Workers, and United Farm Workers, te name a few, were harassed and beaten. In the summer of 1974 the NCLC held a military training school for selected members at a farm near the villages of Argyle and Salem in upstate New York. Among the subjects covered were explosives and demolitiqn, small arnis, small unit tactics,a nd military history. The explosivesa nd- demolition classesw ere taught by an NCLC technicale xpert who had been a member of the Puerto Rican terrorist organization MIRA. [..] A corollary interest of the NCLC's in this period was, as suggested above, the [William F.] Buckley family, National Review, and responsible conservative organizations, which were seen by the NCLC as instruments of the Rockefeller-ClA conspiracy. Agreements were made with Carto and Baker to exchange information on the Buckleys, YAF, the ACU, NR, and others. The offices of National Review and Buckley residences in New York City, Stamford, Conn., and Sharon, Conn. were placed under periodic surveillance by the NCLC Security Staff. NCLC security officers visited Robert Yoakum, a freelance writer in Lakeville, Conn., a few miles from Sharon, who opened his extensive files on the Buckley family to the NCLC. This material was used in a series of New, Solidarity articles on the Buckleys, but the files were also intended, according to sources around the NCLC, for use in planned clandestine harassment operations against the Buckleys. In addition, NCLC security officers purporting to be journalists and conservative activists placed calls to NR, YAF, the ACU, Human Events, and others to gain current information on various conservative figures.

— "U.S. LABOR PARTY: The Swarmy Life and Times of the NCLC" GREGORY F. ROSE. National Review March 30, 1979 P. 409-413

Intelligence files reluctantly disclosed by the New Hampshire State Police showed that they considered seriously the erroneous information provided by "two very well informed gentlemen" from the US Labor Party, an organization that makes no secret of its unconventional conspiracy theories.

The Labor Party representatives claimed that a planned demonstration at the Seabrook, N.H., nuclear station was "nothing but a cover for terrorist activity." according to the state police documents. "The method of operation will be the same as recently used at a bloody anti-nuclear power plant demonstration in West Germany." the report added. No such violence occurred in New Hampshire.

— "Cops And Protesters", By MARTHA ANGLE and ROBERT WALTERS, [syndicated column], June 4, 1979, Indiana Evening Gazette

Along the way--according to former party members and, in some cases, to party publications, internal party reocrds, and law-enforcement officials--members of the party have initiated gang assaults at rivals' meetings, taken courses in the use of knives and rifles at an "anti-terrorist" school and produced private intelligance reports for the Bureau of State Security of South Africa. The party has also broght members from its branches in West Germany and Mexico to a farm in upstate New York for training in guerilla warfar, according to former party members who say they participated in the training. [..] But for opponents of the party who believe themselves the targets of systematic harassment, it is a menace that received 27 percent of the vote in a local election in Seattle ... [..] Recently, at least eight members of the party have undergone intensive training in "anti-terrorist" techniques at a camp in Powder Springs, GA., that is operated by Mitchell L. WerBell 3rd, an international arms dealer who has served as adviser to Latin American dictators, including Fulgencio Batista and Anastaso Somoza. [..] According to Mr. WerBell, the training at his camp -- costig $200 a day per person for six days--involves rifly, knife and pistol use for defense against assassination. [..] The party persistently harasses journalists and publications it regards as unfriendly. One Detroit freelance reporter who wrote of an investigation of the group found the next week that people living on his block had been sent a leaflet inviting them to a "Gay Coming Out Party" at his house. [..] Over the years, members of the U.S. Labor Party and its predecessors have been arrested on a variety of criminal charges--kidnapping, possessoin of guns, assault--but there have been few convictions. The group began with professions of non-violence and Mr. LaRouche still frequently espouses that cause, saying members act only in self-defense. Its involvement with weapons training and military-style maneuvers was known only to the inner circle of the leadership and those selected to participate. According to former members and incidents described in party publications, a frequently used tactic--particularly when members are selling the group's literature or distrupting meetings of other organizations--is to try to incite violence though insults. "Those guys are maniacs," said one former member. "I've seen them. If you don't buy a paper, you're a pig or smell bad or they call you a Nazi. They two inches from a person's face and cut them to pieces. They can get anybody to hit them in a second. They love it, getting bloddy. They talk about it all the time." When members do elicit a reaction, they file assault charges and include the incident in accounts of "assassination attempts."

— "U.S. Labor Party: Cult Surrounded by Controversy," Howard Blum and Paul Montgomery, New York Times, October 7, 1979

While the philosophy of the U.S. Labor Party has shifted dramatically over the last decade--from its roots in the leftwing student movement of the late 1960's to the cult-like right-wing political organization that it is today--one man has always ... [..] Upon his return to New York, Mr. LaRouche announced to the membership, without consultation with the party's executive committee, Operation Mop-Up. It was a two-month period of violence in March and April 1973, in which Labor committee ganges attcked Communist Party members, disruipted meetings of many left-wing groups and attempted to intervene in strikes to assert Mr. LaRouche's "leadership" of the Left. Accordding to former memberss, some participants carried guns and attempts were made to acquire a cache of weapons. This wa also a period of guerilla and terrorist training, which began at a hunting lodge in Pennsylvania and was continued at a farm he group acquired near Salem, N.Y., according to former members who led and participated in this trainig. A report on the guerilla training sessions was filed, according to a law-enforcement official, by a party member who was an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Classes were given by Vietnam veterans and European members who had military or Communist underground experience. According to several who participated, the techniques included garroting, knifing and booby trapping, small-unit maneuvers and the usual toils of boot camp. According to former members, about 50 current members of the U.S. Labor party have undergone aspects of the training. Mr. LaRouche repudiated violence again in 1974 and has persistently denied tht the training sessions took place, thought the group has acknowledged giving courses in "unarmed self-defense." [..] General Singlaub says he has since rejected the organization. "It was so clear to me after the first three or four contacts that they wanted something from me," the general said. "They hounded me for months, they flooded me with documents, they showed up at places where I spoke. " "I think they're a bunch of kooks of the worst form," General Singlaub went on. " I've been telling WerBell that if they're not Marxists in disguise, they're the worst group of anti-Semitic Jews I've encountered. I'm really worried about these guys; they seem to get some people. " . The general was asked if any mention was made in his talks of the possibility of a military coup in the United States - an idea that has recently received currency in the party as a way to put Mr. LaRouche in power. "Well, it didn't come up in that form, but it was suggested that the military ought to in some way lead the country out of its problems, It General Singlaub replied. "I guess I stepped on them pretty hard on that, and it never came up again. It was one of the first things that made me realize they're a bunch of kooks. "

— "One Man Leads U.S. Labor Party on Its Erratic Path", Howard Blum and Paul Montgomery, October 8, 1979, New York Times, Metropolitan Report, Page B1

1980s

1980

Another practice of [North American Labor Party] members is to appear at meetings that seem likely to attract conservatives. Last May two members attended a conference in Chicago sponsored by the National Pro-Life Political Action Committee.

"One of them also got into a panel session," said Peter Jemman, executive director of the U. S. anti-abortion group. "All of a sudden he stood up and launched into a five-minute tirade about some grand conspircay to kill Lyndon La Rouche. I had to ask him rather forcefully to leave."

— Nuclear group raises funds for right-wing party in U.S. Ross Laver. The Globe and Mail. Toronto, Ont.: Jan 2, 1980. pg. P.5

A reporter at the Keene, N.H., Sentinel recently got a call from a man who said his name was Jerry Stein, and that he worked for the Anti-Defamation League of the B'nai B'rith. "Stien" said he was concerned about the reputed anti-Semitic tendencies of a Lyndon LaRouche, the former U.S. Labor Party head now running for the Democratic presidential nomination, and asked what sort of "bad news" the paper had printed about him. The reporter later called the A.D.L. No one named Jerry Stein was working there. Scores of mysterious phone calls have been received over the past few weeks by reporters, Democratic Party and campaign workers involved in the Feb. 26 primary campaign. In each case the pattern is the same: the caller idntifies himself and asks questions about LaRoche A call to the organization reveals no such person exists. The result is suspicious, campaign workers, reporters, and party officials now routinely refuse to talk with a caller until confirming the person's identity. [..] The "LaRouchies," as that campaign's workers have been dubbed, deny their people are responsible. "It's a Byzantine dirty trick," said LaRouche spokeswoman Laura Cohen. "I cannot swear that there was never anyone who did anything like that, but as an organization we don't do it and it's not true." [..] Democratic Party officials complain that LaRouche workers harass them and others with calls and other tactics. [..] It's Donald Segretti type stunts," said one Democrat. "It isn't illegal. But it sure is annoying."

— "Bogus Callers Arouse Suspicion in N.H. Campaign" Megan Rosenfeld Washington Post Staff Writer; The Washington Post Feb 2, 1980; A4

LaRouche Says His Supporters Take Covert Roles in Campaign CONCORD, N.H., Feb. 15 (AP) - Lyndon H. laRouche, the former head of the U .5. Labor Party who is now running as a Democrat, has said that his campaign workers impersonate reporters and others, contending that the covert operation is needed for his security. Mr. LaRouche, who says be is a counter-intelligence expert. said that some New Hampshire newspapers, including The Concord Monitor, The Nashua Telegraph and The Keene Sentinel, had been harassing his supporters. He said that his campaign was engaged in "an undercover number" to retaliate. "Where a press is running a dirty operation against us, like Ewing's little Keene Sentinel." Mr. LaRouche said in an interview yesterday, referring to its publisher, James Ewing, "That's an open target. We can impersonate them all we want to because they are doing it to us. It's just an open field. " The former Presidential candidate of the U.S. Labor Party said that the countereffort was "necessary for security." He said that his supporters used "all kinds" of covers to investigate alleged threats. Mr. LaRouche said that he was "the ex¬ecutive of a political intelligence opera¬tion and these amateurs are not supposed to play games with people of my rank; otherwise they get chewed up. " He has said that there was a plot to set up an "assassination capability" against him. Mr. LaRouche said that the undercover operation was necessary because many of the people being talked-to by his campaign workers "have committed violations" of civil rights and election statutes. He said he has notified the United States Attorney, William Shaheen, of the violations. Mr. Shaheen said that he had received "at least a dozen" complaints from citizens about harassing telephone calls from LaRouche campaign workers, "but to say there is an active investigation is an exaggeration. " [..]

— "LaRouche Says His Supporters Take Covert Roles in Campaign" AP February 16, 1980 The New York Times

Recently, LaRouche verbally attacked two reporters for the Concord Monitor. Angered by stories the two had written, LaRouche vowed to "crush" them. In another release, the campaign charged that Christos Spirou, the Democratic leader in the New Hampshire House, is a "notorious Manchester drug pusher," and that "Spirou's links to organized crime circles in Quebec, Montreal and Greece are being traced." Says Spirou: "I was born in Greece during the Nazi occupation of that country, and my grandfather told me when I was growing up that history repeats itself - and I guess I'm living the repeat of Nazism. I don't think anyone in their right mind would print the kinds of things they've printed about me and other people in New Hampshire state government."

— "FRINGE CANDIDATE OR A THREAT?; ; THE LYNDON LAROUCHE CAMPAIGN" Charles Kenney Globe Staff. Boston Globe Boston, Mass.: Feb 17, 1980. pg. 1

In 1971, the NCLC founded its own "intelligence units" and in 1972 selected members began paramilitary training, according to LaRouche. "After recurring assaults by Com• munist Party, Socialist Workers Party and other groupings, a security section was added to the intelligency organization:' LaRouche wrote in his book. The NCLC started what it called "Operation Mop-Up," striking out against its enemies, including Communist Party members, according to the LaRouche book. The NCLC also allegedly began harassing its nonviolent critics, including journalists. There were reports they were engaging in violence. "so we decided to do a piece on them." recalled Joe Klein, a founder of the Boston Real Paper newspaper. who now works for New York magazine. When Klein and a colleague were covering a 1973 NCLC meeting, LaRouche pointed them out In the crowd and "a couple of his followers started making a move on us:' Klein said. "One of them grabbed Church (Klein's colleague) by the beard and slammed him against the wall," Klein said that although they escaped without injury, his family "started getting , . , threats at 4 a.m. and 5 am. We decided to put a police guard at the Real Paper," "They succeeded in intimidating the Real Paper into not running the piece. I voted to run the story:' Klein said. Although the Operation Mop- Up days are over, LaRouche opponents and a number of journalists say the telephone calls continue. "I got two phone calls. They call up and say you'd better stop attacking us, otherwise you're going to be very sorry:' said Irwin Suall, an executive of the Anti Defamation League of B'nai B'rith in New York. Two weeks ago in Rochester, N.H., a young woman from the University of New Hampshire was verbally abused by an angry LaRouche cam¬paign worker after she asked the candidate critical questions and talked to a reporter at a rally. The LaRouche aide called her a "prostitute" and re¬fused to let her ride a bus back to the campus with the other students who had attended the rally. "The power that LaRouche seems to have over people scares me. He presents a lot of complicated, really unrelated information which I don't think people really understand, and then he draws a simple conclusion:' said the student, who asked not to be named. When asked about their treatment of the student, LaRouche aides charged that she was a "plant" from Gov. Brown's campaign, which she denied. LaRouche conceded to The Times that his group may have made ha¬rassing calls, but he said it was "only when it is overwhelmingly justified . . . for the general good."' LaRouche also charged that Klein had harassed LaRouche's parents and was "a liar and a degenerate,"

— "LaRouche Trying to Lose Splinter Label" ELLEN HUME Los Angeles Times Feb 16, 1980; pg. A20

"Security" became more important and members of the party were trained in self-defense and "anti-terrorist techniques" at the ir own farm and later at a private camp in Georgia operated by international arms manufacturer Mitchell WerBell III. In 1974 they launched "Operation Mop-Up," a retaliatory move against the Communist Party. For about a month Caucus members attended CP meetings, provoking both physical and verbal fights. Later they harassed prominent liberals like Marcus Raskin and linguist Noam Chomsky, calling them "scum" and "fascist," among other things. "Although the Labor Party has developed a new configuration of tactical alliances since January 1974," said an unsigned article inthe Oct 13, 1979, edition of New Solidarity, "it is nonsense to argue that the party's outlook or method have changed over the period of its existence. Dveloped a greater richness, yes; changed in any essential feature, no."

— "Lyndon LaRouche!" By Megan Rosenfeld; The Washington Post ; Feb 22, 1980; D1;

Gov. Hugh Gallen and other New Hampshire officials were targeted for harassing telephone calls "day and night," according to a list found in a room occupied by a campaigner for presidential aspirant Lyndon H. LaRouche.

The names of Gallen, state Atty. Gen. Thomas Rath and New Hampshire Secretary of State William Gardner ap¬peared on the list obtained by the Associated Press, along with the names of several mayors and city clerks in the state. Under the heading, "New Hampshire Target List," were these instructions: "These are the criminals to burn-we want calls coming in to these fellows day and night-use your networks to best advantage," [..] The photocopied list was left in a Concord YMCA room rented by a LaRouche campaigner. It was apparently distributed Feb. 24, two days before the primary. "That would be consistent with the calls I received," Hath said. "I got about 50 phone calls on Sunday at my home," Some of the callers said, "We know where you live," he added. Hath said one person on the list "moved out of his house for a night" because of persistent calls. Several officials named on the list said during the cam¬paign that they received harassing telephone calls after run-ins with LaRouche campaigners over leafleting or vo¬ter registration. LaRouche admitted during the campaign that his work¬ers impersonated reporters and others to gather informa¬tion about his opponents. He said such "undercover num¬bers" were necessary for security, and contended that he was the target of an international conspiracy to kill him.

— "Alleged LaRouche 'Target List' Found " AP, Los Angeles Times; Mar 2, 1980; pg. A26

CONCORD, N.H. - State and local officials in New Hampshire were targeted for political pressure during the recent primary campaign, a spokesman for presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche has confirmed. He would not say whether the LaRouche campaign had compiled and circulated a "New Hampshire target list." A list of names and telephone numbers of state and local election officials, including the governor and attorney general, was part of documents obtained by the Associated Press on Thursday. The documents were found in a room that had been rented to a LaRouche campaign worker in Concord. Titled "Morning Briefing," the documents detail a strategy for the three days of the presidential primary campaign. "There is a good chance" the list came from the campaign, spokesman Ted Andromidas said. "But I don't know. We did choose to target those people for political pressure hopefully to prevent them from carrying out the kind of fraud that occurred in Tuesday's election - fraud, by the way, which (may) send several of those (people) to jail."

— N.H. OFFICIALS PRESSURED - LAROUCHE AIDE Associated Press. Boston Globe (pre-1997 Fulltext). Boston, Mass.: Mar 2, 1980. pg. 1

[Gov. Hugh] Gallen blasted the LaRouche campaign for using "vindictiveness, wild charges and harassment," and his criticism of the recount call was backed by a group of five Republican senators led by Senate President Robert Monier.

— N.H. Recount Law: In Need Of Change? Associated Press. Boston Globe (pre-1997 Fulltext). Boston, Mass.: Mar 2, 1980. pg. 1

Since LaRouche launched his 1980 campaign for President, media interest in his political background has increased. One article published by The Times prior to the New Hampshire primary traced his political career from its leftist origins in the Socialist Workers Party (from 1948 to 1963) to his subsequent founding of the National Caucus of Labor Committees in 1966, which then regarded itself as "an intellectual leftist organization," to a dramatic swing to the right in recent years. The story also reported charges that LaRouche supporters had a pattern of harassing groups or individuals regarded as enemies, and that some had received weapons and martial arts training at a Georgia retreat operated by a former U.S. intelligence agent with ultraconservative ties. [..] Following the campaign, a list of names of lop New Hampshire government officials, including the governor and attorney general, Was found in a room occupied by a LaRouche campaigner. Under the heading, "New Hampshire Target List,' were the instructions: "These are the criminals to burn-we want calls coming into these fellows day and night-use your networks to best advantage." New Hampshire Ally. Gen. Thomas Rather said he had received about 50 phone calls at his home, some of the cal¬lers telIing him ominously that they knew where he lived Several other officials said they had received harassing calls after run - ins with LaRouche campaigners during the prlmary.

— "A Nuclear Pitch at the Airport" WILLIAM OVEREND Los Angeles Times Apr 10,1980 pg.G1

1981

Actor Peter Fonda stuck up for his sister, Jane, but it earned him a misdemeanor charge from police. Fonda was detained yesterday after he allegedly pulled out. a knife and cut up a cardboard sign posted outside a terminal at the airport in Denver. The sign read: "Feed Jane Fonda to the Whales." The signed belonged to the Fusion Energy Foundation, a group that supports nuclear energy. Miss Fonda has campaigned vigorously against nukes and also on behalf of saving whales. Her brother, 42, was released without having to post bond for the charge of destruction of property, said police Lt. Paul Kaiser. However, he missed his plane to Bozeman, Mont. He owns a ranch near there. No one was hurt in the incident, Kaiser said, and the value of the sign was minimal.

— About people Syracuse Herald-Journal, Saturday, July 25, 1981 A-9

• Off camera, the candidates were friendly except for a brief shouting match outside the studio between Mr. Barbaro and Mr. Klenetsky after Mr. Barbaro referred to Lyndon H. LaRouche, the founder of the U. S. Labor Party as a known anti-Semite. Mr. Klenetsky, who was the party's candidate for Governor of Illinois three years ago, said he was Jewish.
  • "KOCH JOINS DEMOCRATIC RIVALS IN FIRST DEBATE" LYNN, FRANK. New York Times. (Late Edition (East Coast)). New York, N.Y.: Aug 31, 1981. pg. A.1

His organization was dedicated to the proposition that every other group on the far left was a tool of the Rockefeller family, the Ford Foundation, and/or the CIA, and it spent more than five years disrupting meetings of organizations ranging from the Communist Party to the United Auto Workers. [..] His campaign for president last year was rife with wild accusations on the order of: "Gov. Hugh Gallen caught in assassination plot," a headline of a campaign press release during the New Hampshire primary.

— "Senator Finds an Unlikely Ally in Abscam Fight " The Washington Post (1974-Current file); Nov 25, 1981; A4;

1982

• Teamster Madness by Douglas Foster, Mother Jones Magazine Jan 1982. [2]

• A pro-nuclear energy group founded with the help of politician Lyndon LaRouche said yesterday it will try to make "a laughingstock" out of Henry Kissinger by pushing an assault complaint against his wife. Dennis Speed, regional coordinator of Fusion Energy Foundation, said it was at his suggestion that a group member filed charges after being involved in an altercation with the Kissingers.
  • "KISSINGER TARGET OF COMPLAINT " Boston Globe 5 Mar. 1982

As The Times reported in 1979, followers of LaRouche sign up supporters at airports and campuses around the country, under the name of the Fusion Energy Foundation. They promote nuclear power and carry colorful banners with slogans such as "Feed Jane Fonda to the Whales." Defectors told The Times in 1979 that LaRouche's U.S. Labor Party, previously called the National Caucus of Labor Committees, is a cult-like, paramilitary group, Members have been involved in scuffles at airport With Fonda's brother. Peter. and with Nancy Kissinger, wife of former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger.

— Vidal Badly Eclipsed by Brown in Fund Raising ELLEN HUME Los Angeles Times (1886-Current File); Jun 2, 1982; pg. B3

A $1.5 million damage suit has been filed by U.S. News & World Report against the U.S. Labor Party, charging that affiliates of the party impersonated the magazine's White House reporter in interviews with news sources. The suit said the chairman of the First National Bank of Boston and officials of the National Association of Home Builders had received telephone calls from a woman representing herself as Sara Fritz, a White House correspondent for the weekly magazine. In a third instance, a man posing as a reporter for the magazine questioned a staff member of the Senate Select Committee on Ethics about two of its investigators, the complaint said. The suit was filed Wednesday against the New Solidarity International Press Service and Campaigner Publications, both affiliated with the U.S. Labor Party, which was founded by Lyndon H. Larouche Jr., a threetime candidate for the Presidency.

— Magazine Sues U.S. Labor Party Over Impersonation Of A Reporter AP. New York Times. (Late Edition (East Coast)). New York, N.Y.: Aug 20, 1982. pg. D.16

1983

On the other hand, some NDPC-affiliated candidates have made a practice of loudly scolding the sponsors of forums for debate between mainstream candidates in hopes of squeezing onto the podium. Sheila Jones, who ran as a t hird-party candidate for the 9th Cong ressional District seat last year and as a Democrat in Chicago's mayoral primary on Feb. 22, interrupted debates in both races by shouting from the audience. After she was ejected, her supporters carried on.

— "Right-wing group takes aim at local school elections" by Thomas J. Lee, Herald Political Editor, THE SUNDAY HERALD September 4, 1983 Section 1—11

• Walter F. Mondale held a news conference at the Summit Hotel, but some of members of the press turned out to be politicians and polemicists. Two followers of Lyndon LaRouche peppered Mr. Mondale with questions about plots and conspiracies.
  • "NEW YORK DAY BY DAY : Mondale Meets 'the 'Press' " Carroll, Susan Heller Anderson and Maurice. "[4]. " New York Times [New York, N.Y.] 30 Nov. 1983, Late Edition (East Coast): B.3}}

Many of these peripheral supporters are first apporached in airports. In summer 1981, actor Peter Fonda flew into a rage at Denver's Stapleton International Airport when he saw Fusion Energy Foundation members ridiculing his sister, Jane, for her environmental activities. He drew a pocketknife and attacked their sign, which read "Feed Jane Fonda to the Whales."

A year later, LaRouche was in the news again when Nancy Kissinger, wife of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, was accused of attempting to choke a Fusion Energy Foundation demonstrator at Newark Internal Airport. The young woman had asked Henry, whom LaRouche considers to be a British agent, if it were true that he slept with young boys. Nancy, who was escorting her husband to Boston for a triple-bypass heart operation, was not amused. "I took her by the neck and pinched her," Nancy admitted at her trial in Newark Municipal Court. She asked the woman, "Do you want to get slugged?" The judge ruled that Nancy had engaged in "a reasonable spontaneous, somewhat human reaction." Since there was no injury, he acquitted her of assault.

In August 1982, LaRouche followers held a Washington press briefing to denounce Kissinger as a homosexual and release information claiming to link him, through an Italian Masonic lodge, with the murder of Aldo Moro. At about the same time, members of the LaRouche front called the Committee Against Genocide picketed in New York, denouncing Averall Harriman, a leading liberal in the Democratic party, as a Nazi because his aristocratic family supported eugenics research.

The LaRouchies refer to their slanders as "psywar techniques." In a world in which the conspirators supposedly saturate us with their books, music, newspapers, and television shows, LaRouche's followers fight back with words that stick in one's mind like shards of glass.

"We're not very nice, so we're hated," said Paul Goldstain. "Why be nice? It's a cruel world. We're in a war and the human race is up for grabs." p191-192 [..] First, there was Operation Mop-Up, LaRouche's 1973 attempt to eliminate such rivals as the U.S. Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party by arriving at meetings, confronting opponents, and "poking at their minds" with psywar techniiques. An article in the party's newspaper, now called New Solidarity, described a fight that erupted when some of LaRouche's followers tried to disrupt a meeting of Communist youth group in Buffalo. When a member of the groups attempted to call the police, LaRouche's people stopped him. By the time the fight was over, the article stated, three of the enemies had to be hospitalized. An investigation of LaRouche's organization commissioned by the AFL-CIO described similar attacks: "Usually, [LaRouche's] goon squad numbered between fifteen and fifty persons, generally armed with numchukas." (A numchuka is an Oriental martial-arts weapon made of two clubs connected with a chain.)

As the mid-1970s approached, LaRouche' followers seemed to renounce street-fighting for psychological warfare and conspiracy theory. They denounced the idea of community control of schools as a fascist scheme created by Nelson Rockefeller, the Ford Foundation, the CIA, and the KGB. Throughout 1974, stories in New Solidarity told of CIA plans to brainwash the U.S. population. Articles explained how to detect brainwashing and administer psychological first aid. p.202-203

— Johnson, George (1983). Architects of fear : conspiracy theories and paranoia in American politics. Los Angeles; Boston: J.P. Tarcher ; Distributed by Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0874772753 : 9780874772753. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help)

1984

Off camera, his followers sometimes become abusively violent, however. Employees of his newsletter, the Executive Intelligence Review, regularly appear at press conferences in Washington and New York to harangue public figures they consider to be opponents. In 1980, Democratic officials in New Hampshire, the state with the first presidential primary, said they were flooded with complaints about harassment and intimidation of voters by LaRouche workers. Former members of Mr. LaRouche's now-defunct U.S. Labor Party have said the party initiated gang assaults on rivals' meetings in the late seventies and trained some members in terrorist and guerrilla warfare.

— UNITED STATES Oddball tycoon wins some battles JOHN KING. The Globe and Mail. Toronto, Ont.: Jan 26, 1984. pg. P.8

At his previous sessions in the East Room of the White House, the presidential lectern has been set up against the eastern wall of the room. This meant that, to enter or exit the room, Mr. Reagan had to walk through rows of reporters who sometimes tossed questions at him.

At his previous session, he was collared by a reporter associated with fringe presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche, who demanded to know why he wouldn't give Mr. LaRouche Secret Service protection.

Last night, however, the lectern was on the western side of the room, with the White House foyer behind him and the reporters turned 180 degrees from their usual positions

— "New Set for Reagan Allows Quick News Session Exit. " Wall Street Journal [New York, N.Y.] 5 Apr. 1984, Eastern edition: p. 1.

To fully appreciate LaRouche and his followers, you have to have had dealings with them. Which I have.

A few years ago, something that called itself Citizens for Chicago took a frenzied dislike to Jane Byrne and began selling posters of her that bordered on the pornographic.

I became curious and looked into Citizens for Chicago. Its leader lied and lied, but I established that it was one of the many LaRouche front organizations.

When I wrote a column exposing it, their response was to distribute handbills and posters claiming that I had undergone a sex change operation.

That didn't bother me, since I had evidence to the contrary.

But they somehow tracked down the address of my assistant, a female reporter. They managed to get into her high-rise building and find her apartment.

And on the doorknob they left one of their handbills. On it was drawn a bull's-eye. And there was a message.

"A warning," they said. "We will kill your cat."

So let us hope that the primary is the last election this crowd wins. If not, no cat will be safe.

— 2 WINNERS FROM THE TWILIGHT ZONE; [SPORTS FINAL, C Edition] Mike Royko. Chicago Tribune (pre-1997 Fulltext). Chicago, Ill.: Mar 20, 1986. pg. 3

"We now find ourselves faced with a possibility that radicals-fringe candidates-may fill the lieutenant governor and secretary of state slots on the Democratic ballot," [Adlai E. Stevenson III] said. "These candidates are not remotely qualified. Nor are they Democrats. They are adherents to an extremist political philosophy bent on violence and steeped in bigotry."

— SCOTT KRAFT, LARRY GREEN. Two LaRouche Illinois Victories Stun Democrats :[Home Edition]. Los Angeles Times (pre-1997 Fulltext) [serial online]. March 20, 1986:1.

In what was described by "New Solidarity" as an attempt to provide "competent leadership" for the "working class", LaRouche began "Operation Mop-Up" in 1973, a series of assaults on members of the U.S. Communist Party, according to published reports. The Heritage Foundation said more than 60 incidents of violence took place, but the "move towards violence cemented LaRouche's leadership of the U.S. Labor Party."

— "3-time fringe presidential hopeful LaRouche remains an enigma" Robert Estill The San Diego Union [serial online]. 23 March. p. A-15.

LaRouche also has been the subject of national news probes into alleged harassment of reporters whose reports were perceived as unfavorable. Klenetsky dismissed the reports yesterday as the work of LaRouche enemies exerting their influence on the media. "We are taking on very powerful enemies," he said, specifically mentioning LaRouche attacks on Henry Kissinger and former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.

— DARKHORSE CANDIDATE HOPING FOR 25% OF VOTE AIDE SAYS LAROUCHE

HAS VARIED SUPPORT

JODI DUCKETT, The Morning Call. Morning Call. Allentown, Pa.: Apr 7, 1984. pg. W.32

His 1968 divorce from the SWP was not a simple one and physical violence erupted between the Communist Party and the fledgling LaRouche organization, which fielded Operation Mop-Up in 1972. As he explains it, "The Communist Party was deployed in hooligan efforts against us. We went to law enforcement, including the FBI. The FBI said, `Take your lumps, we're not going to help you,' so we defended ourselves. That simple. Because after all, everybody knows the Communist Party is the FBI." The aggressive nature of the LaRouche followers was thus ingrained deeply in the organization from its earliest days. His people have impersonated reporters to obtain information, and frequently disrupt meetings and debates. Some even attended an anti- terrorist school conducted in the hills of Georgia. As they have learned to use the political process, the LaRouche organization also has learned to use the law, and files lawsuits with astonishing frequency.

— LaRouche indulges in explosive rhetoric; [1,2 Edition] Don Davis. The San Diego Union. San Diego, Calif.: Jun 3, 1984. pg. A.1

• The nadir was Memorial Day, normally a flesh-pressing bonanza for a politician. For Mondale, it began in Fort Lee, N.J., with catcalls from the disciples of Lyndon LaRouche Jr., a demagogic conspiracy theorist who is running for President, and went downhill from there.
  • "Last Call, and Out Reeling" By Evan Thomas;Sam Allis;Jack E. White Monday, Jun. 11, 1984, TIME [3]

Although LaRouche publicly eschews violence, over the years members have been charged with a variety of offenses, including assault, possession of weapons, possession of explosives, and kidnapping. There have, however, been few convictions. In 1973 LaRouche undertook "0peration Mop Up," as a means of consolidating his hold on what was a de facto attempt to take full control of the U.S. Communist Party .. Operation Mop Up was initiated after LaRouche returned from an extended trip to Europe, and took place during Spring 1973. During this action, more than 60 incidents of violence took place, with some victims of LaRouche's forces requiring hospital treatment. Ironically, according to published reports, it was this move towards violence that cemented LaRouche's leadership of the U.S. Labor Party, and helped to increase its membership and coffers. [..] One of the most disturbing turns in the path of LaRouche's ideology has been his incorporation of strong anti-semitic themes into the grand conspiracy he claims steers world events. As part of this move, LaRouche has established ties with organizations which promote racial hatred and anti-Semitism, including the Ku Klux Klan and the Liberty Lobby.7 [..] What makes the hatemongering aspect of the LaRouche network a serious concern is that the organization has had a history of violence, and has even had some of its members undergo paramili¬tary training. Over the years, LaRouche followers have been charged with--although infrequently convicted of--criminal acts including assault, kidnapping, possession of weapons, and pos¬session of explosives. Moreover, LaRouche generally travels with armed bodyguards, and is reported to keep armed guards outside his New York apartment. The potential to turn the network's proclivity for violence against a specific racial or ethnic group is real.

— "THE LAROUCHE NETWORK " Milton R. Copulos Senior Policy Analyst, Heritage Foundation, July 19, 1984

• ...at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School last March 20, Nobel-Prize winning economist Lawrence Klein was giving an introductory economics lecture when three followers of political guru Lyndon LaRouche burst in, accusing Klein of Nazism and genocide. Klein responded, "I insist that you are a bunch of screwballs, and would you please get out," and university police arrived and evicted the LaRouchites.
  • "Free Speech on Center Stage, Nationally" September 29, 1984 By PETER J. HOWE, The Harvard crimson [4]

1985

onathan Prestage was a reporter with the Manchester Union-Leader in 1980 when his editors asked him to write an article on Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr., the right-wing presidential candidate who was then stumping New Hampshire for votes in the state's Democratic primary. There were allegations by New Hampshire residents that LaRouche workers were harassing voters on the street and making odd late-night telephone calls to political figures.

LaRouche showed up at the newspaper's office with a group of about 10 people, Prestage recalled, several of them security men who left their guns downstairs. In a tense interview with the entire group glaring at him, Prestage said, he asked LaRouche about his organization's intelligence-gathering network.

"He said, 'You can't use that,' " Prestage recalled. "I said, 'Why not?' . . . He said, 'We have ways of making it very painful for people.' I asked, 'Is that a threat?' They just kind of chuckled." The next day, the paper ran an article by Prestage describing the exchange.

Prestage said that the day after the story ran, he awoke in his large old house in rural Barrington to find one of his cats dead on his back doorstep. In all, three cats were left dead on his doorstep over three days.

Prestage said he believes that LaRouche's supporters killed his cats. He is not alone in believing himself to be a target of their alleged harassment.

Former associates of LaRouche and others familiar with his organization said its supporters routinely use threats and questionable tactics to silence critics and former members and to discourage the media from writing critically about the group.

Supporters of the group also routinely use pseudonyms, or impersonate reporters or others, in their intelligence work, said ex-members and people familiar with the group.

LaRouche and his associates deny they harass anyone. An associate added that they had nothing to do with Prestage's dead cats.

In a deposition in connection with a libel suit against the NBC network last year, LaRouche said that at a 1980 New Hampshire news conference he said he was an executive of a "political intelligence operation" and that "amateurs" who "play games" with him would "get chewed up." He added in the deposition that that meant he would expose them.

Jeffrey Steinberg, a top LaRouche aide, said that reporters who complain of harassment have other motives. "A lot of journalists don't like us," Steinberg said. [..] "Our method is polemical," Goldstein said. "We aim to provoke."

One ex-associate put it another way. "To people who are unfavorable to them, they do whatever they can to commit character assassination," the ex-member said. [..] In a 1981 memo to members, LaRouche said the group should conduct "ruthless political campaigns" against its enemies. "We measure personal political performance by the number of enemies of humanity each region of the organization prodded into apoplectic fits that day."

"Since 1972, obedience to the NCLC National Caucus of Labor Committees leader has included carrying out . . . verbal and propaganda attacks on individuals and members of other groups LaRouche decided were his enemies," John Rees, who has been studying LaRouche for years, wrote in a report on the group in his newsletter. "First a series of vitriolic and obscene attacks would be unleashed in the LaRouche publications. There followed personal harassment in the form of midnight telephone calls, personal and photographic surveillances . . . telephone calls to friends and family members, picket lines at home and work, vexatious lawsuits and vandalism . . . . " [..] One man who says he has borne the wrath of LaRouche supporters is Dennis King, a Manhattan free-lance writer who has written extensively about the organization for six years. King declined to comment on the record about the alleged harassment, but he pointed to sworn statements that he has submitted in federal court cases.

Steinberg denied that the group harassed King but said King has urged people to harass LaRouche.

According to King's affidavits, the anonymous telephone calls started in 1979, soon after he started writing about LaRouche. Some threatened his life, he said. He estimated he has received 500 abusive or hang-up calls at home.

Leaflets handed out in New York around that time said the publisher of the newspaper he was then working for was a criminal and that its lawyer was a homosexual, King said. LaRouche publications accused all three of being drug pushers, and at least one article contained King's address and phone number, King said.

On Oct. 14, 1980, King said he received a telephone call threatening him with homosexual rape and murder. The caller also described how King was to be tied to a lamppost and beaten with a baseball bat.

On Feb. 20 1984, a LaRouche publication, New Solidarity, ran an article entitled, "Will Dennis King Come out of the Closet?" King said. Copies were left throughout his apartment building, he said.

The harassment extended to members of his family, King's affidavit said. In November 1980, the employers of King's father, then 79, received letters urging that the father be fired, an affidavit said. His father and other members of the family received numerous anonymous telephone calls about him, King said. The callers said King would be murdered.

In a deposition, LaRouche said King is with the "dope lobby" and that LaRouche's supporters have been "monitoring" him since 1979. "We have watched this little scoundrel because he is a major security threat to my life."

Another journalist the group has publicly denounced is Pat Lynch, an Emmy-winning NBC television producer who researched a network broadcast about LaRouche. Members of the LaRouche organization have picketed NBC's New York offices with signs saying such things as "Lynch Pat Lynch."

In October, on the first day of a libel trial in U.S. District Court in Alexandria in which LaRouche charged that Lynch's broadcast had defamed him, the NBC switchboard said a telephone caller threatened Lynch's life. A spokesman for the LaRouche group said it knew nothing about the threat. An FBI spokesman said an investigation is pending but declined to comment further. [..] An NBC researcher in Chicago, Marcie Permut, 22, said that soon after she started working on a segment about LaRouche, someone started placing fliers around her parents' neighborhood in suburban Chicago stating that she was running a call-girl ring out of her parents' home. LaRouche associates say they have no knowledge of the matter.

"His outfit smacks of fascism to me," Rep. Parren J. Mitchell (D-Md.) said in a statement introduced in the libel case. Mitchell said in an interview that LaRouche supporters tried to break up his political gatherings in Baltimore and distributed literature calling him a drug dealer and a "house nigger." Mitchell said he received several anonymous telephone calls, including one death threat.

"I knew it was them because I recognized some of their voices," Mitchell said. He said the harassment ended soon after he pulled a gun on a group of LaRouche supporters gathered outside his Baltimore home. [..] But the name that comes up perhaps more than any other in LaRouche's pantheon of enemies is former secretary of state Henry Kissinger. The preoccupation with Kissinger increased after June 10, 1982, when Kissinger's wife Nancy was escorting him onto a plane at Newark Airport for a trip to Boston, where he was to undergo triple-bypass surgery.

When a LaRouche supporter, Ellen Kaplan, started yelling abusive comments at him, such as, "Is it true that you sleep with young boys at the Carlyle Hotel?" Nancy Kissinger allegedly grabbed the woman by the throat. She was acquitted in a Newark court of assaulting Kaplan.

LaRouche publications have said that Kissinger is a Nazi and a murderer. In his deposition, LaRouche said Kissinger is "a faggot." LaRouche's supporters have demonstrated against Kissinger and heckled him at his speeches.

Former associates of LaRouche and critics of the group said they believe that LaRouche encourages such tactics because they engender angry responses, and make members of his organization feel more alienated from the outside world. "He likes to bait people into counterattack," said one former member. "It increases the sense within the group of being under attack." [..] Ex-members said that the organization brands as traitors those who quit the group. Former members said they know of several dropouts who have received threatening phone calls from supporters.

The LaRouche-tied New Solidarity newspaper in 1974 ran an obituary for three associates who it said had been murdered by federal agents. The three, who were still alive, had recently quit the group.

The group's internal memos in the 1970s and early 1980s referred to individual dropouts variously as a liar, a thief, "psychotic," a KGB pawn, "a scummy dupe," "a witting agent," "a pathological liar," "a zombie" and "virtually paranoid."

The organization has used a range of other unorthodox methods. One tactic is for members to misrepresent themselves while investigating someone. "It was a regular modus operandi," said one ex-associate.

Former members said they routinely used pseudonyms or posed as employes of other organizations, often as reporters. (That was what the federal court jury found the group had done in trying to sabotage NBC's interview with Moynihan.)

In 1982 U.S. News & World Report filed a lawsuit in federal court against LaRouche-affiliated publications charging that their representatives had impersonated the magazine's White House reporter in phone interviews. The defendants denied the allegations but agreed to a permanent injunction barring them from impersonating the magazine's reporters.

Jeffrey Steinberg, one of LaRouche's top aides, said in a deposition that he has posed as a reporter for nonexistent publications and that the group's policy is not to impersonate employes of existing publications.

LaRouche added in his deposition that his associates have infiltrated opponents' electoral campaigns to gather information

— "Critics of LaRouche Group Hassled, Ex-Associates Say"

By John Mintz Washington Post Staff Writer

January 14, 1985

Last fall, presidential candidate Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., suffered a double defeat at the hands of a federaljury in Alexandria, Virginia. His $150 million libel suit agasint NBC-- wghich aired two reports that charged, among other things, that LaRouche was the leader of a violenceprone, anti-Semitic cult that smeared its opponents and sued its critics -- was rejected. Perhaps more significant, the jury ordered LaRouche to pay $3 million to NBC on the network's counterclaim that LaRouche and his followers had played "dirty tricks" on the network and had interfered with its newsgathering activities by, for example, impersonating NBC reporters and producers. While this was by no means the first time that the LaRouchians, as his followers are commonly called, had been detected posing as reporters and members of TV camera crews, it was the first time that a jury had weighed the evidence regarding such activities and imposed punitive damages on LaRouche. [..] As I testified at the trial, my first encounter with LaRouchian dirty tricks occurred on January 30, 1984. As the producer of a report on LaRouche for NBC's now-defunct First Camera program, I was filming LaRouche's residence in Leesburg, Virginia. While correspondent Mark Nykanen was doing a "stand up," my associate producer, Kathleen Paterno, and I saw one of LaRouche's security guards reach through the window of our crew car, remove our work schedule from the dashboard, read it, return it, then stroll away. Later that afternoon, back in Washington, Paterno was telephoned by a man representing himself as an aide of New York Senator Daniel P. Moynihan. whom we were scheduled to interview at 5:00 p.m. The caller said that the senator was having "second thoughts" about doing the interview because he and his family had been subjected to harassment by LaRouchians in the past. Half an hour later the "aide" called back. raising questions about how thorough our report would be. Had we talked to the FBI, the CIA, the IRS? Paterno and I assured him that we had. After this call. Paterno looked worried. The man we had just spoken to, she said, sounded very different from the one with whom she had set up the appointment. I called Senator Moynihan's office and, to my surprise, learned that the interview had been cancelled by someone purporting to be from NBC. The interview was rescheduled for 5:30 p.m. When I and my associates arrived at Moynihan's office. the senator showed me a press release that had just arrived from LaRouche's political organization. the National Democratic Policy Committee. It stated: "Fat [sic] Lynch to interview Moynihan today" information that could only have been obtained from the work schedule perused by the security guard. [..] This use of a bogus phone call to elicit information that the LaRouchians could use for ends of their own reminded me of what Sara Fritz had told me earlier that week in a taped interview. Frrtz, who was then White House correspondent for US News & World Report and who now covers Congress for the los Angeles Times, had told me how in 1981 a LaRouchian woman had impersonated her to obtain important interviews, which then appeared under that woman's by-line in various LaRouche publications. US News & World Report sued and won an injunction against the offending publications. I suggested to our lawyers that, should LaRouche follow through on his threat to sue NBC, the network should countersue - which is what happened. [..] From January 30 on, several people who had served as sources for my First Camera report began to receive strange phone calls. One was Lynn Cutler, vicechair of the Democratic National Committee. Her caller identified himself as "Scott Lewis," my researcher. "Lewis" told her that I was concerned that NBC was "slanting" my story by suppressing information about the Reagan administration's links to LaRouche. Cutler believes that the imposter was trying to get her to file a complaint against the network for biased news reporting so as "to create problems for the Republicans and the Democrats. "

A few days later, Cutler received another phone call, which she found vaguely menacing since the caller seemed to have inside information about her daily schedule. "We know you are going to be interviewed by Pat Lynch," the caller said, and then hung up. (LaRouche and his followers have targeted prominent Democrats for harassment and vilification for several years, although LaRouche himself is at least nominally a Democrat. Portions of videotapes showing LaRouchian harassment of Mondale, which I had obtained for my broadcast, were played for the federal jury.) [..]Sometimes the Larouchians' tactics can damage a journalist's career. Freelance journalist Charles Fager is a case in point. He became a target of the LaRouchians, he says, while he was preparing an article about LaRouche for Boston's The Rettl Paper in the early 1970s. Fager believes that a combination of physical and legal threats caused the paper to spike his article. Then. around 1980, by which time he was working for Congressman Paul McCloskey of California, he began receiving what turned out to be bogus phone calls. [..] Occasionally, LaRouchian "actors" meet their victims face to face. In February 1984, Terry Dalton, state editor of the Centre Daily Times in State College, Pennsylvania, was visited by a La- Rouche camera crew. Members of the crew implied that they worked for NBC and canre into the Dalton house with cameras rolling. "I was subjected to a series of accusations and increasingly hostile questions from the man holding the microphone," Dalton recalls. (Dalton had written two stories about a local woman who had been persuaded to run for Congress as a LaRouche candidate but had withdrawn from the race.) Dalton says that the reporter, who identified himself as Stanley Ezrol, accused him of making "abusive" phone calls to the candidate, then interrogated him about why he had written "negative" stories about Lyndon LaRouche. Dalton says that the question he found most "chilling" came at the end of Ezrol's interview: "Have you ever feared for your personal safety?" Before the La- Rouchians left, Dalton persuaded Ezrol to produce a business card. [t bore the name of a LaRouche publication: Executive Intelligence Review. One month after Dalton's encounter with the LaRouchian camera crew, Arch Puddington of the League for lndustrial Democracy was ambushed by a threeperson crew that arrived uninvited at his office in New York City. A woman asked why he was "undermining" LaRouche's presidential campaign. Members of the crew raised questions about his having written for Natiortal Review, a publication the LaRouchians detest. "They asked me whether I had participated in pot parties on [publisher] William Buckley's yacht," Puddington recalls. "Then they spent a lot of time impugning the reputation of free-lance writer Dennis King, saying he had 'low moral character' and was a member of the illegal drug lobby. " Dennis King, who has written extensively about LaRouche and his followers, has been harassed by them for six years and has been sued three times. King recalls two faceto- face encounters with LaRouchians. man who introduced himself as David Feingold from the AFL-CIO struck up a conversation with me on a shuttle flight down to Washington." says King, who edits Nex' Americ'a, a bimonthly published by the Social Democrats, USA. After telling King that he was concerned about the LaRouche "menace," the man tried to draw him out. King later called AFL-CIO headquarters and learned that no such man worked for the organization. He was subsequently able to identify the man as a LaRouche follower named Herbert Quinde from photographs supplied by The Hartford Courant. [..] One former LaRouchian whom I interviewed last winter (and whose information was admitted into evidence) took a more sinister view of the practice. "We use our phones as weapons: to harass, to intimidate, to probe, to interrogate. You'd be amazed the kinds of things you learn by pretending to be someone important. "

— "ls Lyndon LaRouche using your name?: How the LaRouchians masquerade as journalists to gain information" bv PATRICIA LYNCH COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW, MARCH/APRIL 1985 p42-46

ln 1973, still claiming ro be a leftist, LaRouche launched a campaign "to finish off the Communist Party." It was called Operation Mop-Up and it was violent. Squads of NCLC members beat up Communist Party activists, many of whom required hospital treatment. [..] Some LaRouchians underwent paramilitary training.

— "Far left, far right--far out" bv PATRICIA LYNCH COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW, MARCH/APRIL 1985 p44

The first word of the new U.S.-Soviet talks came in a speech Tuesday by [Richard R. Burt, assistant secre¬tary of state for European affair] to the Washington World Affairs Council. Burt's speech was enlivened by a scuffle when Allan Ogden, an associate of radical politician Lyndon LaRouche, interrupted Burt with shouts of "traitor!" A member of the audience responded by dellvering several hard punches to Ogden's face and pushing him out of the meeting. The assailant was removed from the meeting but later returned. Burt, apparently unaffected by the fray, completed his speech.

— "U.S., Soviets Plan First Afghan Talks in 3 Years", NORMAN KEMPSTER, Los Angeles Times May 29,1985

And [Federal Reserve Board chairman Paul A.] Volcker has yet to convert some of his public enemies, like the followers of leftist Lyndon LaRouche. Several weeks ago, while Volcker was addressing a gathering in Seattle, one of his detractors released a sack of live rats in the auditorium, temporarily disrupting his speech.

The protest was reportedly directed at his high interest rates and pressures on Third World debtor nations.

— "Paul A. Volcker: America's Money Man: Harvard's 334th Commencement Speaker" June 06, 1985 12:00 AM By DAVID S. HILZENRATH, the Harvard Crimson, www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=219773

1986

The case grows out of two NBC broadcasts about LaRouche in 1984--one on an NBC Nightly News program, on Jan. 30, the second on the First Camera magazine of March 4, both dealing with LaRouche and his organization and alleging that LaRouche believes Jews are responsible for the evils in the world. The First Camera program also said that an Internal Revenue Service investigation would result in a criminal indictment of the LaRouche organization and that LaRouche once proposed the assassination of President Carter and several of aides.

NBC's countersuit contended that LaRouche associates had attempted to interfere with the network's investigation of LaRouche. NBC alleged that LaRouche aides had telephoned Senator Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) and the NBC office in Washington, claiming to represent NBC or the senator and canceling a scheduled interview. The LaRouche aide who called NBC in the guise of a Moynihan staffer was also said to have sought and obtained the names of others NBC had contacted in its investigation of LaRouche.

— "NBC upheld in appeals decision on LaRouche case. " Broadcasting. 110 (Jan 20, 1986): 234(2). . Gale.

The group, known by its Swedish initials as E.A.P., is associated with the American right-wing political figure Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Mr. LaRouche's wife, was described as the chairman of E.A.P. in an October 1983 press release distributed by the Executive Intelligence Review, an organization founded by Mr. LaRouche.

Founded in West Germany in 1974, the European Workers' Party is stridently anti-Communist and frequently criticizes the Soviet Union. Its branches in Sweden, Denmark, Italy and France oppose Communism, advocate European unification and support the nuclear industry.

The party had made personal attacks on Mr. Palme, a Social Democrat who served as Sweden's Prime Minister for 11 of the last 17 years.

We had hard polemical campaigns against Palme, Mr. Ericson admitted, but it was mutual - he indulged in polemics against us, too.

— SWEDISH SUSPECT WAS ONCE IN RIGHTIST GROUP STEVE LOHR, Special to the New York Times. New York Times. (Late Edition (East Coast)). New York, N.Y.: Mar 19, 1986. pg. A.6

Compared to the allegations of above-the-law tactics attributed to the LaRouche organization, Fairchild and the Harts have a fairly mild history of civil disobedience. Hart and a LaRouche colleague, Ronald A. Bettag, 37, were arrested on May 7, 1985, by suburban Glencoe police on a charge of disorderly conduct after they allegedly disrupted a speech by Milwaukee's Roman Catholic Archbishop Rembert Weakland at a Glencoe synagogue. Hart allegedly tried to hand the archbishop a foil-wrapped piece of liver. A spokesman for Hart alleged that Archbishop Weakland was praising Adolf Hitler and that the liver represented the "pound of flesh extracted by Hitler" during the Holocaust. Police said Hart and Bettag, a roommate of Fairchild's, are charged with disorderly conduct and could face fines of up to $500. Robert Hart was fined in 1980 for "soliciting business" while standing in the middle of Chicago's Cumberland Avenue. The Harts have been involved in political fund raising tactics of LaRouche's political committee that resulted in civil fines for violating federal law. According to Federal Election Commission records, Robert and Janice Hart were questioned under oath in a probe about money orders from a Chicago bank that were given to LaRouche's political committee, Citziens for LaRouche, in their names. The committee agreed in October, 1982, to pay a $15,000 civil fine imposed by the FEC. But the fine was not paid until 1984, when the FEC refused to release nearly $500,000 in federal matching funds for one of LaRouche's three presidential campaigns unless the overdue fine was paid. [..] Hart later said that former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was part of an international "drug mafia."

Asked if she believed Jewish persons were behind the drug traffic, she replied: "That's totally nonsense. I don't consider Henry Kissinger a Jew. I consider Henry Kissinger a homosexual."

— 'LAROUCHIES' FORCE STATE TO TAKE NOTICE;

R Bruce Dold and Wes Smith Ray Gibson and Kurt Greenbaum contributed to this report. Chicago Tribune

(pre-1997 Fulltext). Chicago, Ill.: Mar 23, 1986. pg. 1

• Just before the Illinois primary, LaRouche supporters barged into the campaign office of Mrs. Hart's opponent and demanded that a worker "take the AIDS test."
  • SUPPORTERS OF LaROUCHE ARE WINNING LOCAL BALLOT SPOTS IN GROWING NUMBERS, PHIL GAILEY, Special to the New York Times. New York Times. (Late Edition (East Coast)). New York, N.Y.: Mar 23, 1986. pg. A.38

• In his last two bids for the presidency, LaRouche's campaign squads often played the role of bully-boys. They bombarded California Gov. Jerry Brown with unspeakable obscenities in a number of state primaries.
  • "Kooks right out of the Twilight Zone" LIONEL VAN DEERLIN. The Tribune. San Diego, Calif.: Mar 24, 1986. pg. B.7

LaRouche and his followers, who raise money primarily through selling literature at airports and in front of public buildings, are difficult to characterize philosophically. [..] They often disrupt news conferences of other candidates to make their points.

— Democrats make plans to keep LaRouche followers in shadows; [NO STAR Edition] NENE FOXHALL, Houston Chronicle Political Writer. Houston Chronicle (pre-1997 Fulltext). Houston, Tex.: Mar 26, 1986. pg. 21

• TWO hundred people were gathered at Georgetown University recently to hear Colorado Gov. Richard Lamm talk about immigration reform. Suddenly, a well-dressed man in the third row of the auditorium stood up and began shouting: "You're just spreading neo-Nazi ideology!" The governor tried to restore order, but the hullabaloo continued. Finally, as a uniformed guard dragged the protester from the room, the man yelled one final message: "Lyndon LaRouche has the answers!"
  • "Lyndon LaRouche has got America's attention now!" By John Dillin, Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor The Christian Science Monitor. March 27, 1986 edition

Mr. LaRouche, who operates out of a heavily fortified estate in Leesburg, Va., denies all charges of wrongdoing. While he has aligned himself more with the ultra-right in recent years, he retains the conspiracy theories previously promoted by his former Marxist groups, which were known for harassing public officials and unions and for physical violence in some disputes.

There haven't been any violent clashes between LaRouche followers and other groups in recent years, but there have been some harassment incidents. When Henry Kissinger and his wife were walking through Newark airport in 1982, on his way to heart surgery, LaRouche follower Ellen Kaplan shouted to him, "Do you sleep with young boys at the Carlyle Hotel?" Mrs. Kissinger grabbed her by the lapel, prompting Ms. Kaplan to file assault charges that later were dropped.

More recently, one reporter critical of LaRouche encountered leaflets inviting neighbors to a "gay coming-out party" at his house; another found leaflets detailing her purported prostitution ring. New Hampshire reporter Jon Prestage discovered a dead cat on his doorstep each successive day his LaRouche stories appeared in the Manchester Union Leader.

In a trial last year in which Mr. LaRouche tried to sue NBC for defamation after it aired two reports on him, he was instead ordered to pay $202,000 in damages to the network. NBC charged in federal court in Alexandria, Va., that LaRouche followers made repeated threats and posed as NBC and Senate aides to falsely cancel an NBC interview with New York Sen. Daniel Moynihan.

— LaRouche Group, Long on the Political Fringe Gets Mainstream Scrutiny After Illinois Primary By Ellen Hume. Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition). New York, N.Y.: Mar 28, 1986. pg. 1

LaRouche's movement is an odd species of homegrown fascism, complete with a fascination with violence and a penchant for harassment of critics.

— THE GAME'S UP FOR LAROUCHE; [FINAL EDITION, C] Stephen Chapman. Chicago Tribune (pre-1997 Fulltext). Chicago, Ill.: Mar 30, 1986. pg. 3

[..] LaRouche lives in a 13-room Georgian mansion nestled on a 27- acre estate in rural Loudoun County in Virginia, a three-hour drive of Washington, D.C.

There are sandbag buttressed guardposts at the gates. Cement barriers along the road leading to the mansion. And sharp metal spikes in the driveway as it nears the front door.

Guards wearing military berets are dotted all over the estate. They carry a variety of handguns, Colt Combat Commanders, Walther PPKs, and MAC10s.

LaRouche, who is 63 years old, never goes anywhere without a troop of armed bodyguards. He travels in a motorcade, like some Middle Eastern potentate. The heavy security is needed, he says, because he is in imminent danger of assassination by hit teams sent out by the Libyans, the Soviets, narcotics pushers, and maybe even the Queen. [..] Janice Hart, the woman who has won the nomination for Illinois secretary of state, told The Washington Post in a telephone interview: "We're going to put you guys on trial for Nuremburg crimes. We are on the warpath, and we are not going to tolerate the media or anybody else standing in the way. We are in the worst strategic crisis in the history of the western alliance."

— U.S. extremist grows as political force; [SUN Edition] William Lowther Special to The Star. Toronto Star. Toronto, Ont.: Mar 30, 1986. pg. B.1

Finally, in February, Girvin said, she was being interviewed by a television news crew outside the county courthouse in Leesburg, Va., when a woman walked past her, turned and said: "Polly, you will die."

Local officials eventually vetoed LaRouche's plans for the summer camp. But police declined to act on Girvin's complaints about the harassment, citing insufficient evidence, and she decided to give up her Leesburg law practice, sell her renovated log-and-stone house and move to a different state.

"I feel totally helpless," Girvin said during a telephone interview. "It's very frightening when you're a victim of him. . . . I just want to get out from under Lyndon LaRouche. You could go up against him, but you'd be exhausted after three years."

ALLEGATIONS OF HARASSMENT

Girvin is one of many people around the country - some famous, some unheralded - who say they have been harassed and slandered because they opposed LaRouche and his National Democratic Policy Committee (NDPC), which stunned Democratic Party leaders and gained national visibility by scoring two victories in the Illinois Democratic primary this month.

Former followers say LaRouche adherents have engaged in physical violence against opponents, psychological indoctrination of members and "dirty tricks" that include disrupting opponents' meetings and lying about their own identity to gain information. They say LaRouche has links with extreme right-wing groups, such as the Liberty Lobby and the Posse Comitatus, and has adopted anti-Semitic attitudes to ingratiate himself with such forces.

LaRouche, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has repeatedly denied those allegations. He says the accusations have been circulated in an attempt to discredit him by a large cast of enemies that includes former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the Soviet KGB, international bankers, British intelligence agents, drug smugglers and various agencies of the federal government.

ACCUSATIONS DENIED

Supporters of LaRouche deny that they disrupt or harass adversaries such as those who opposed their summer camp in Virginia. "These people don't like to debate their policies," said a spokesman, Mel Klenetsky. "These people call it disruptive. We call it polemical."

— 'VERY FRIGHTENING' FOES SPEAK OF HARASSMENT FROM LAROUCHE CAMP Ken Fireman. Philadelphia Inquirer. Philadelphia, Pa.: Mar 30, 1986. pg. A.4

Letters, calls, complaints and great thoughts from readers:

Dorothy Sullivan, Chicago: Were you serious or just kidding us when you said some LaRouche people once threatened to kill your assistant's cat?

If you were kidding, that is nothing to joke about. Just the thought of cruelty to helpless animals is enough to make me sick.

But if you were serious and it actually happened, then these LaRouche people are even sicker and more dangerous than I had thought.

Comment: Yes, they did threaten to kill my assistant's cat because they didn't like what I had written about them, but they never followed up on the threat. However, cat-killing is not unknown to the LaRouchites. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that a newspaperman in New Hampshire, who wrote a series of articles about the LaRouchites, found a dead cat on his front porch each day the articles appeared. Fortunately, the series eventually ended, so cats can still be found in that state.

— LAROUCHITES KEEP FUR FLYING; [SPORTS FINAL, C Edition] Mike Royko. Chicago Tribune (pre-1997 Fulltext). Chicago, Ill.: Mar 31, 1986. pg. 3

Stevenson also will have to add a page in his campaign plan on dealing with harassment. As the three singers who interrupted him at the Du Page County Democratic Convention in Wheaton Monday night made clear, Stevenson can expect to be followed and bothered by disciples of the right-wing extremist LaRouche wherever he goes on the campaign trail. The singers included the surprise Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor, Mark Fairchild. As a U.S. senator, Stevenson chaired a subcommittee that oversaw the International Monetary Fund, which LaRouche has attacked as being part of a worldwide drug conspiracy. LaRouche supporters staked out Stevenson's office in Washington and trailed him around the Capitol. Stevenson campaign officials are prepared for similar confrontations this year. Benjamin said, "If they get too obstreperous, they're going to be tossed. Anything dealing with the LaRouchies is cause for some concern. We're prepared to deal with that."

— STEVENSON ROLLS WITH THE PUNCHES; [SPORTS FINAL, C Edition] Mitchell Locin and Daniel Egler Dave Schneidman contributed to this report. Chicago Tribune (pre-1997 Fulltext). Chicago, Ill.: Apr 2, 1986. pg. 1

When Adlai Stevenson was confronted with a rendition of the old Turtles' rock and roll hit, "Happy Together," as he spoke at a Democratic Party gathering Monday night, it might have been only a hint of things to come during his campaign for governor.

Stevenson was serenaded at the Du Page County Democratic Convention in Wheaton by three supporters of right wing extremist Lyndon LaRouche, including the surprise Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor, Mark Fairchild. The song apparently referred to the fact that Stevenson and Fairchild are technically running mates, although Stevenson has refused to accept Fairchild.

Fairchild appeared at the convention with Sheila Jones, the announced LaRouche candidate for mayor of Chicago, and with another, unidentified woman. The three began singing while Stevenson spoke to the crowd, said Michael Donohue, chairman of the Du Page County Democrats. "We asked them to stop, and they wouldn't," Donohue said.

Donohue said he offered Fairchild an opportunity to speak after Stevenson if he and his companions would stop singing. The three accepted. However, "when I introduced Fairchild, virtually everybody left the hall," Donohue said. [..] Last May, Janice Hart, the LaRouche follower and Democratic nominee for secretary of state, was arrested and charged with disrupting a speech in North Shore Congregation Israel, a Glencoe synagogue, when she and a male companion presented Milwaukee Roman Catholic Archbishop Rembert Weakland with a large, foil-wrapped piece of liver.

When Jones ran for mayor in 1983, she tried to disrupt televised debates among the major Democratic candidates by shouting from the audience. She was ejected during one debate. Although security officials were on the lookout for her at a subsequent debate, she disguised herself as an old woman, gained entry and tried to question why she wasn't included in the debate. She was ejected again.

Stevenson campaign officials are prepared for similar confrontations this year, particularly since Stevenson has sought ways to remove Fairchild and Hart from the Democratic ticket and, failing that, is hoping to run as an independent candidate with mainstream alternatives to the LaRouche devotees. He has reportedly narrowed his choices to Cook County Circuit Judge Michael Howlett Jr., son of former Secretary of State Michael Howlett, and former State Rep. Jeanne Simon, wife of U.S. Sen. Paul Simon (D., Ill.).

"It's an open secret they're (the LaRouche followers) are going to try to harass Stevenson," said Robert Benjamin, Stevenson's press secretary. "They're going to shout. They're going to sing. If they get too obstreperous they're going to be tossed."

Just who is going to be doing the tossing is not clear. Benjamin would not comment about security precautions, saying only that the subject is not being ignored. "Anything dealing with the LaRouchies is cause for some concern. We're prepared to deal with that," he said.

— LAROUCHE SERENADE WOEFUL FOR ADLAI; [NATIONAL, C Edition] Mitchell Locin and Don Terry. Chicago Tribune (pre-1997 Fulltext). Chicago, Ill.: Apr 2, 1986. pg. 7

Stevenson is drawing up a new plan for ousting three-term incumbent Thompson after Democratic voters saddled him with the LaRouche devotees as running mates in the March 18 primary. The changes range from fundraising and reallocating resources, to searching for new running mates and dealing with heckling at public appearances, such as occurred when LaRouche supporters confronted him with a rendition of the old rock and roll hit "Happy Together" as he tried to speak earlier this week.

— STEVENSON DRAWS UP NEW PLAN; [SPORTS FINAL, C Edition] Steve Neal, Chicago Tribune Mitchell Locin and Dave Schneidman contributed to this report. Chicago Tribune (pre-1997 Fulltext). Chicago, Ill.: Apr 3, 1986. pg. 3

Our experience is that Mr. LaRouche commands numerous volunteers who work with robot-like persistence in unswerving devotion to him and his conspiracy theories. His candidates are well-financed and will say and do almost anything to win, including smearing opponents with wild charges. On one occasion, LaRouche followers burst into our offices and abused staff workers.

— "HOW NEW YORKERS DEFEATED LAROUCHE " Stanley E. Micels and Franz S. Leichter, Stanley E. Michels is a City Council member and Franz S. Lechter is a state senator. :[Op-Ed]. New York Times (Late Edition (east Coast)) [serial online]. April 3, 1986:A.27

Charges of Heckling And Kissinger Scuffle The controversy surrounding Mr. LaRouche and his organization involves more than oratory. Over the years there have been persistent complaints that LaRouche supporters have harassed, heckled and menaced people they perceived as critics or opponents. Of the groups I had to deal with, said Charles T. Manatt Jr., the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, I considered them by far the biggest bane of my existence.

LaRouche supporters dogged the 1984 campaign of the Democratic Presidential nominee, Walter F. Mondale, according to Mr. Mondale's campaign manager, Robert G. Beckel. They clearly have an organization, and they know where you're going to be, and they know a lot about schedules, Mr. Beckel said. And they were effective, early on, disrupting Mondale speeches.

Mr. Kissinger, a spokesman said, has been heckled or picketed by LaRouche supporters on several occasions, and he was also the focus of perhaps the most widely known incident between a LaRouche supporter and a public figure.

In 1982, Henry and Nancy Kissinger were in Newark International Airport when a LaRouche supporter approached the couple and began asking questions, including one that a judge later described as offensive. Mr. LaRouche acknowledged that his supporter asked Mr. Kissinger: Is it true that you sleep with young boys at the Carlyle Hotel? Mr. LaRouche added that he considered it an appropriate question.

The LaRouche supporter brought a charge of simple assault after a scuffle with Mrs. Kissinger, who was found not guilty.

A former member of the LaRouche organization, who asked that his name not be published because he feared reprisals, said, Lyndon is particlarly vindictive against reporters who have written about him. He said he had been assigned by the organization to harass reporters and others with late-night death threats and demonstrations at their homes.

Mr. LaRouche described the complaints of harassment as garbage, although he added, Maybe every once in a while someone associated with me gets a little freaked out and curses somebody out. But he argued that his supporters were the victims of harassment, not the perpetrators.

— LAROUCHE SAVORS FAME THAT MAY RUIN HIM The following article is based on reporting by Robin Toner and Joel Brinkley and was written by Miss Toner, Special to The New York Times. New York Times. (Late Edition (East Coast)). New York, N.Y.: Apr 4, 1986. pg. A.1

Several prominent New Hampshire Democrats voiced misgivings about the LaRouche party, whose name can be confused with the Democrats. One leading state Democrat obtained a bodyguard after experiencing harassment, ominous phone calls and unexplained disruption of campaign offices in the 1980 presidential primary, and he blames it on LaRouche's organization.

— DIVIDED N.H. DEMOCRATS; [THIRD Edition] David Nyhan, Globe Staff. Boston Globe (pre-1997 Fulltext). Boston, Mass.: Apr 10, 1986. pg. 17

As time passed he gained political sophistication, culminating in the establishment in 1980 of his National Democratic Policy Committee. The NDCP, whose members routinely interrupt other organizations' political gatherings, currently is the front for LaRouche's theories of economic doom, international intrigue and technocratic political equations.

— Democrats find LaRouche is somebody to reckon with; [1,2,3,4,5,6 Edition] Don Davis. The San Diego Union. San Diego, Calif.: Apr 14, 1986. pg. A.3

The Leesburg Garden Club, according to Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr., is a "nest of Soviet fellow travellers," and its members are "clacking busybodies in this Soviet jellyfish front, sitting here in Leesburg oozing out their funny little propaganda and making nuisances of themselves."

At first Leesburg residents laughed. But if they laugh now, they look over their shoulders first. One merchant faces a $2-million libel and slander suit filed by a LaRouche organization, and a lawyer is in hiding and says her life has been threatened. LaRouche calls her a lesbian "tied to international terrorism." [..] Residents who have spoken out against him say they have received threatening phone calls late at night that they believe came from his supporters. A few say they have been followed.

Law-enforcement officials say they have no evidence that LaRouche or his followers have broken any laws in Leesburg, and Edward Spannaus, a spokesman for LaRouche, denies the allegations of harassment.

But ask someone on the town's brick sidewalks about LaRouche, and that person is likely to glance over his or her shoulder before speaking.

Ask over the phone and they will not talk at all. Newcomers are regarded with suspicion, and the close-knit small-town atmosphere is gone.

At churches and supermarkets in this county seat, LaRouche's supporters have handed out leaflets asserting that five residents "allied themselves knowingly with persons and organizations which are part of the international drug lobby."

Some of those named are members of the local gentry, longtime residents prominent in community-improvement work. [..] An advertising salesman for The Loudoun County News, published by Campaigner Publications, which is run by LaRouche followers, was convicted recently of two counts of assault for confrontations with passengers at Dulles Airport.

Local merchants say the News has run advertisements for their businesses without permission, apparently to give the impression of community support for LaRouche.

Claims harassment

Danaura Smith, who with her husband runs R&D Furniture Galleries, said she was approached by a salesman for the News but said no. Thepaper then reprinted an advertisement she had run in the Washington Post.

When she complained to the salesman, she said, "He told me I was harassing him."

Spannaus, the LaRouche spokesman, denied that advertisements are run without merchants' permission [..] Asked if county residents had any reason to fear LaRouche, the sheriff said, "I don't know."

The police chief, the sheriff and the state police say LaRouche and his followers have had no local run-ins with the law, with the exception of a shoplifting spree last June by several dozen people, mostly teenagers, brought to town for a seminar on running for office.

The organizers, who said the conference had been infiltrated by enemies, paid for the missing merchandise.

Last fall organizations dominated by LaRouche applied for a zoning variance to open a children's summer camp at Sweetwater Farm, a 65-acre tract near Neersville in Loudoun County.

At the zoning hearing, a photographer who said he was with Campaigner Publications, the LaRouche publishing company, took pictures of those who spoke against the variance.

The picture-taking was legal, but the sheriff and others said the intent was intimidation. Spannaus said the photographer also took pictures of those who spoke for the variance.

Mrs. Harrison spoke against it, as did Pauline Girvin, the lawyer who is now in hiding. She had collected signatures from neighbors on a petition to stop the camp, fearing that it might become a weapons training ground.

While Girvin was being interviewed on a Leesburg street by WRC-TV, an NBC affiliate in Washington, someone walked behind her and, according to Girvin, said, "Polly, you're going to die."

The television reporter said on the air that the comment sounded like a threat. Law-enforcement officials said it could not be the basis for an arrest.

Girvin, in a telephone interview from what she said was "a safe-house," said she left town after receiving telephone threats and after a car repeatedly pulled into and out of her driveway.

Talk in town also dwells heavily on a $2-million libel and slander suit brought by Campaigner Publications, which publishes New Solidarity, the semi-weekly national newspaper that espouses LaRouche's views, as well as the Loudoun County News.

Campaigner filed the suit against Steve Dabkowski, a 29-year-old owner of videotape rental store, who was interviewed by WRC-TV for a report about rumors in Leesburg since LaRouche's arrival.

In answer to what the suit said was a question about incidents "for which Campaigner Publications Inc. and its officers and employees were responsible," Dabkowski said: "A horse was poisoned on someone's property. Another dog came home with his tail cut off and his back, hind legs skinned." No action was filed against the station.

Many people in Leesburg, including Sevila, confirmed that the rumors were common. Sevila added that he did not know if the events had even occurred, and the sheriff's office will not say what evidence it has. A reporter trying to track down those two incidents and other similar stories was not able to confirm them.

— Man who calls Queen a pusher worries town; [FINAL Edition] By MATTHEW WALD. The Gazette. Montreal, Que.: Apr 14, 1986. pg. A.1.FRO

Harassment of their opponents has become legendary. When Chicago columnist Mike Royko exposed one of the LaRouche organizations, handbills claiming that Royko had undergone a sex-change operation appeared.

LaRoucheians dispute the harassment charges and say that the negative publicity is part of a conspiracy against them by the drug lobby.

— DIFFERENT KIND OF 'DEMOCRAT' ULTRA-RIGHT-WING CANDIDATE FOR GOVERNOR HAS SOME RADICAL IDEAS FOR PENNSYLVANIA DEBBIE M PRICE. Philadelphia Daily News. Philadelphia, Pa.: Apr 14, 1986. pg. 4

LaRouche and his supporters said the investigations are the result of colossal conspiracies against him by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the banks, narcot-ics dealers and others. His organizations have filed several lawsuits against federal officials and banks involved in the credit card transactions. Some LaRouche supporters have distributed leaflets describing a top FBI official as a homosexual, and have demonstrated against William Weld, the U.S. attorney in Boston, by chanting, "Weld is a fag." [..] Former members and experts on the LaRouche operation say it is highly authoritarian, with LaRouche, 63, holding sway over members' personal lives. [..] The Swanson family said in statements to the FEC that LaRouche representatives called every five minutes, and the family stopped taking calls except from friends who were given a phoneringing code. "I didn't want to hear constantly about how disaster was about to strike any moment unless they had money for this or that," Carl Swanson said. Ordel Bradley of Modesto, Calif,, said in her FEC complaint that she was "harassed" by LaRouche callers in the summer of 1984 until she agreed to loan them $950 with her credit card. She said they then talked her into making two loans totaling $30,000, "my life's savings." When the first installment was not made, she demanded all $30,950, she said, but has thus far gotten $450, friends say.

— U.S. Investigating Fraud Allegations, Tax Law Violations against LaRouche, THE POST-STANDARD/Saturdayx April 19,1986/PAGE A-9

Talk show host Phil Donahue and a pro-nuclear activist affiliated with political extremist Lyndon LaRouche got into a fight at LaGuardia Airport Sunday after the protester shouted that Donahue and his wife "ought to be murdered," officials said. [..] The fists were flying," said Port Authority police officer Mitchell Kaufman. "Several officers responded, and they had to pull them apart."

Donahue and Thomas were walking through the central terminal about 12:15 p.m. when the man yelled, "Donahue and his wife ought to be murdered," police said.

Donahue, 50, responded, the two began shouting and a fight ensued, Kaufman said.

The protester was identified as William Ferguson Jr., 44, of Ridgefield, N.J., a member of the International Caucus of Labor Committees, said Port Authority spokesman Leon Katz. The caucus is a pro-nuclear group affiliated with LaRouche. [..] Both men filed harassment complaints against each other, police said.

An Associated Press reporter who happened to be in the terminal said Donahue's face was bruised and the other man was taken away in handcuffs after the fight. Neither man required medical treatment, Katz said.

— DONAHUE, ACTIVIST LET FISTS FLY; [SPORTS FINAL, C Edition] Associated Press. Chicago Tribune (pre-1997 Fulltext). Chicago, Ill.: May 12, 1986. pg. 3

Television talk-show host Phil Donahue and a pro-nuclear activist affiliated with right-wing politician Lyndon LaRouche got into a brawl yesterday after a shouting match in a New York airline terminal, officials said. The confrontation came hours before actress Marlo Thomas, Donahue's wife, received an award for her work against nuclear arms. Donahue was walking through a LaGuardia Airport terminal about 12:15 p.m. with his wife when a man identified as William Ferguson of Ridgefield Park, N.J., yelled, "Donahue and his wife ought to be murdered," police said. Donahue responded, the two began shouting and a fight ensued, according to police. The scuffle occurred near a stand where pro-nuclear LaRouche supporters hand out leaflets, police said. "I've known my husband for nine years, and I've never seen anything like that," Thomas said. "I am proud to say my husband did not throw the first punch." Both men filed harassment complaints against each other, said Port Authority Police Officer Mitchell Kaufman.

— THE SCORE IN TOKYO: ROYALS 1, WRESTLERS 0 Katharine Seelye, (Contributing were. Philadelphia Inquirer. Philadelphia, Pa.: May 12, 1986. pg. E.2

Donahue got into a fight with William Ferguson, 44, of Ridgefield Park, N.J., at LaGuardia Airport in New York as he and Thomas were catching a plane to Boston. Thomas, starring in ``Social Security on Broadway, went to Boston to accept an award for her work toward ending the nuclear arms race.

Donahue and Thomas were walking through the central LaGuardia terminal when Ferguson reportedly shouted at them: ``You (expletive) you should be murdered, the Boston Herald reported.

Donahue, 50, host of the national weekly talk show, ``Donahue, said the man started shouting at him. Donahue said the man said, ```You ought to be in jail,' the Daily News reported.

Donahue dropped his suitcase, walked toward Ferguson and put his hand on the man.

``He kneed me in the groin, and I punched him in the mouth, Donahue said.

Observers reported fists were flying and the two had to be separated by airport security officers.

Donahue said he reacted immediately when Ferguson began shouting obscenities, because ``I've never been called that out loud in a public terminal before. I thought that was kind of an inflammatory thing to say. [..] Ferguson, a member of the International Caucus of Unions, a pro-nuclear group with ties to radical politician LaRouche, was handing out pro-nuclear literature in the airport terminal when the incident occurred.

Police officers separated the men, who both filed harassment complaints against each other. Both men wanted to have the other arrested, authorities said.

Lt. Michael Koretzky of the LaGuardia police said Donahue and the LaRouche supporter then agreed to settle their differences in the New York City Conflict Resolution Center, an arm of the criminal court where minor differences are settled. [..] ``It was very frightening to have somebody screaming in a public place with such profanity and vulgarity, Thomas said shortly after she received the award at Boston's Park Plaza Hotel.

``It was very scary. I was afraid the man had a weapon and wasn't quite sure why he'd use such language.

— Donahue, LaRouchite trade blows at airport; [3 STAR Edition] Houston Chronicle (pre-1997 Fulltext). Houston, Tex.: May 12, 1986. pg. 1

• Television talk show host Phil Donahue got into a scuffle with a pro-nuclear supporter of independent presidential candidate Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. at New York's LaGuardia Airport, police said. The unidentified activist was was handing out leaflets shouted an obscenity at Donahue, who "took offense", police said, and the two reportedsly had to be separated. Donahue was accompanied by his wife, actress Marlo Thomas.
  • Newsmakers JENNINGS PARROTT Los Angeles Times (1886-Current File); May 12, 1986 pg. OC2

William Ferguson, the supporter of maverick right-wing politician Lyndon LaRouche who achieved fame by duking it out with Phil Donahue at a New York airport Sunday, said it all happened when the TV talk-show host called him a Nazi after Ferguson pointed him out to an associate. "He was totally berserk," said the 6-foot, 260-pound Ferguson, 24, who repeatedly referred to Donahue as a "beast" during a Big Apple news conference yesterday. He said that after pointing Donahue out, the TV star approached him and hit him on the head while he was seated. Donahue has said that Ferguson, 24, started the fight by kicking him in the groin after cursing him and saying, "You should be in prison." The combatants have agreed to try to work things out through a New York mediation service.

— HIROHITO ENTERTAINS THE ROYAL COUPLE W Speers, (Contributing to this article were, and. Philadelphia Inquirer. Philadelphia, Pa.: May 14, 1986. pg. D.2

• Phil Donahue, known these days as "Fightin' Phil" for duking it out with a Lyndon LaRouche supporter at LaGuardia Airport, hands the mike over to the audience, which wants some answers from Posner about life in Russia.
  • The Soviets' Best P.R. Man / Vladimir Posner makes the rounds on TV; [TWO STAR Edition] San Francisco Chronicle (pre-1997 Fulltext). San Francisco, Calif.: May 22, 1986. pg. 74

He never pulls a punch during an argument on his talk show, but last week Phil Donahue found himself fighting more than a war of words at New York City's La Guardia Airport. The encounter occurred as Donahue and his actress wife Marlo Thomas were on their way to Boston, where Thomas was being honored for her anti-nuclear-arms activities. William Ferguson, a 6-ft., 260-lb. follower of right-wing Activist Lyndon LaRouche, was passing out pro-nuclear literature when he spotted the couple--at which point a down-with-your-nukes, put-up- your-dukes fracas broke out. Donahue says that Ferguson yelled, "You oughta

— be in jail!" and kicked him in the groin. Ferguson says that Donahue was a "beast" who went "totally berserk" and bashed him on the head after calling him a "Nazi." [..], "People" By Guy D. Garcia, May. 26, 198 TIME

Many of the persons who signed the petitions were not aware of the link between the initiative and the LaRouche group. However, a number of letters and telephone calls protesting harassment by the signature gatherers came in to the secretary of state's office, officials said.

According to one complaint, a youth yelled at a Catholic priest in Camarillo, accusing him of being a homosexual, when the priest would not sign the petition. In Huntington Beach, a woman coming from a Post Office was accosted for her signature and when she refused to sign, the petition pusher yelled, "You are going to get AIDS!" according to her letter to the secretary.

George E. Hollis of San Diego, a candidate for the Democratic nomination to Congress from the 45th District, dismissed reports of wrongdoing on the part of any LaRouche supporters.

— LaRouche is linked to petition, Initiative proposal would quarantine AIDS patients; [1,2,3,4,5,6 Edition] Don Davis. The San Diego Union. San Diego, Calif.: May 23, 1986. pg. A.3

• The literature included the New Solidarity, "the nonpartisan national newspaper of the American System" produced by LaRouche's New Solidarity International Press Service. [..]Another story accuses Phil Donahue of being the "racist NBC talk show host" who is supported by the "pot-toking Yippie organization reborn as the North American Green Party." It also states that NBC stands for "Nothing But Cocaine." **Area residents dismayed by gathering of LaRouche supporters at post office By MIKE CLEM News-Post Staff, THE FREDERICK POST, FREDERICK, MD., THURSDAY, MAY 29, 1986 p. A8

• A supporter of radical politician Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. agreed to drop criminal charges against television talk show host Phil Donahue during a hearing in Queens, N.Y. "We have no present intnetion of pursuing this," a Donahue spkeswoman said. The two men came to blows after a bout of name-calling May 11 at LaGuardia Airport, where William Ferguson was handing out literature supporting nuclear power. Ferguson, 24, is from Ridgefield Park, N.J.
  • The Nation, Los Angeles Times (1886-Current File); Jun 3, 1986; pg. A2

Television talk show host Phil Donahue and a follower of extremist politician Lyndon LaRouche have buried the hatchet two weeks after they tangled at LaGuardia Airport.

Queens Criminal Court Judge Richard Rutledge on Monday dismissed simple assault and harassment charges that William Ferguson had filed against Donahue.

— BRIEFLY Donahue, Ferguson bury the hatchet The Globe and Mail. Toronto, Ont.: Jun 4, 1986. pg. C.7

• Members of the Trilateral Commission meeting in Madrid last month received harassing phone calls from people who posed as Israeli journalists seeking information about the foreign policy organization, which LaRouchites believe is part of a sinister conspiracy of international financiers. When one Trilateralist asked if the caller was a LaRouche follower, he sputtered in confusion and broke off the conversation.
  • "Larouche's Tangled Web" Jun. 09, 1986, TIME [5]

The Democratic Party must mount major election attempts to defeat the "fanatical forces" of political extremist Lyndon LaRouche, whose followers act like "a Mussolini or a Hitler," the Democrats' national chairman said yesterday.

LaRouche followers "practice the politics of intimidation and harassment, the politics of prejudice and the politics of paranoia, the politics of extremism and exclusion, the politics of fraud and the politics of fear," said Democratic National Chairman Paul Kirk.

"In a pattern not unlike that of a Mussolini or a Hitler, the LaRouchites have exercised political expediency ... indulging ... in anti-Semitism and religious and racial bigotry, never acknowledging or accepting the fundamental principles of democracy," Kirk said at a Democratic Issues Forum.

— Demos Urged To Defeat 'LaRouchites'; [FINAL Edition] San Francisco Chronicle (pre-1997 Fulltext). San Francisco, Calif.: Jun 25, 1986. pg. 7

• For several years, LaRouche militants have systematically harassed Petra Kelly, an American educated founder of the Greens, picketing and disrupting meetings where she speaks
  • LAROUCHE FRINGE STIRS IN GERMANY" LAROUCHE FRINGE STIRS IN GERMANY, JAMES M. MARKHAM, The New York Times, Jun 30, 1986

Election officials, charging followers of extremist Lyndon LaRouche are bullying people into signing candidate petitions, Monday warned voters to scrutinize petitions before jotting down their names. [..]

The LaRouche candidates are trying to collect enough signatures to qualify for primaries against candidates backed by the Democratic Party, including Gov. Mario M. Cuomo and his running mate, Rep. Stanley Lundine, D-N.Y.

Officials at the Board of Elections and local Democratic committee offices logged about two dozen complaints last week about LaRouche supporters incorrectly suggesting that LaRouche candidates were endorsed by the Democratic Party.

The incidents, which took place at a downtown Rochester shopping mall and several other locations, ended with "abusive language" aimed at people who refuse to sign petitions, Toole said.

"This is just one more harassment to the voter," Toole said. "It just discourages people from participating in the electoral process, including signing petitions and getting out to vote in primaries."

The local Democratic committee is not currently planning legal action against the LaRouche candidates, said Thomas Fink, lawyer for the committee. But Fink said the state Democratic committee will review all petitions filed by LaRouche candidates and may consider court action.

— "LAROUCHE BACKERS ACCUSED OF 'BULLYING'" AP, Albany Times Union (Albany, NY) July 8, 1986 pB11

The best way to understand the LaRouchites--how they think and operate --is to get them mad at you.

In that sense, I've been fortunate because they've been mad at me for years. [..] Long before their fluke victories in the Illinois primary made them well known, I was writing about their sleazy attacks on public figures--labeling certain female politicians as prostitutes and their husbands as pimps--and the way they conned people into giving them money.

Their response was to threaten to murder a cat belonging to a reporter who worked for me. They never followed through on the threat, possibly because they discovered that the cat had not been declawed.

Of course, they are capable of cat-killing, as they demonstrated in New Hampshire, where a reporter wrote a series of articles on their lunacy. Every day that an article appeared, a dead cat was dropped on his doorstep.

So I wasn't surprised when a group of LaRouchites showed up in front of Tribune Tower the other day. No dead cats, this time, but they were chanting and passing out handbills.

Their chants consisted of something like: "Why hasn't Royko taken the AIDS test? What is he hiding?"

This has become a standard part of the LaRouchites patter. If a reporter puts a hard question to Mark Fairchild or Janice Hart--the two nonentities who won the primaries--they respond by demanding that he take an AIDS test. [..] I mentioned that they were distributing handbills. Unsigned, of course. The LaRouchites--like people who make obscene phone calls--don't like to leave their names.

The handbills said that I am a "degenerate drug pusher," and challenged me to go to Malaysia, where drug pushers are hanged.

The LaRouchites make a practice of calling those they dislike drug pushers. So this puts me in a rather select crowd, since they have often accused the Queen of England of being head of a worldwide drug ring.

And, of course, they claim that they are great crusaders against drugs. They collected a lot of money from people who believed them, until several suburban police departments stopped them from conning people in their communities.

In fairness, though, I have to concede that they probably know something about drugs and the profits that can be made by drug pushers.

After all, Ms. Hart recently had to get a new lawyer to represent her in court because her former lawyer recently was convicted of being part of a giant, national drug smuggling ring.

— LAROUCHITES TEST POSITIVE FOR FLEECE; [SPORTS FINAL, C Edition] Mike Royko. Chicago Tribune (pre-1997 Fulltext). Chicago, Ill.: Jul 25, 1986. pg. 3

Janice Hart, the Lyndon LaRouche supporter who won the Democratic nomination for Illinois secretary of state, yesterday was found guilty by a jury of disrupting an archbishop's speech by presenting him with a raw, bloody liver. She faces a fine of up to $500 for the misdemeanor conviction of disorderly conduct. [..] Hart contended she presented the liver to Roman Catholic Archibishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee during a speech on May 7 last year at a synagogue in the Chicago suburb of Glencoe to protest his support of the International Monetary Fund. She said Weakland had voiced support for policies of the IMF, which she said upholds South Africa's discriminatory policy of apartheid. "Nobody wants to deprive them of their rights to make the statements in the proper political forum," prosecutor Everette Hill had said in closing arguments, "but they can't go into a meeting and try to make a mockery of what is going on and, in so doing, disrupt the whole service." Craig Miller, the attorney for Hart and Bettag, argued she was exercising her right of free speech in making a symbolic protest against the archbishop's views.

— ILLINOIS SUPPORTER OF LAROUCHE IS GUILTY IN PROTEST; [THIRD Edition] Associated Press. Boston Globe (pre-1997 Fulltext). Boston, Mass.: Aug 22, 1986. pg. 36

Jeweler Stanley Caulkins, 61, was among the vocal critics.

Caulkins said that shortly after Monday's raid, his store received the following anonymous telephone call: ``Tell Stanley Caulkins he is next on the list. We won't forget him.

During the past year, a number of people in Leesburg and surrounding Loudoun County said they received similar calls after speaking out against LaRouche.

LaRouche has denied harassing or threatening anyone.

— "Townspeople sparked LaRouche crackdown" Houston Chronicle [Houston, Tex.] 9 Oct. 1986, p17.

Political extremist Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. and his associates were so upset about the federal investigation of the group's finances that they spent entire nights making telephone calls to harass government lawyers, picketed several courthouses and sent colleagues to Germany to keep them from appearing before a grand jury, federal authorities testified yesteday.

LaRouche told his longtime security consultant, a former Ku Klux Klansman facing weapons and other charges, that the federal prosecutor overseeing the LaRouche investigation ``doesn't deserve to live, he should get a bullet between the eyes, an FBI agent testified.

— "PROBERS SHOOK UP LAROUCHE GROUP :[FIRST Edition]. " Seattle Times [Seattle, Wash.] 10 Oct. 1986,A2

A few weeks ago Adlai Stevenson's campaign organization was saying it had seen or heard little of late from Mark Fairchild and Janice Hart, the followers of political extremist Lyndon LaRouche who upset the slated Democratic candidates to win the nominations for lieutenant governor and secretary of state. But Illinois Atty. Gen. Neil Hartigan and his family and neighbors heard an earful from them Wednesday night. About 30 LaRouche followers showed up shortly after 10:30 with a cross, lights and a bullhorn to chant and sing songs in front of Hartigan's home in the 1100 block of West Albion Street. They were there, said the "LaRouchies," as they've become known, "to exorcise the demons out of Neil Hartigan's soul." Among the participants in the rally--which police peacefully broke up after an hour because of a prohibition against residential picketing--were Fairchild and Hart. In contrast to the period immediately following their March 18 primary victories, when Fairchild and Hart regularly held press conferences and they and other LaRouche followers tried to attend Democratic Party events, in recent months they have generated comparatively little public activity. Fairchild and Hart and their attorneys have been in court as much as anyplace else, Hart defending herself on charges that she tossed a piece of raw liver at a Roman Catholic archbishop, [..] Wednesday night's rally, which marked a return to the public antics of the LaRouche followers, was in response to the ongoing federal and state investigations into LaRouche and his organization, including a suit filed in June by Hartigan, Hart said.

— THE LAROUCHE CAROLERS STOP BY THE HARTIGANS' Mitchell Locin. Chicago Tribune (pre-1997 Fulltext). Chicago, Ill.: Oct 10, 1986. pg. 1

Veterans of anti-Vietnam War rallies in the 1960s in New York remember Lyndon LaRouche as a radical leftist named Lyn Marcus. With the help of a small band of disciples, he fomented violence during anti-war protests. [..] It is the security unit, run by trusted aides, that enforces "damage control" by running smear campaigns and threatening critics and perceived enemies, the FBI and others say.

Often, the tactic is simply to skewer their foes in LaRouche's many publications. For instance, in 1980 a call went over the group's national teletype for jokes about President Carter and Senator Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., that could get the LaRouche presidential campaign some publicity. More recently, they wrote that Kennedy tottered into a Senate hearing "smelling of drink."

Backers of Walter Mondale say the group got hold of his schedule during the 1984 presidential campaign and used it to disrupt his appearances. In 1982, according to an FBI informant, they printed a phony section of the New York Times and delivered it to Manhattan newsstands to embarrass lawyer Roy Cohn, who died this year, and Mayor Ed Koch.

Forrest Lee Fick, an FBI informant and former Ku Klux Klansman who used to handle security chores for LaRouche, told NBC News in April that some in the LaRouche organization also discussed killing Henry Kissinger, an arch-villain in the LaRouche world view.

Many critics of LaRouche report that they have been harassed. Flyers appear calling women prostitutes, men are called homosexuals and government officials are called agents of the British-Zionist drug conspiracy. Reader's Digest, after a story about LaRouche, was called a Soviet tool in a long article in New Solidarity, a newspaper published three times a week.

In a 1984 report, NBC aired a number of charges against LaRouche and quoted defectors saying that LaRouche followers were hired by the Teamsters union to harass union dissidents.

LaRouche lost a libel suit against NBC over that report, and in turn the network won a $200,000 punitive judgment against LaRouche for his supporters posing as NBC journalists to disrupt an interview with Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y.

Ever since that report, the network has been under sustained attack. Producer Patricia Lynch said she has been harassed to the point that she calls back to check the authenticity of everyone who telephones her. LaRouche publications also carry frequent allegations that NBC and its reporters lead a large drug ring and have plotted LaRouche's assassination.

FBI agent Richard Egan, in federal court, said intimidation of critics was a key role of the security unit headed by Jeffrey and Michelle Steinberg, who remain jailed after being indicted last week on charges of obstruction of justice.

Egan said a defector told him that the Steinbergs reported gleefully one morning how they had stayed up all night to make harassing phone calls to Charles Steele, general counsel to the Federal Election Commission, which has investigated LaRouche's political fund-raising and imposed civil penalties. Steele confirmed that the calls occurred, Egan said. [..] Residents of Leesburg appeared to be special targets. They have reported threats after opposing LaRouche motions before the City Council and planning commission, and local merchants set up a defense fund to repel LaRouche lawsuits.

— Raid Stirs Reports of LaRouche's Dark Side; [FINAL Edition] Kevin Roderick, Los Angeles Times. San Francisco Chronicle (pre-1997 Fulltext). San Francisco, Calif.: Oct 14, 1986.

LaRouche, the onetime Marxist who shifted his philosophy to the extreme right in the 1970s, settled here in 1983. Tiny Leesburg hasn't been the same since.

"When he first came here, nobody knew who he was," says Mayor Robert Sevila, a local attorney. "But it wasn't long before he was making accusatory and vitriolic statements against people in this town who disagreed with him." [..] Frank Raflo - a county supervisor, native Leesburg resident and one of LaRouche's most vocal opponents here - says: "LaRouche thought he was a big- city boy who could push us country boys around. There's been a feeling of intimidation. People wondered if their new neighbors were LaRouchies. They wanted to do something to change things."

LaROUCHE AND his followers strongly deny there is any animosity between them and most county residents.

"You can go into any town in America and there are always oddballs," says Warren J. Hamerman, chairman of the National Democratic Policy Committee, LaRouche's political organization.

"You can find the few individuals who get riled up about Lyndon LaRouche. There are no more than 10 people in this town who oppose Lyndon LaRouche. We are here to stay and to thrive in Leesburg." [..] According to various local residents, tension surfaced soon after LaRouche arrived and his associates were found pointing weapons at people near, but not on, the LaRouche property. [..] ONE LEESBURG merchant, asking not to be identified, says his first encounter with the LaRouche organization occurred about two years ago when he was confronted by armed guards while making a delivery at LaRouche's estate. "I told them I was just bringing what they had bought," says the merchant. [..] Tension increased earlier this year when the county zoning board denied the application of the LaRouche organization to operate a day camp at the Sweetwater Farms property in the county. At the hearing, LaRouche associates took pictures of opponents, and some residents said they were harassed for fighting the camp's application.

A month later the LaRouche organization filed a $2 million libel suit against a video store owner. The store owner had told a television reporter covering the zoning dispute that in the neighborhood of the LaRouche estate a horse on someone's property had been poisoned and a dog's tail had been cut off and its hind legs had been skinned.

A LOCAL judge dismissed the suit, but the LaRouche organization has appealed to the Virginia Supreme Court. [..] LaRouche's sharp attack on the Leesburg Garden Club, a longtime organization of local women, was particularly upsetting to residents. The verbal attack came, according to Sevila, after a woman in the LaRouche organization attended a meeting of the club and heard some of the club members complain about LaRouche and his activities in the community.

ASKED IN a television interview about the club, LaRouche said:

"Absolutely a Soviet front. You've got these cackling busybodies in this Soviet jellyfish front, sitting here in Leesburg, oozing out their funny little propaganda and making nuisances of themselves."

Hamerman says the club has opposed LaRouche's effort to keep drugs out of Loudoun County. "Because the drug-running threat is Soviet-backed and the Garden Club is fighting LaRouche on drugs, they are serving as Soviet agents," he says.

— "LAROUCHE KEEPS TINY VIRGINIA TOWN BUZZING \ Extremist set up quarters in '83 :" ROBERT GETTLIN The Sunday Patriot - News. Harrisburg, Pa. 1986 Nov 2 pg. D.1

• Federal authorities in the United States who are examining notebooks seized during a raid on the headquarters of political extremist Lyndon LaRouche have found numerous references to the slaying of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, sources close to the investigation said Friday. NBC News reported that Swedish authorities are examining the notebooks, and that they contain 45 references to the Palme killing, as well as references to the use of a .357 magnum weapon in the slaying and to a man initially held and then released following Palme's Feb. 28 slaying. LaRouche associates, speaking at a news conference, said the LaRouche organization had no contact after mid-1985 with the man who had been held in connection with the killing. [..] Palme had been the object of vicious attacks in LaRouche publications in the United States and even more so in Sweden, he said.
  • LaRouche notes refer to slain Swede Palme; [1 STAR Edition] Houston Chronicle (pre-1997 Fulltext). Houston, Tex.: Dec 6, 1986. pg. 8
  • Around the World; [FINAL Edition] The Ottawa Citizen. Ottawa, Ont.: Dec 6, 1986. pg. A.7

Court documents also say a former LaRouche employee quoted him as saying Weld ``does not deserve to live. He should get a bullet between the eyes. [..] Weld, who is now an assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department's Criminal Division in Washington, supervised the grand jury probe of LaRouche's organizations for more than a year.

While the grand jury was sitting over the past two years, LaRouche followers picketed the federal Post Office and Court building on several occasions and passed out leaflets accusing Weld of involvement in drug trafficking.

Last Christmas, they sang a jingle advocating that he be hanged in public, ending with the words: ``When his tongue and eyes stick out, then justice will be done. [..] The suggestion that Weld does not deserve to live was attributed to LaRouche by Roy Frankhauser of Reading, Pa., who was named as a defendant in the earlier indictment.

FBI agent Richard Egan reported the conversation in testimony during a bail hearing two months ago.

— "Indictment says LaRouche wanted to smear official to block probe" :[3 STAR Edition]. " Houston Chronicle 17 Dec. 1986, p. 14

1987

• The only other serious suspect, a 33-year-old Swedish member of American extremist politician Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr.'s European Labor Party, who Holmer believed had a special hatred for Palme's Socialist policies, was released last March after a week of questioning.
  • Sweden Uneasy Over Failure to Solve Palme's Assassination By TYLER MARSHALL, Times Staff Writer february 02, 1987, Los Angeles Times [6]

Chances for a mayoral debate before the Feb. 24 primary election appeared to be remote Wednesday when a deadline set by Mayor Harold Washington to complete negotiations passed with nothing but political word wars.

A spokesman for former Mayor Jane Byrne said she planned to purchase a half-hour of television time for a debate on Feb. 15 and would invite Washington to attend. [..] Washington has insisted that any debate be held before a live audience, and Byrne has held out for a studio format with no audience.

"You mean she doesn't want to debate because someone might heckle her? I've been heckled by masters, that doesn't bother me," Washington said.

When told that Washington had said she might be afraid of being heckled, Byrne, bristling, shot back, "I'm not afraid of being heckled." [..] To bolster their argument for a closed debate session, Pecor played a tape for reporters of a stormy mayoral debate in January, 1983, held in Roberto Clemente High School.

In the taped section of the debate, the moderator, John Calloway, was forced to stop several times by disruptions from audience members, including Sheila Jones, the Lyndon LaRouche mayoral candidate.

— WORD WAR CONTINUES, DEBATE UNLIKELY; [SPORTS FINAL, C Edition] Robert Davis and John Kass. Chicago Tribune (pre-1997 Fulltext). Chicago, Ill.: Feb 5, 1987. pg. 1

• A supporter of political extremist Lyndon LaRouche has been charged after allegedly stepping onto a Des Moines street and harassing a motorist who refused to donate money to the LaRouche movement.
  • "LaRouche Fund Raiser Is Arrested in Des Moines" Omaha World - Herald. Omaha, Neb.: May 29, 1987. pg. 1

Police were called when six supporters of Lyndon LaRouche invaded Des Moines Register Editor James Gannon's office Monday, but the six left after a short meeting with Gannon.

A spokesman said the six were unhappy with the newspaper's refusal to cover LaRouche's presidential campaign, and also the paper's position on economic issues. The six said backers were working hard to line up support in Iowa, where precinct caucuses provide an early test of presidential strength next February.

""It wasn't really a dialogue, it was a harangue, Gannon said afterward.

The six left after meeting with Gannon for about 15 minutes. Police said no one was arrested.

The brief disruption followed a signcarrying demonstration by 25 La-Rouche supporters outside the Register building.

(Amid chants of ""Reading the Register without rubber gloves will give you AIDS and ""Mikhail Gorbachev owns the Register, picketers compared Iowa newspapers' editorial policies with those of publications in the Soviet Union, United Press International reported. ""We have as much openness in our reporting here as they do in Russia, said a supporter who identified himself as Vladimir. ""Iowa's newspapers are a sham.

[..] Ms. Hart and five other people went inside the Register building and walked unannounced into Gannon's office. Witnesses said Gannon responded he would be happy to make an appointment to see the six but they said they were running out of time.

Gannon then had the six sit in his office and he left, witnesses said. They followed him through the newspaper building, and eventually Gannon met with them in another office.

Two police officers responding to calls from the newspaper arrived at the room but were told by Gannon he would be ending the meeting with the La-Rouche supporters soon. Another officer arrived a short time later.

Ms. Hart demanded a retraction of editorials the newspaper has printed, arguing that the newspaper's ""economic policies stink.

Gannon refused to make a retraction.

The discussion continued. When the LaRouche supporters began singing the ""Battle Hymn of the Republic, Gannon ended the meeting and showed the six to the elevator.

""I don't respond to pressure of that kind, Gannon said later. ""Usually insults aren't a very effective way of reaching a meeting of the minds. Mostly what I heard this morning was insults, both personal and professional.

— "Police Summoned, Not Needed LaRouche Backers Invade Des Moines Editor's Office;" [METRO Edition] Omaha World - Herald. Omaha, Neb.: Jul 13, 1987. pg. 1

While testifying during the district court trial, Kevin E. Pearl of Baltimore claimed that Lark E. Lands crumpled literature and spat on him twice outside the post office on June 12. Prosecutors had charged Ms. Lands with battering Pearl during a struggle. Pearl is a grass roots organizer for the National Democratic Policy Committee. Lyndon LaRouche was the chairman emeritus before he withdrew to run for president of the United States. Ms. Lands, 36, lives in Frederick County and works with AIDS victims in Washington. She was outraged by posters she saw outside the post office which she recalled saying: "Kill the faggots. Kill Elizabeth Taylor." [...] Dana Scanlon, press spokesperson for the LaRouche Democratic Campaign, said that the National Democratic Policy Committee representatives who visit the Frederick post office want "to help fight AIDS politically, to return to traditional health measures."

— Olnick, Philip (SEPTEMBER 2. 1987). "Woman who works with AIDS victims found not guilty of battery". THE FREDERICK POST. (FREDERICK. MD).

In April 1973, LaRouche ordered associates to learn street-fighting techniques and start "Operation Mop-up" to destroy the Communist Party, which he viewed as counter-revolutionary. There followed more than 40 brawls at communist meetings around the country, with many injuries. Some LaRouche associates were arrested, but there were no convictions.

In December of that year, LaRouche dramatically announced to his followers at a New York hotel that the English man who had married his ex-wife was out to kill him on orders of CIA brainwashers. LaRouche also said that many other followers had been brainwashed without their knowledge into trying to kill him.

His speech set off a chain reaction of hysteria. There were shrieks in the ballroom. Weeping people begged LaRouche to "de-program" them. Members of LaRouche's newly formed security squad shuttled members off to apartments to confess their doubts about their leader.

Soon the group went on a kind of war footing. Members ended ties to their families and quit their jobs to work for the group full-time.

It was around then that LaRouche began his practice of intensely grilling followers about their political deviations, their most private thoughts, their sex lives. He might turn on any one of them anytime, proclaiming that one's clothes or make-up or accent is a sign of some sexual or political inadequacy, or an attempt to undercut him.

Law-enforcement officials say the psychological browbeating continues to this day. So does LaRouche's practice of appearing only with an armed entourage-because he's convinced he can be killed anytime.

The group became "a seven-day-a-week, 24-hour-a-day total immersion," said one former member. "It's a situation where people wouldn't have any private lives anymore . . . . Everyone's got to march to the same tune." [..] By the 1980s, he steered the group into support for President Reagan, and some of their publications echo the conservatives' patriotic, pro-military rhetoric. But their ideology is truly undefinable, veering daily according to the leader's whims.

Ex-members say the main controlling emotions in the group are a desire to please LaRouche and the top leaders, and fear of crossing them. LaRouche or one of his aides might denounce this or that follower anytime, and for any perceived misstep. Lengthy hollering at the member would follow, all in front of the other members. People who work in Leesburg office buildings where the group has rented space said they've heard frequent shouting from LaRouche offices, day and night.

One ex-member recalls an instance a few years ago when a male member was caught making unauthorized passes at a woman member. LaRouche's assistant mocked him in front of everyone for his supposedly loathsome sexual depravity. Every member was instructed to ask him every day about his sexual fantasies. The ex-member said associates avoided the man's gaze for weeks. The man is still a loyal LaRouche associate, and he faces trial this week with the others.

Former LaRouche followers say group members practice a complex self-deception and submerging of self. Humiliated by LaRouche for something, members almost invariably convinced themselves that of course LaRouche was right, in fact he had brilliantly pointed out their zombie behavior, or their psycho-sexual deviance, or their KGB wretchedness.

The arbitrariness of the assaults would keep them all on edge.

For months at a time a member might quietly go about his group work-researching, or selling papers, say-and even get married to another group member. But eventually the humiliation would return.

Maybe it would be over a pregnancy-group leaders discouraged having babies, because they believed children interfered with political work. Despite the group's anti-abortion line, some group leaders coerced some women into having abortions, ex-associates have said. (A few members do have children, but the family relationships tend to be rocky, ex-members said.) Maybe trouble would come in a marriage, and the group's security squad would visit.

"The relationship between two people is used to police each other within the organization, like you keep your spouse in line, he keeps you in line," one ex-member said. "You're encouraged to inform on your spouse."

These tensions keep group members in a constant state of rage against one another and against the outside world, ex-associates said.

That may explain the group's penchant for nastiness. LaRouche's followers denounce every critic-prosecutors, politicians, people at the airport who disagree with them-as cretins, communists, traitors or homosexuals. They believe the world is in danger of imminent collapse for any number of reasons, which vary-nuclear war, global starvation, and lately AIDS. They think LaRouche is the planet's only chance for survival-and people must be crazed not to accept him.

"Your parents are fundamentally immoral," LaRouche told members in an internal bulletin several years ago. "You are moral despite them . . . . The people of the United States are not morally fit to survive . . . . Everything your parents say is evil-they are like lepers, morally and intellectually insane."

"We represent the only efficient moral, intellectual and political force capable of saving human civilization."

LaRouche echoes this notion in his 1979 autobiography, in which he describes his followers as the world's "golden souls," and the rest of humanity as "the poor donkeys, the poor sheep, whose consciousness is dominated by the infantile world-outlook of individual sensuous life." LaRouche continually describes the world as oozing with lasciviousness and sexual depravity. [..] The federal indictment alleges that, soon after the FBI started investigating the group in 1984, members discussed ways to scuttle the probe, sent witnesses to Europe to keep them from investigators, hid and burned subpoenaed documents, investigated the friends and family of the prosecutor, even put out leaflets saying he was a homosexual and a dope pusher. [..] Former LaRouche associates say the group believed that was the way the world worked. Their cynicism about how power is exercised in society convinced them that the way to stop criticism is to hit back hard. In another context, LaRouche said he wants his associates to practice "ruthless" politics.

— John Mintz. "Inside the Weird World of Lyndon LaRouche :[FINAL Edition]. " The Washington Post (pre-1997 Fulltext) [Washington, D.C.] 20 Sep. 1987,c01

Agnes Harrison, who lives on a 50-acre estate near the LaRouche compound, sat on the back patio of her house the other day and said, "I don't know why they moved here. But I think we'd all rejoice if we heard a LaRouche conviction." [..] In spring 1985 a LaRouche group deluged Loudoun with leaflets that attacked Harrison and other foes of its plans to open a summer youth camp that critics feared would become a paramilitary facility.

It stated: "All of these persons . . . are part of a highly organized nest of Soviet fellow-travelers . . . and all have allied themselves knowingly with persons and organizations that are part of the international drug lobby."

Harrison recalled, "My friends burst out laughing from these extreme statements. "I had to say, 'It is funny, isn't it?' But he didn't go to this trouble to be funny. That's what bothered me."

Another LaRouche critic named in the leaflet, Polly Girvin, sold her house and left town after she said that a woman on the street whispered, "Polly, you will die." Other foes said they received threatening phone calls.

— "RESIDENTS STAND AGAINST LAROUCHE VIRGINIANS HOPEFUL THAT CONVICTION WOULD BE END OF STRANGE NEIGHBOR" United Press International. Orlando Sentinel [Orlando, Fla.] 11 Oct. 1987, A8.

1988

• A federal appeals court Wednesday upheld an order requiring NBC to surrender outtakes of an interview with a former consultant for Lyndon LaRouche who said a top LaRouche aide discussed killing Henry Kissinger.
  • Court upholds NBC outtake order AP THE FREDERICK POST, FREDERICK, MD., THURSDAY, MARCH 10, 1988 A-3

• Before the hearing began, 12 members of a Lyndon Larouche organization gathered on City Hall Plaza to protest the needle-exchange program. The protesters held placards, dispensed Larouche literature and took turns on a bullhorn denouncing Flynn's proposal. A spokesman for the group, Anthony DeFranco, said the plan amounted to "a surrender," adding: "We've got to always be against drugs, and government has to represent that. This is like saying drugs are all right."
  • "TACKLE AIDS, HELP ADDICTS, SPEAKERS URGE CITY COUNCIL;" Peggy Hernandez, Globe Staff. Boston Globe . Boston, Mass.: Apr 13, 1988. pg. 77

Texas Democratic Chairman Bob Slagle Wednesday accused President Reagan of deliberately fanning unsubstantiated rumors about Michael Dukakis' mental health because the Republicans are behind in the presidential race.

Reagan sparked controversy Wednesday when he referred to the Democratic presidential nominee as an "invalid" in response to a question from an affiliate of political extremist Lyndon LaRouche about Dukakis' failure to release his medical records.

"I'm not going to pick on an invalid," a smiling Reagan said in response to the question from Nick Benton, a former Houston congressional and mayoral candidate for the LaRouche organization.

LaRouche backers have distributed fliers containing broad insinuations - admittedly not backed by evidence - that Dukakis has been treated for mental illness on two occasions. Dukakis and his physician deny the claims.

Reagan later said he was joking and admitted his attempt at humor failed. "I was just trying to be funny and it didn't work," he said when asked if he based his comment on any information. [..] Slagle said the issue should not harm Dukakis if it is made clear the rumor was initiated by LaRouche, a perennial presidential candidate who has accused Queen Elizabeth of "pushing drugs" and Walter Mondale of being "an agent of influence of the KGB."

"Those are mean, irresponsible people. We all know they are smear artists," he said.

Slagle said the group once attacked his cooperation with the party's Gay and Lesbian Caucus by sending out a mailing that insinuated he is a homosexual.

"My reputation probably needs defending, but not for that," laughed Slagle, who is married for the second time and the father of two grown children and an infant.

The response from Dukakis was subdued.

"I'm a very healthy guy," Dukakis told reporters in Boston. "No apology was really needed. We all occasionally misspeak, and I don't think the president needed to apologize."

— Campaign '88/Reagan's `invalid' remark assailed/Slagle says comment `calculated' move to close gap in polls; [2 STAR Edition] NENE FOXHALL, Houston Chronicle Political Editor. Houston Chronicle (pre-1997 Fulltext). Houston, Tex.: Aug 4, 1988. pg. 12

Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, seeking to quash unsubstantiated rumors that he was once treated for depression, made public today a statement from his personal physician that the Democratic presidential nominee is in "excellent health" and has had "no psychological symptoms, complaints or treatment." At an impromptu news conference arranged after President Reagan fueled the health controversy by calling Dukakis an "invalid," Dukakis said he had never sought help to combat depression or other mental illness, and he pledged to make public the results of his annual physical examination this fall. His aides said a date for the examination has not been set, but that it would be well before Election Day. But the nominee also continued his refusal to release all of his medical records, a decision that has helped keep alive the swirling but unproven rumors that he may have undergone professional treatment for depression after two traumatic events. [..] In Washington, Reagan set today's developments in motion when he was asked by a representative of political extremist Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. whether he thought Dukakis should make public his medical records. "Look, I'm not going to pick on an invalid," the smiling president replied. Less than an hour later, Reagan said he regretted the statement. He said he had "attempted a joke" but that "I don't think I should have said what I said." Dukakis dismissed the president's comment as a misstatement and said no apology was necessary, but other Democrats characterized it as ugly and insensitive. Dukakis' vice presidential running mate, Texas Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, said Reagan's comment was "outrageous and laughable. [..] The rumors are at least a year old, promoted by the LaRouche organization that makes a practice of circulating wild, inflammatory charges about people in public life. But the rumors began to resurface last week with reports of a questionnaire sent to Dukakis and Bush by the Detroit News asking about drugs they took and whether they had ever been hospitalized or treated for depression or other mental illness. Dukakis did not respond, but with the revival of the rumors his campaign press secretary, Dayton Duncan, last Friday issued a sweeping denial, asserting that Dukakis had not been treated for depression "or any mental illness at any time." Most news organizations, including The Washington Post, did not report Duncan's statement because it dealt with rumors the newspapers had not printed and could not substantiate. But the Boston Globe and the Washington Times published the denial and referred to the underlying rumors that prompted it. Today, The New York Times and Detroit News also published reports about the rumors and Duncan's denial.

— Dukakis Acts To Kill Rumor; Doctor Says Nominee In `Excellent Health' Edward Walsh. The Washington Post (pre-1997 Fulltext). Washington, D.C.: Aug 4, 1988. pg. a.01

The followers of Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. -- known to many people as the kooks at airports who solict money to "Nuke Jane Fonda" -- in fact make up a shrewd, sophisticated operation capable of disrupting mainstream politics, as they have with charges that Michael Dukakis has had psychological problems, according to several organizations that track the group.

These analysts say followers of LaRouche, who is running for president, specialize in trading tidbits of often accurate information with journalists and politicians in an effort to entice them into accepting more outlandish stories.

"This is not the first time that political people or journalists have used LaRouche people as sources," says Chip Berlet, a Cambridge analyst who tracks extremist groups. Berlet said there have been at least 25 similar "smear" campaigns against political candidates, usually liberals, since 1976.

"In a political campaign, people really want things to be true against their enemies," Berlet said.

The charges against Dukakis clearly mark one of the most successful LaRouche operations. Although rumors that Dukakis had undergone treatment for depression have been circulating for years, they became front-page news when a reporter for a LaRouche newspaper asked President Reagan about them -- eliciting the wisecrack that he would not "pick on an invalid." [..] The LaRouche supporter who asked the question is the White House reporter for Executive Intelligence Review, a LaRouche publication. [..] The current controversy over rumors about Dukakis' health was sparked in part by a pamphlet circulated at the Democratic National Convention by a LaRouche organization that made sweeping allegations about Dukakis' mental health history. [..] Dana Scanlon, a spokesman for LaRouche, yesterday defended the leaflet distributed at the convention in Atlanta as accurate, saying it raised "questions that have still not been answered." She said the Executive Intelligence Review, a LaRouche publication, has "sources the way every news organization does" and often has "sought and shared information."

— LAROUCHE GROUP CALLED ADEPT AT SMEAR TACTICS; [THIRD Edition] Jonathan Kaufman, Globe Staff. Boston Globe (pre-1997 Fulltext). Boston, Mass.: Aug 5, 1988. pg. 6

Because it was something quite outside this rich tradition, a brief flap over the mental health of Michael Dukakis serves to remind Americans of a dark ugliness still confronting us in the person and political movement of Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche Jr.

It was the LaRouche organization that prepared and distributed -- under Atlanta hotel doors in the dark of night -- printed sheets with the baseless rumor that Dukakis had twice undergone psychiatric treatment for depression. It was the "reporter" for a LaRouche publication who put the question that prompted President Reagan's thoughtless jibe, "I'm not going to pick on an invalid." [..] LaRouche followers are encouraged to take instruction in karate and street fighting.

— LIONEL VAN DEERLIN "LaRouche gang thrives on Big Lie" The Tribune, San Diego 1988 Aug 9 B-7

For the last two weeks, Democratic presidential nominee Michael S. Dukakis has been dogged by rumors that he once received psychiatric treatment for depression. Although the rumors were unsubstantiated and were spread originally by associates of political extremist Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr., they were helped along by some aides to Vice President George Bush and were picked up by at least two newspapers-compelling Dukakis to bring out his doctor to deny them. [..] In Dukakis' case, the rumor of psychiatric history was apparently disseminated in a LaRouche broadside distributed during the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta. And even though there was no evidence to support it, in the game of media, like the children's game of telephone, it produced troublesome variations. [..] Among the most disturbing trends is what campaign professional Bill Carrick, who managed Missouri Rep. Richard A. Gephardt's presidential bid this year, calls "bankshot journalism," in which a newspaper unwilling to print the rumor in the first place will run countless stories about the rumor after it has appeared somewhere else. "When the LaRouchites and the Washington Times are deciding what is news, we are in a lot of trouble," Carrick said.

— Political Weapons Rumor Mill: The Media Try to Cope

PAUL HOUSTON, THOMAS B. ROSENSTIEL. Los Angeles Times (pre-1997 Fulltext). Los Angeles, Calif.:

Aug 5, 1988. pg. 1

A former aide to Lyndon LaRouche ...

Charles Tate, testifying on the third day of the mail-fraud and tax-evasion case against LaRouche and six associates, said LaRouche lied repeatedly, often humiliated and insulted staff members and made decisions when he was very drunk.

— "FORMER AIDE DESCRIBES LAROUCHE AS PARANOID SCHIZOPHRENIC" :[THIRD Edition]. " Seattle Times [Seattle, Wash.] 24 Nov. 1988, B3.

1989

In the midst of my lecture at Lima's Pacific University, a young man with a heavy northern Mexican accent stood up and began to make some remarks that soon turned into abuse. First he questioned my patriotism. Then he claimed, without offering proof, that the two most prominent men opposed to President Garcia's bank takeover were involved in drug trafficking. These two men were novelist and presidential candidate Mario Vargas Llosa and Hernando de Soto, author of one of the most influential books ever written on Latin America's social, political and economic system, "The Other Path."

My hosts at the university, upset at the long-winded harangue, asked me whether I wanted the security forces to expel the extemporaneous speaker and a group of his supporters who surrounded him in a defiant attitude. But I feared a likely violent outcome. Instead, I waited for my cue. When he began ranting that Mexico's state takeover of the banks had been well deserved because these institutions were involved in the laundering of drug money, I joked that cars are often used for the transportation of drugs, but that no one claims this is a reason to expropriate the automobile industry.

I was then able to request questions from other sections of the auditorium, but I could still hear my vitriolic countryman cry out, "You're a demagogue." After the lecture, though, he approached me and gave me an issue of the Executive Intelligence Review, one of Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr.'s primary publications. [..] Soon I found that LaRouche's activities in Latin America were widespread:

-- His Labor Party in Mexico has been often used to attack the opposition, and a book published by it argued that the right-of-center National Action Party (PAN) is a KGB agency;

-- In a critical 1986 election in Chihuahua, Mexico, LaRouche's Mexican goons passed out slanderous pamphlets about the PAN gubernatorial candidate. One such pamphlet suggested: "A vote for the PAN is a vote for Nazism"; [..] For political bigwigs enamored of conspiracy theories, and pressed with the need to find goons willing to do dirty jobs for them, his organization is too useful to turn down. Where else could one find someone willing to spread a rumor on the mental illness of a presidential candidate, to claim that the critics of a certain president are drug traffickers, to argue that a conservative party is funded by the KGB, or to disrupt an academic lecture because it runs counter to a government's interests.

— The Americas: Lyndon LaRouche's Latin American Connection By Sergio Sarmiento. Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition). New York, N.Y.: Sep 1, 1989. pg. 1

His intelligence gathering and propaganda networks also helped protect the financial operation by investigating the investigators and launching smear campaigns against creditors.

— Introduction, LYNDON LAROUCHE AND THE NEW AMERICAN FASCISM, William Dennis King, 1989.

They came to believe that the Revolution was just around the corner: The NCLC would seize control of most major American trade unions within six months, overthrow the government within the decade, and rule the world by the year 2000. To hasten the process they began disrupting meetings of other groups, seizing the microphone to give vehement speeches to the effect that everyone except themselves was working for the CIA.

— King, Chapter Two

Operation Mop Up was preceded by months of squabbling between the NCLC and the Communist Party USA. NCLC members had frequently disrupted CP meetings with long harangues from the floor. The CP began tossing them out and published articles alleging that they were government agents. Matters escalated in early 1973 when the NCLC announced a conference in Philadelphia to build a national organization for welfare recipients and the unemployed. CP members and other local activists started a campaign to discredit the conference, calling its NCLC organizers racists as well as agents. The NCLC leadership was furious. A New Solidarity front-page editorial, entitled "Deadly Crisis for CPUSA," warned the CP that if it didn't back off it would face an all-out counterattack. The CP failed to take the threat seriously. On the conference's opening day the anti-NCLC coalition sent a sound truck through the black community and staged a picket line with signs comparing the NCLC to the Ku Klux Klan. This failed to stop the event, which was attended by several hundred white middle-class activists and a handful of welfare mothers. The harassment did, however, give LaRouche the pretext he needed. He called an emergency meeting of the East Coast NCLC. "From here on in," he declared, "the CP cannot hold a meeting on the East Coast . . . We'll mop them up in two months." The NCLC, he promised, would seize "hegemony" on the left—i.e., replace the CP as the dominant organization. Many NCLC members were shocked and frightened by LaRouche's announcement, but he anticipated their reluctance: "I know you better than you know yourselves, and for the most part you're full of crap," he said. "This isn't a debating society anymore." A front-page New Solidarity editorial, "Operation Mop Up: The Class Struggle Is for Keeps," echoed LaRouche's call. "We must dispose of this stinking corpse [the CP]," the editorial said, "to ensure that it cannot act as a host for maggots and other parasites preparing future scabby Nixonite attacks on the working class. . . . If we were to vacillate . . . we would be guilty of betraying the human race. Our job is to pulverize the Communist Party." Meanwhile, the NCLC leadership prepared an extraordinary psycho-theological document, "The CP Within Us," to bolster morale. The key to winning Mop Up, it argued, was to expunge the inner voice of cowardice and hesitation (i.e., the CP) within each NCLC member. Months prior to Mop Up, LaRouche had ordered the most physically agile NCLC members to undergo training for street fighting. This training was now stepped up. Members were organized into flying squads armed with metal pipes, clubs, and nunchukas (Okinawan martial arts devices consisting of two sticks attached by a chain). The idea was to go into action as mini-phalanxes with the nunchuka wielders in the center. Mop Up began in New York, and spread to Philadelphia, Buffalo, Detroit, and other cities. Attackers were sometimes brought from out of town so their faces wouldn't be recognized. In several cities they broke up public meetings and invaded leftist bookstores, beating anyone who tried to bar their way. In New York they ambushed individual CP leaders on the street. In Detroit they administered a savage beating to a partially paralyzed left-wing activist on crutches. In Philadelphia, twenty-five to thirty NCLC members raided a meeting of the Public Workers Action Caucus. "The steps were a mass of blood," said a PWAC activist. "As soon as I walked out I was hit by a pole," Although no one was critically injured in any of the attacks, several were hospitalized with broken bones and many required medical treatment for cuts and bruises. The NCLC rhetoric kept pace with the attacks. "The red Communist Party has turned into a den of yellow cowards," announced a LaRouche spokesman in Philadelphia. "CP Recruiting Pallbearers for Its Own Funeral," blared a headline in the April 30 New Solidarity. When members of the Socialist Workers Party and other Trotskyist groups came forward to defend the CP despite past differences, the NCLC responded with an announcement that henceforth the Trotskyists would be fair game. Undeterred, dozens of SWP supporters showed up to guard the CP's New York mayoral candidate, Rasheed Storey, after the NCLC announced it would break up a speech he was scheduled to give at Columbia. Doug Jenness, a member of the defense squad, recalls that about forty LaRouchians "filtered into the hall, some wearing leather jackets. They had staves concealed under blankets. When Storey started speaking, they stood up and moved forward, putting on brass knuckles and displaying nunchukas." Storey and other speakers were whisked out the back. The battle then began in earnest. Although the NCLC was finally driven from the hall, six members of the defense squad required treatment. An unsigned front-page New Solidarity article, "Their Morals and Ours" (named after an anti-Stalinist treatise by Trotsky), expressed anger at the attitude of LaRouche's former Trotskyist comrades. The SWP, the article complained, "has been saying, 'Smash the Communist Party' for almost forty years, yet when some left organization proceeds to actually smash the CP, the SWP leaders and members roll their glazed eyes heavenward, expecting the entire galaxy to fall upon them." "Their Morals and Ours" revealed the tactical thinking behind Mop Up. It boasted that fifty NCLC members could "rout" three hundred CP members and that the CP would have to mobilize at least six times as many fighters to even become a "serious obstacle." [..] Most Mop Up attacks were carried out by just a few dozen persons. Even the most enthusiastic of these became nervous as the CP and SWP fought back, their defense squads often outnumbering the attackers. "I pissed blood for a month," recalls a female NCLC member who was injured while charging a Detroit SWP rally. The Chicago regional NCLC sent a memo to New York stating that it wasn't strong enough to "deal directly" with the CP. Would the leadership send "defense reinforcements"? Until such reinforcements arrived, the Chicago organization would keep most of its activities "low-key or underground," the memo said. By May, the NCLC leadership was finding it difficult to whip up enthusiasm for fresh attacks even in New York. It is widely believed among leftists that the police in some cities encouraged Mop Up. This suspicion is understandable in light of well-documented police harassment of left-wing groups in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But former LaRouchians who participated in Mop Up say they don't recall any police encouragement. At the time, the NCLC regarded the police as the enemy, acting in cahoots with the CP and the SWP to repress the true forces of Revolution. This view was vehemently expressed in the pages of New Solidarity as the police cracked down on Mop Up in city after city. Several NCLC members were arrested in Philadelphia, including a top LaRouche aide. More were arrested in Boston. In Buffalo felony indictments brought the local Mop Up to a grinding halt. In New York City two NCLC members were charged with second-degree assault and possession of a deadly instrument after they attacked black CP leader Ron Tyson. One of Tyson's attackers was rearrested a week later for assaulting an SWP member. The only evidence of a law enforcement role in Mop Up points not to local police but to the FBI. The findings of a federal judge in an SWP lawsuit against the FBI suggest that once Mop Up was under way, the bureau's New York office attempted to aggravate it as part of a campaign of anonymous mailings and other malicious pranks to keep leftist sects at each other's throats. Federal Judge Charles D. Breitel of the Southern District of New York reviewed classified FBI files in 1979 as a court-appointed Special Master acting for plaintiff SWP. His report noted that a letter had been sent to the NCLC during Mop Up listing the names, home telephone numbers, and addresses of SWP members. "Unless the Government is prepared to allow disclosure of all information" in the deleted part of the file, Breitel ruled, "it should be conclusively presumed that the letter was sent by the FBI . . ." LaRouche knew just how far he could push Mop Up. Before the stalemate with the CP could turn into a rout for his followers, he declared victory and called everything off. In fact, Mop Up did no real political harm to the CP. A few meetings were canceled in the first weeks, but thereafter the CP continued its normal activities behind a screen of defense squads. However, Mop Up was a great success for LaRouche. It induced his followers to believe that those they had attacked, and who had fought back, were permanently the enemy. No longer were non-NCLC leftists seen as rivals within a common Marxist tradition. They had become unredeemable devils, traitors to the working class, subhuman police agents, fascists. Mop Up thus marked a bizarre new stage in the NCLC's political evolution—the stage of antifascist fascism.

— King, Chapter Three

Predictably, any member who expressed skepticism became immediately suspect. Christine Berl called the story hogwash and withdrew from any active role in the leadership. LaRouche said that the CIA, acting through her boyfriend, had taken over her mind. A friend warned her that a plot was afoot to kidnap and deprogram her—to liberate her from her brainwashed condition. They waited outside her door, but she didn't come out. Less fortunate was Alice Weitzman, also a skeptic, who was held captive in her apartment and forced to listen to Beethoven at high volume—a deprogramming technique suggested by LaRouche. Weitzman managed to throw a note out the window. A passerby picked it up and alerted the police. When officers went to the apartment, they heard screams, forced their way in, and freed her. Later that day, they arrested six NCLC members on kidnapping charges. (The case was ultimately dismissed after Weitzman refused to press charges.)

— King, Chapter Four

The first application of "ethnic fascism" came in 1973, when the NCLC set out to organize street-fighting units, fascist in all but name, among black and Hispanic ghetto youth. LaRouche first alluded to this idea in his April 1973 speech announcing Operation Mop Up. "You think this CP stuff [Mop Up] is scary?" he asked. "Well, I'll tell you something that's really gonna scare you. In a few months we're gonna have 10,000 enraged ghetto youth, we're gonna organize street gangs. . . "

At an NCLC convention in late May he launched the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM), which he said would be a "paramilitary organization" reaching out to the type of ghetto youth who believe they can "make it as Superfly." It would "cut through" their "hustle" mentality and organize them on the basis of "what they really feel underneath," their feelings of despair and of "increasingly pure rage." RYM would teach them that rage is not just "robbing the corner candy store." Rage is the determination to "take it all"—to seize control of America in alliance with other enraged groups. [..]

The message was that gang members could become "Prometheans"—like Zeke Boyd, a former Panther and the token black on the NCLC security staff. LaRouche's organizers developed ties with the Outlaws, reportedly the largest gang in Bedford-Stuyvesant. New Solidarity said the Outlaws were a peaceful bunch attending RYM classes to learn to appreciate classical music. According to Christine Berl, this was not entirely accurate. "I gave the Beethoven class," she recalls. "They had guns in the room." [..] The NCLC also physically attacked black activists and disseminated blatantly racist propaganda. This began during Mop Up, when blacks were priority targets. A black CP leader was assaulted on the street near party headquarters in Manhattan. A CP meeting in Harlem was terrorized by a contingent wearing hockey helmets. A meeting of the Martin Luther King Coalition in Buffalo was attacked by an all-white Mop Up squad, which beat up several people. New Solidarity meanwhile carried headlines such as "CP Turns Rebels into Niggers" and bestowed demeaning nicknames on black CP members—e.g., "Ron 'Race Riot' Tyson." In Newark the NCLC targeted poet turned activist Amiri Baraka, who had attracted national attention by his crusade for black community empowerment. NCLC members convinced themselves that Baraka was a CIA agent and hence fair game. They circulated a pamphlet called Papa Doc Baraka: Fascism in Newark. This and various New Solidarity articles called him a "gutter dweller," an "animal," a "mad dog," "Aunt Jemima," and "Superfly." A cartoon on the pamphlet's cover portrayed him as a hyena with Negroid lips drooling over a baby's corpse. Baraka became the NCLC's Symbolic Black, just as Henry Kissinger would become its Symbolic Jew.

Baraka's and LaRouche's followers began to fight it out in the streets, much to the delight of right-wing elements in Newark's white ethnic community led by lawand- order advocate Anthony Imperiale. Followers of Imperiale began to echo some of the NCLC's charges against Baraka, and met with Newark NCLC members to explore the possibility of joint action. Individuals claiming to be affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan also approached NCLC members to express support. In September 1973 the NCLC staged an anti-Baraka demonstration that turned into a slugfest inside the Newark City Council chambers. Ten NCLC members were arrested, including Gus Kalimtgis, co-author of the Baraka pamphlet. The NCLC developed a plan to take its anti-Baraka campaign nationwide. "The country will be saturated with our newspapers, leaflets, with the Baraka pamphlet, with meetings, forums, press conferences, rallies," boasted New Solidarity. It called on "every working class organizer" and "all trade unionists" in the country to join the fight. That fall violent clashes between the NCLC and black nationalists occurred on several campuses. At Harvard the NCLC security staff set a trap. They called a meeting, armed themselves, and waited for members of the Boston-based Mau Mau to filter into the room. "A signal was given," said a former NCLC member. "Suddenly a sea of nunchukas rose in the air and came down." One of the Mau Mau tried to pull a gun; NCLC members wrestled him to the floor. "They beat the shit out of him with sticks, then one of our guys stood over him with a shotgun while he lay there bleeding. The rest of the Mau Mau beat a retreat."

— King, Chapter Five

In psychological terms the anti-Semitism that seized the NCLC in the late 1970s was similar to the violent fantasies that gripped it during Operation Mop Up. Instead of assaulting Communists with nunchukas, the NCLC now attacked Jews via brutally worded propaganda tracts. Once again LaRouche helped his followers overcome their moral qualms by reframing reality for them through semantic tricks and false syllogisms.

— King, Chapter Six

In the early 1970s LaRouche bolstered his followers' morale with fantasies of an insurrection that would soon put them in power. Select NCLC members were sent to a secret boot camp near Argyle, New York, to study riflery, the use of explosives, and small-arms tactics. One of the former instructors, Gregory Rose, said they learned "how to take this hill, that hill." They also played Capture the Flag. Members not attending the camp participated in local NCLC "militias." Former NCLC member Linda Ray recalled: "We were each handed a pole. We were told we were preparing for class warfare. We practiced marching in circles." A top LaRouche aide produced a study of Tito's World War II partisans as the prototype for LaRouche's army. Relevant intelligence was collected, such as on the troop strength and readiness of California's National Guard. As the NCLC moved to the right, the idea arose of winning over military officers to help LaRouche achieve power. U.S. Army intelligence reports reveal that in the mid-1970s NCLC members began calling and sending suggestive memos to high-ranking officers. For instance, Ron Kokinda called the XVIII Airborne Corps commander at Fort Bragg in 1976 to warn him that a Carter victory in the presidential election would pose a threat to the Republic. Kokinda also sent a letter to General Frederick C. Weyand, the Army Chief of Staff, claiming that Carter and the Wall Street bankers were plotting to destroy the Constitution. The way to stop them, he advised, was to crush Wall Street's "command structure" and undertake a massive "economic reorganization."

[..] According to former NCLC members, the national office staff was briefed in May 1979 on how a military coup would make LaRouche dictator. The NCLC's "rightwing allies" supposedly would bring this about sometime before the 1980 election. Meanwhile in a campaign speech LaRouche called for the abolition of democracy and alluded to a plan for a march on Washington. The context suggested something like Mussolini's 1922 march on Rome.

— King, Chapter Seven

His campaign workers made hundreds of harassing phone calls to New Hampshire state officials and Democratic Party leaders at all hours of day and night. [..] LaRouche organizers rounded up low-income senior citizens in the industrial towns of southern New Hampshire and took them to the city clerk's office. There, they had the seniors fill out voter registration forms, get the forms properly certified, and then request and fill out absentee ballots on the spot. According to Manchester city clerk Joan Walsh, the LaRouchians even helped the seniors mark the ballots. Newspaper articles suggested that many who filled out the absentee ballots did so out of fear. Local police received several complaints about LaRouchian canvassers harassing and intimidating seniors.

— King, Chapter Eleven

The NDPC got off to a roaring start with a rally in Huntsville, Alabama, to Hang Paul Volcker (the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and a favorite target of the ultra-right).

— King, Chapter Twelve

The Illinois Democratic Party received the greatest surprise of its history when, in the March 18, 1986, primary, followers of LaRouche won the nominations for lieutenant governor and secretary of state. The LaRouchians were no less amazed. Their Chicago contingent hadn't even bothered to watch the election polls that night, being too busy conducting a mock exorcism in front of the home of University of Chicago religion professor Mircea Eliade (they claimed he was an evil warlock). The following day, Janice Hart, thirty-one, the victor in the secretary of state contest, announced her plans for a different kind of exorcism targeting bankers and drug pushers: "I'm going to revive the spirit of Abraham Lincoln and Genera! Patton. We're going to roll our tanks down State Street." [..] A curious incident the day before the primary showed that the LaRouchians were well aware of this tinderbox. A contingent of NDPC demonstrators led by Sheila Jones invaded the lobby of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. They unfurled a banner: "End the Bankers' Dictatorship—Jones for Senate." The NDPC had unsuccessfully sought major media attention during the previous week through a variety of stunts.

— King, Chapter Thirteen

During his eight years of presidential press conferences, Ronald Reagan often took questions from Executive Intelligence Review correspondents. On August 3, 1988, the question and answer created a furor. EIR’s Nick Benton asked the President if he thought Michael Dukakis should make his medical records public. Benton was alluding to rumors spread by his own NCLC colleagues that the Democratic presidential nominee had sought psychiatric help for depression in the late 1970s. Reagan, grinning, answered: "Look, I'm not going to pick on an invalid." The remark elicited groans of dismay from the assembled reporters, and Reagan half apologized several hours later. Yet the President had managed to transform an unsubstantiated smear into a major international news story. The New York Times’s Anthony Lewis wrote that "anyone who thinks that crack was accidental must believe in the Tooth Fairy." Senator Daniel P. Moynihan used even blunter language, charging that the "Big Lie" of Lyndon LaRouche had "reached the Oval Office." The LaRouchians had started their Dukakis rumors at the convention, with leaflets that asked, "Is Dukakis the new Senator Eagleton?" Afterwards they called daily newspapers around the country, telling each that its competitors were already hot on the story. Fearful of being scooped, editors and reporters reacted predictably. Dukakis headquarters received a barrage of inquiries. Although campaign spokesmen denied everything and the LaRouchians offered no solid evidence, the rumors became newsworthy simply as rumors. The weekend before Reagan's "invalid" quip, several important news outlets had already reported the story. The Reverend Moon's Washington Times gave it front-page coverage with the sly headline: "Dukakis Psychiatric Rumor Denied." On August 3, a Wall Street Journal editorial noted "rumors about [Dukakis's] depression," which supposedly highlighted "how little the American people know about this man." Dukakis called a press conference to deny the rumor, and within a few days it was overshadowed by the story of Dan Quayle and the National Guard. Syndicated columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak noted that the caper apparently had backfired by linking Bush to LaRouche more than Dukakis to the psychiatrist's couch. They charged that, weeks before the story broke into print, the "political apparatus of Bush campaign manager Lee Atwater was investigating the details and trying to spread the findings without leaving any vice-presidential fingerprints." The column suggested that Atwater's lieutenants had "asked outside GOP operatives" to do the dirty work. There was a potential bombshell here, but most of the media showed the usual reluctance to cover anything relating to LaRouche. This emboldened his followers to escalate their smear campaign with a sixteen-page pamphlet on Dukakis's alleged mental problems, partiality for the "drug-sex counterculture," and support for "privileges for homosexuals." The initial press run was 100,000 copies, available for fifty cents each in bulk orders of 100 or more. The press treated the original smear as an isolated incident, but the LaRouche organization had conducted scores of dirty-tricks operations against the Democrats (and occasionally against moderate Republicans on behalf of the Reaganites) over the previous twelve years. Almost totally ignored by the press except in the earliest and least harmful stage, this campaign is probably the largest and certainly the longest-running operation of its type in American electoral history.

The NCLC's wooing of the Republicans began in 1976, when LaRouche was running for President on the U.S. Labor Party ticket. Shortly after Jimmy Carter won the Democratic nomination, LaRouche shifted from seeking votes for himself to diverting votes into President Ford’s column. NCLC defectors recall meetings that summer and fall to plan pro-Ford and anti-Carter activities. New Solidarity told the NCLC membership that the nation would face a "near-certain nuclear incineration" if they didn't launch an all-out "stop Carter" effort. On election eve LaRouche appeared on NBC-TV to warn the nation about Carter's alleged mental imbalance—the same charge as against Dukakis, although less artfully presented. The NCLC collected $96,000 on an emergency basis to pay for LaRouche's half-hour speech. New Solidarity said the money was raised "with the aid of a group of conservative Republican businessmen"—a statement which NCLC defectors say is true. Federal Election Commission records show large donations to LaRouche's campaign committee the day before the election. The reputed donors were NCLC members covering for the real donors. One conservative donor, who was a member of the board of directors of Ocean Spray, put up $15,000. [..] In 1982 the LaRouchians used red-baiting and sexual smears against former California governor Jerry Brown, who was running for the U.S. Senate. The material was issued by NDPC candidate William Wertz's campaign committee. It emphasized Brown's ties to Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda, presenting a wildly exaggerated account of the couple's leftist activities in hopes it would rub off on Brown. Fonda engaged in animalistic sexual behavior, one pamphlet said. Her movies promoted incest. Her mother had committed suicide. Her Malibu home had been the scene of "wild goings-on" prior to Sharon Tate's murder. She, her husband, and Brown were all part of the "Cult of Aquarius" plotting to deprive America of clean safe nuclear energy. The pamphlet advertised campaign bumper stickers: "Clean Up the Fruitflies—Spray Jerry Brown," "Don't Let Jerry Brown Pull Down Your Pants" and "What Spreads Faster than Radiation? Jane Fonda."

The Baltimore LaRouche organization smeared liberal Democratic congresswoman Barbara Mikulski in the 1982 and 1984 primaries, as noted earlier, but the softening-up tactic was best seen in 1986, when Mikulski became the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate. She was opposed by Republican Linda Chavez, a Social Democrat turned neo-conservative who had served as the chief of President Reagan's public liaison office. The Republicans regarded the race as a crucial one in their battle to keep control of the Senate, and the LaRouchians obliged by lesbian-baiting Mikulski in the primary. NDPC candidate, Debra Freeman, urged Maryland Democrats to "vote straight Democrat." She continued this rhetoric beyond the primary season, calling Mikulski a "dike in the way of progress" and the "ugliest woman in Congress." New Solidarity quipped that there should be a prize for anyone "who can correctly identify Mikulski's sex." Chavez adopted a watered-down version of this, calling her opponent a "San Francisco-style Democrat" and warning that she could not "hide in the closet." Supporters also dredged up stories about an alleged affair between Mikulski and a staff aide. But many voters apparently were disgusted by the Freeman-Chavez act: Mikulski won a strong victory in November.

[..] Democratic governor James Hunt attempting to unseat Republican senator Jesse Helms, one of the most powerful figures on Capitol Hill. Former NCLC security staffer Charles Tate says he was told in early 1984 that work would be done on Helms's behalf. This was no surprise to Tate: he knew the security staff had been in touch with a top Helms aide for several years. (During the Falklands war in 1982, Helms had been the only senator to adopt the idea, also held by LaRouche, that the United States should invoke the Monroe Doctrine against "British imperialism" and in defense of Argentina's junta. The NDPC had issued a pro-Argentina propaganda pamphlet, including statements by LaRouche and Helms.) Security staffers discussed sending an infiltrator into the Hunt campaign, but decided they could do the job best through undercover phone calls. Tate was present in the New York security office while a black NCLC member made calls to gay activists backing Hunt. The caller claimed to be from the Chicago Metro, a black weekly. Given Helms's notorious racism, the persons being interviewed all assumed the caller was anti-Helms. Meanwhile articles linking Hunt to the gay community began to appear in The Landmark, a now-defunct conservative weekly published by Chapel Hill realtor Robert Windsor. The Landmark published excerpts from what apparently were taped conversations with various Hunt supporters in Chapel Hill, New York City, and elsewhere. The persons interviewed included gay activists as well as liberal socialites and civil rights leaders. The idea was to show that Hunt was getting substantial local and national support from constituencies disliked by many conservative Democrats. There were also articles suggesting Hum was himself gay. "Jim Hunt Is Sissy, Prissy, Girlish and Effeminate," read one headline, followed by "Is Jim Hunt homosexual?...Is he AC and DC? Has he kept a deep dark secret in his political closet all of his adult life?” Hundreds of thousands of free copies of The Landmark were circulated throughout the state, especially in rural areas. Like any wily campaigner, Helms publicly disassociated himself from the false charges about Hunt's sex life (and there is no evidence that Helms personally knew of the LaRouchians' involvement), but The Landmark's press run increased sharply right before Election Day. In the wake of Helms's narrow victory, many North Carolinians believed the smear campaign had tipped the balance.

At least some of the tapes used by The Landmark came from LaRouche's security staff. In early March 1984, a LaRouchian phoned Virginia Apuzzo, director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, pretending to be a news reporter. Charles Tate says he heard the call being made and "saw the tape recorder running." A transcript of Apuzzo’s remarks appeared in the March 29 issue of The Landmark, which also included excerpts from a phone conversation with Lightning Brown, a gay activist in Chapel Hill. Brown says he received two calls. The first was from Grant Duay, a supposed reporter for a gay weekly, the New York City News. Brown said that Duay "asked about my fund raising for Hunt. The details ended up in The Landmark right away—it was frightening." Duay was in fact a notorious LaRouche operative who had previously used the New York City News as his cover for interviewing and taping political opponents of LaRouche. (In 1986 Duay would be arrested in Manhattan as part of a homosexual child pornography ring.) [..] That fall they went after Democratic front-runner Walter Mondale with insulting leaflets and carefully staged disruptions of his campaign appearances and press conferences. As against Bush in 1980, they used the Trilateral Commission issue, publishing a list of Mondale advisers said to be Trilateral members and citing his own membership as proof that he was a tool of "Kissinger and Rockefeller." At the time of the Grenada invasion they charged that Mondale foreign policy adviser Robert Pastor and former Carter aide Dr. Peter Bourne had been in cahoots with the ultra-left military regime overthrown by the invasion. In fact, Pastor and Bourne had merely provided advice to Bourne's father, who ran a medical school on the island, on how to steer safely through a dangerous situation. The LaRouchians circulated a pamphlet asserting that Pastor and Bourne had formerly been associated with the Institute for Policy Studies. When Mondale was asked about the Grenada allegations at an Oklahoma press conference, he complained about the smear campaign. But he never took any steps against the LaRouchians, and never raised the issue of their apparent ties to the Reagan administration. [..] In March 1984 NBC-TV's First Camera aired an expose of LaRouche's ties to the Reagan administration and especially to the National Security Council, The report also described the NCLC's anti-Semitism and history of violence--and LaRouche's discussion of a scheme to kill President Carter.[..]

— King, Chapter Fifteen

LaRouche's cadres were preprogrammed for the quarantine campaign. For years words like "faggot" and "queer" had peppered NCLC publications, along with allegations that child molesters, Satanists, and Communists control the gay rights movement, The articles also suggested that homosexuality is a characteristically Jewish condition and that rich Jews encourage it to undermine Western civilization. When the AIDS crisis erupted, LaRouche blamed the "shylocks" for being too cheap to pay for research crash programs. His gay-equals-Jewish canard dates back to the 1970s, when New Solidarity raved against the "faggot politics" of "Zionist-supporting" gay activists. New Solidarity published a cartoon series in which prominent New York Jews were shown in Roman togas at a banquet sponsored by the "Emperor of Homohattan,” Mayor Ed Koch. In the early 1980s LaRouchian publications accused prominent Jews and pro-Zionist Gentiles of being part of an international "Homintern." LaRouche wrote "Kissinger: The Politics of Faggotry," a crude and defamatory leaflet on his longtime Symbolic Jew. According to LaRouche, Kissinger's alleged "heathen sexual inclinations are merely an integral part of a larger evil," and Kissinger is "psychologically" part of a "distinct species." In the context of LaRouche's biological-racial theories about the Jewish "species," the equation of Jewishness and "faggotry" was unmistakable.

— King, Chapter Sixteen

On February 7, 1982, two LaRouchians met the Devil, not in a graveyard at midnight, but in the well-lit terminal at Newark International Airport. They abandoned their literature table and rushed to exorcise him with a barrage of hostile questions. "Jesus Christ," muttered Dr. Henry Kissinger, their longtime hate figure. He and his wife, Nancy, kept walking toward the boarding area, en route to Boston, where he was scheduled to undergo triple-bypass heart surgery. "Dr. Kissinger," shouted twenty-eight-year-old Ellen Kaplan, "is it true that you sleep with young boys at the Carlyle Hotel?" It was a standard LaRouchian accusation. Nancy Kissinger would have ignored it on other occasions, but she was distraught by the prospect of her husband's operation. According to her attorney, her hand reached out and came in contact, very lightly, with Kaplan's throat. Others assert that her actions were less restrained. Whatever the truth, Kaplan retreated, and the Kissingers continued on their way. A trivial event, one might say. Yet its consequences included a warrant for Mrs. Kissinger's arrest, a heavily publicized assault trial, and a LaRouchian harassment campaign against Dr. Kissinger on four continents. This campaign, waged from mid-1982 through late 1984, is unique in the annals of radical protest against public figures. It involved a torrent of propaganda attacks in at least six languages, carefully planned disruptions of Kissinger's public appearances, the planting of defamatory rumors in the international press, scores of malicious pranks, and the expenditure of millions of dollars on network television ads denouncing him. [..] The LaRouchians had attacked Kissinger on an overtly anti-Semitic basis throughout the late 1970s. When New Solidarity called for the "immediate elimination" of the "Jewish Lobby" from American public life, it said the first stage should be "the naming of names, such as Henry A. Kissinger." A subsequent editorial railed against infiltration of Washington by agents of the "Zionist-British organism." Heading the list was the "Israeli-British" agent Kissinger. When Kissinger's The White House Years was published in 1980, a review by LaRouche in EIR used Mein Kampf-style images of infection and contamination. America's moral "rot," he said, was due to "such alien 'Typhoid Marys’ of immorality" as Kissinger. LaRouche then dashed off The Pestilence of Usury, a pamphlet sold at airport literature tables. Among the villains was Kissinger, said to be the servant of oligarchs "far worse than Hitler . . . nasty, evil." [..] LaRouche once again reframed reality so that his Jewish followers could tell themselves that the anti-Kissinger campaign was "anti-Nazi," He called it Operation Nuremberg, an effort to punish Kissinger for alleged crimes a "hundred times worse than Hitler's." The government would never punish Kissinger; only the NCLC could do it. The NCLC might lack the power to exact the ultimate penalty, but it could psychologically torment Kissinger. LaRouche used his vaunted profiling technique to determine what Kissinger supposedly feared the most: ridicule. The NCLC set out to confront him with it, much like the interrogator in Nineteen Eighty-four who confronted Winston Smith with rats. LaRouche called this "psychological terror." He framed his plan in such a way that no matter what happened, he would look all-powerful to his followers. If Kissinger expressed anger, this would be proof that LaRouche had freaked him out. If he ignored LaRouche, this would be proof that LaRouche had frightened him into silence. In either case LaRouche could claim that the trauma was festering and that Kissinger would sooner or later commit suicide or die of a heart attack. After the Newark Airport tussle the LaRouchians dispatched Ellen Kaplan to criminal court to swear out an assault complaint. This tactic had gained them media attention on earlier occasions, as when FEF members filed assault charges against Peter Fonda after he ripped up their poster at Denver International Airport calling for feeding his sister Jane to the whales. The New York Post's gossip page took note of Kaplan's assault complaint, but the story would have stopped there except for a simple mishap: The summons was delivered to the Kissingers' Washington home at a time when it was closed up. Mrs. Kissinger did not receive it in time to file an answer before a routine warrant for her arrest was issued.

The LaRouchians were ecstatic. They called a press conference in Manhattan. Kaplan briefly recounted her story, and then NCLC regional director Dennis Speed outlined the plan to psychologically harass Kissinger through ridicule. In an ideal world the press would have walked out at this point. Instead, Kaplan and Speed's remarks—including the canard about the Carlyle Hotel—were given national coverage.

On May 21, Mrs. Kissinger's attorney moved for dismissal in New Jersey State Superior Court, arguing the case was "too trivial" for trial. The judge denied the motion and set a trial date. An editorial in the New York Daily News asked why the courts should be party to schemes that merely "add injury to the original insult." When the non-jury trial convened on June 10, the media turned out in force. Kaplan took the stand and delivered a litany apparently designed for maximum quotability: Mrs. Kissinger "took her left hand and grabbed my neck. I was very scared. She sneered, bared her teeth, and I thought she was going to bite…." Municipal judge Julio Fuentes found Mrs. Kissinger not guilty. Sometimes, he observed, it is "spontaneous and somewhat human" to assault someone. Although press columnists denounced Kaplan as "swinish," "lowest," and "filthiest," LaRouche must have felt satisfied. First, he had escaped denunciation himself—most news accounts didn't even mention that Kaplan was connected to him. Second, the public had been exposed to a baseless charge against Kissinger, and it was inevitable the accusation would stick in many people's minds, in that twilight zone where people half believe something because they want to believe it, (Former NCLC security staffer Charles Tate says the Carlyle Hotel story came from a "demented" source who also purveyed hysterical rumors of nationwide homicidal conspiracies.)

[..] In the summer of 1982, the LaRouchians announced the next step—an international campaign to draw the noose of psychological terror around the neck of "Fat Henry." What followed was a multileveled effort by hundreds of LaRouche's followers. Most important was the planting of defamatory stories about Kissinger with overseas newspapers. This was easiest to achieve in Mediterranean and Third World countries where conspiracy theories are a basic part of the political culture, many intellectuals are anti-American and anti-Israel, and Communists and ultrarightists subsidize mass circulation dailies. LaRouche's intelligence staff concocted different stories for different audiences. Always there was a plot, and always it reflected anti-Semitic stereotypes. Kissinger and his friends were portrayed as plotting the assassination of prominent Gentiles, collecting usurious debts for the International Monetary Fund, engaging in real estate swindles, betraying America to its enemies, and encouraging moral degeneracy on behalf of a cosmopolitan value system. The supporting cast included, in one version or another, the CIA, the KGB, Mossad, the Mafia, the Freemasons, and a powerful homosexual cabal. The LaRouchians held press conferences in various world capitals to release official-looking reports on behalf of Lyndon LaRouche, representing him as a leader of the U.S. Democratic Party, international publishing tycoon, friend of Giscard d'Estaing and Helmut Schmidt, and economist of world renown. Reporters for sensation-mongering newspapers often failed to check whether LaRouche's credentials were really what his followers claimed.

LaRouche's European Labor Party (ELP) presented a legal brief to the Italian government tribunal investigating the Red Brigade's kidnapping and murder of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro. The brief said Kissinger was behind not only the Moro murder but a wide range of terrorist acts—a “strategy of tension" designed to prevent Italian Communist Party participation in the government, A former Moro aide then told the tribunal about a 1974 conversation in which Kissinger, who was secretary of state at the time, told Moro that the U.S, government disapproved of his plan to bring the Communist Party into the government. The LaRouchians said this proved their case. The fact that Moro was kidnapped in 1978, when Kissinger was no longer secretary of state, didn't faze them at all. This story obviously was aimed at the left, but the ELP also developed a version for the right: Kissinger was a member of the "Homintern," a secret gay brotherhood operating at the "highest levels of several governments." The KGB had learned about this and had blackmailed him into becoming their agent. Just why a KGB agent would have wanted to murder Aldo Moro and keep the Communists out of the Italian cabinet was not explained. The LaRouchians boasted that story number one (Kissinger/CIA) was picked up by Moscow's Literaturnaya Gazeta, while story number two (Kissinger/KGB) was supposedly reported in Italian, French, and Tunisian newspapers and on Venezuelan television. The 1981 attempted assassination of Pope John Paul was also grist for the mill. To blame Kissinger fit right in with LaRouche's theory that the Jews controlled Europe in the Middle Ages through selective poisoning of popes. The LaRouchians also enticed the Arab media with a story that Kissinger had formed a real estate consortium to buy up the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

In mid-1982 the LaRouchians learned that Kissinger was planning a trip to Argentina, which was in political turmoil following the Falklands fiasco. A press statement was sent to Buenos Aires from the office of "U.S. Democratic Party leader" LaRouche reminding Argentinians that Kissinger had supported the British. The statement also accused Kissinger of murdering Aldo Moro, attempting to murder Helga LaRouche and braining a Rumanian waiter with a whiskey bottle during a sex orgy in Acapulco. EIR later claimed that the LaRouche statement was distributed by TELAM, the Argentine government press agency, and was printed under banner headlines in a Buenos Aires daily. A follow-up news release said that Kissinger intended to put the squeeze on Argentina for the usurers of the International Monetary Fund and would destroy any politician who opposed him. According to EIR, this release also was distributed by TELAM and printed in at least two Argentine newspapers. LaRouche's Mexican Labor Party joined the act with a demonstration at a Chase Manhattan branch in Mexico City to protest an upcoming Kissinger visit. Kissinger's name was again linked to IMF usury and threats to national sovereignty. In late 1982 the LaRouchians set up a "special-operations 'Kissinger watch'" in Wiesbaden. This coincided with the arrival in Europe of LaRouche security aide Paul Goldstein (who according to FBI claims was hiding from a Manhattan grand jury investigating the NCLC's harassment of Roy Cohn). EIR boasted that the Kissinger Watch had "tracking capabilities extending from Ireland through the Middle East." In fact, security staffers merely called up Kissinger Associates in New York, posing as journalists, to obtain Kissinger's travel schedule. The objective was to create a "controlled aversive environment" around Kissinger—schoolboy pranks, crank calls, demonstrations. When he was about to leave Munich for London to meet with British officials, an imposter called Britain to say Kissinger wasn't coming, then called Kissinger's hotel room to say the British had canceled. When he visited Milan, the LaRouchians released a banner supported by hundreds of balloons proclaiming that "Kissinger Killed Moro." When he traveled to Stockholm, Swedish ELP members disrupted his press conference and had to be removed by the police. New Solidarity boasted that this took place "under cascades of flashbulbs and television cameras," and that the story "reached as far as Singapore and Mexico via satellite hook-ups."

gave a speech in Worms on German-American Friendship Day, an ELP leaflet urged the audience to buy Seymour Hersh's biography of Kissinger, The Price of Power. According to EIR, a prankster dressed as Kissinger jumped up as the event began and shouted: "That man on the podium is not the real Dr. Kissinger. I am the real Dr. Kissinger. I will now tell you the truth about Aldo Moro. . ." EIR said that as the prankster was being carried out, a second one, dressed as Nancy Kissinger, jumped up to continue the disruption. The campaign was no less intense in the United States. When Kissinger appeared on ABC-TV's Nightline in August 1982, the LaRouchians mobilized at the studio in Manhattan. Covering both exits, they pelted his limousine with eggs, forcing him to make his escape hidden in a catering truck. When he spoke at Georgetown University, they passed out copies of EIR containing an article entitled "How Henry Kissinger Will Be Destroyed." When his friends gave him a birthday party, the LaRouchians passed out a fake "medical alert bulletin" alleging that he had AIDS (again, the Mein Kampf theme: contamination). When he addressed the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, picketers carried signs such as "It's Anti-Semitic to Call Kissinger a Jew." LaRouche meanwhile issued a personal attack in Kissinger. Circulated in leaflet form under the title "The Politics of Faggotry," it was a kind of manifesto of the harassment campaign, uniting LaRouche's loathing of Kissinger, Roy Cohn, gays, discotheque music, and the Roman Empire into a single extraordinary vision. To understand Kissinger's evil species-nature, LaRouche said, one must "think back to the Emperor Nero and his court. Think of Studio 54, then of Nero's court, and then of Studio 54 again. Think of Roy Cohn's parties . . . Think of Nero, and then of Kissinger, and then of Nero and then of Roy M. Cohn. That is the kind of faggot Henry Kissinger is." (Questioned about this quote in a 1984 deposition, LaRouche knew he was on shaky ground. He backed down and said Kissinger merely had the "personality of a faggot.") [..] A 1983 EIR special report accused Kissinger of "coordinating a drive to consolidate control of the Reagan administration for the Trilateral Commission wing of the Republican Party." When Reagan appointed Kissinger to head the White House Commission on Central America, New Solidarity claimed that "a wave of fear and foreboding is now sweeping through the United States." An accompanying article alleged "intense resistance among Reagan Kitchen Cabinet insiders to Kissinger involvement in administration policy making." (The LaRouchians were in contact at the time with Judge William Clark's assistant, Richard Morris.) But Kissinger was said to hold all the aces. He had supposedly obtained, via the "Israeli mafia," blackmail videotapes of top administration officials in bed with Alfred Bloomingdale's mistress, Vicky Morgan. At this point the LaRouchians downplayed the theme of Kissinger the "British" agent, which always had been too esoteric for most Americans. Now the Symbolic Jew was given a guise the New Right could easily comprehend: a good old-fashioned Commie traitor like the Rosenbergs. New Solidarity announced that Kissinger, although still linked to the British, was also a "secure and long-term asset of the Soviet KGB." This charge was soon extended to other Jews in the U.S. government and to many Israeli leaders. In 1984, LaRouche adopted the campaign slogan "Vote for the man that Kissinger hates the most." This was a variation on the 1980 campaign theme that LaRouche was the man the Zionists hated the most. LaRouche purchased fifteen half-hour spots on national television, incessantly attacking Kissinger as a traitor. Under federal law the networks had to sell LaRouche the time and could not censor his remarks, for he was a registered candidate. EIR boasted that LaRouche's television chats reached "up to 15 million people." When he referred to "Kissinger and his friends" and "Kissinger and people like him," the real meaning was obvious to many viewers. A LaRouchian internal briefing of March 7, 1984, reporting on the organization's daily round of telephone calls, alleged that the anti-Kissinger campaign was making headway in important circles. "Republican and military layers in the south and mid-Atlantic states are queasy about Kissinger," the memo said. It cited a "high level military contact who is a former astronaut." This individual supposedly hated Kissinger and believed "the Administration has been going 'downhill' ever since the removal of Clark from the NSC. He wants all our material on Kissinger." (It should be noted that internal briefings routinely exaggerated the NCLC's influence: High-level officials described as enthusiastic allies were sometimes just listening to them out of curiosity.) The LaRouchian hysteria about Kissinger resulted in a strong indirect warning to the former Secretary of State in July 1982. An EIR news brief quoted a prediction by an unnamed psychic that if any attempt should be made on the life of LaRouche, "a list of 13 well-known political figures, headed by Henry Kissinger, Nancy Kissinger, and Alexander Haig will meet sudden death by either massive heart attacks or strokes." Death fantasies about the Symbolic Jew thereafter became commonplace in LaRouchian publications. When Hersh's The Price of Power was published, New Solidarity reported that Kissinger was on the verge of a "potentially fatal coronary.” EIR boasted that, as a result of Operation Nuremberg, Kissinger had become a "cardio-vascular risk" and might "choose [a] coward's way out" (i.e., suicide). When Hungarian-Jewish writer Arthur Koestler (the author of Darkness at Noon) committed suicide along with his wife in 1983, New Solidarity suggested various ways in which Henry and Nancy Kissinger and Federal Reserve Board chairman Paul Volcker (the arch-usurer, in LaRouche's eyes) could follow the Koestlers' example. In what could be read as an allusion to the Holocaust, the article asked: "Why should the worthwhile vast majority of the human race settle for attempts to solve its antisocial problems on a case-by-case basis? Why not get organized to settle with such characters all at once?" The LaRouchians privately discussed various extreme measures. Former LaRouche bodyguard Lee Fick told NBC Nightly News that Paul Goldstein had asked him to put a bomb under Kissinger's car. Charles Tate recalls a security staff meeting on the lawn of LaRouche's Loudoun County mansion at which members were told Kissinger must die. But this rage ultimately was just sublimated into more nasty leaflets and EIR articles. The LaRouchians had come to believe that really clever conspirators never carry out an assassination themselves, but simply spread hate propaganda about the targeted person which might trigger an attack by some disturbed personality or fanatic. That way, they can never be held legally responsible, As a result of the menacing rhetoric, Kissinger wrote FBI director William Webster for advice in 1982. He was careful to emphasize that he was not asking the FBI "to interfere in any manner with LaRouche's First Amendment rights." When the harassment escalated, Kissinger sent a second letter. The FBI checked to see if there were grounds for prosecution under the federal statute pertaining to interstate obscene or harassing phone calls. There weren't. When the LaRouchians obtained copies of this correspondence under the Freedom of Information Act, they immediately released it to the press in an effort to embarrass Kissinger. Jack Anderson, in an archly written 1985 column on the FOIA documents, made no moral distinction between victim and victimizer. He referred to a "decade-long feud" between Kissinger and LaRouche, as if Kissinger had been partly responsible. In 1987, James Ridgeway of The Village Voice rehashed this story, also affecting neutrality: LaRouche had harassed Kissinger, but Kissinger had an "animus" against LaRouche, Ridgeway said. The Voice illustrated Ridgeway's column with pictures of Kissinger, LaRouche, and Webster with the caption "The Three Faces of Evil." This type of press coverage encouraged the LaRouchians, when they came under federal indictment, to use the Kissinger-Webster letters as proof that the FBI and the prosecutors were motivated by a vendetta. The press was not alone in displaying a curious blindness to the true nature of the anti-Kissinger campaign. None of the major Jewish organizations spoke out, even in the face of blatantly anti-Semitic LaRouchian headlines such as "Kissinger Mafia Pollute the Holy Land.” The Reagan administration also said nothing. Indeed, many administration officials continued to meet with the LaRouchians at the height of the anti-Kissinger campaign, all but egging them on. Kissinger was well aware of this. In a 1984 interview he called the administration's dealings with LaRouche "outrageous, stupid, and nearly unforgivable." [..] For instance, when New Solidarity said Kissinger had organized a "multimillion-dollar special counterintelligence team" to combat LaRouche, this built up the NCLC's belief in LaRouche's status as an international figure—a man so important that even the famous Kissinger would stay up all night thinking about how to thwart him. It also helped to maintain the NCLC's siege mentality as an organization surrounded by innumerable enemy agents. Furthermore, the alleged machinations of Kissinger served as a convenient explanation for NCLC setbacks. When LaRouchian candidates did poorly in elections, it was because of vote fraud arranged by Kissinger. When an NCLC member defected, it was because agents of Kissinger had bribed him. When a journalist wrote a scathing article about LaRouche, it was because he was part of a Kissinger psychological warfare network. Thus, by a strange inversion, the setbacks became a proof of the NCLC's success, for Kissinger would only bother to do these things if the NCLC was a real and growing threat to the forces of evil. [..] Thus did Kissinger's ordeal become an object lesson for anyone in authority who might be tempted to stand up to LaRouche. Each leaflet and each demonstration helped to solidify LaRouche's public image as an unpredictable wild man who refused to play by the rules. The message—don't mess with Lyndon LaRouche— was received loud and clear. Along with his penchant for filing libel suits and collecting dossiers on his enemies, LaRouche's anti-Kissinger campaign helps to explain why, even in the late 1980s, he continued to enjoy a remarkable degree of immunity from public criticism.

— King, Chapter Seventeen

Some defectors have said that LaRouche's brainwashing was what kept them in the offices twelve to sixteen hours a day. In part this was true. Members also endured a certain amount of psychological bullying from martinet types in the leadership. [..] From its inception the European Labor Party concentrated much of its energy on tracking, compiling dossiers on, and harassing politicians in Germany and Scandinavia who were critics of U.S. policy or advocates of Ostpolitik. They conducted a smear campaign against former Chancellor Willy Brandt, putting up posters depicting him in a Nazi storm trooper uniform with a swastika prominently displayed. (Brandt sued them and won.) In 1982-83 the ELP went after Petra Kelly, leader of Germany's Green Party and a strong advocate of removing U.S. missiles from German soil. Various smear articles called her a Communist, a terrorist, and sexually promiscuous. An article entitled "Did You See This Whore on Television?" described her alleged affairs with married men. She sued the LaRouchians for libel in New York federal court. Her attorney, former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, said the LaRouchians had engaged in a "vicious campaign that made it difficult for her to appear in public. The campaign became physical at times. They cornered her on a train, they shoved her grandmother around....They abused her most fundamental rights of privacy, dignity, physical integrity, and reputation."

— King, Chapter Eighteen

According to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, NCLC members barraged CIA headquarters with phone calls in 1976 offering to provide briefings on international terrorism. They asked to speak with the director, George Bush, and even placed a call to his home. Commenting on these overtures, a CIA memo observed that LaRouche had "openly advocated the overthrow of the U.S. government" only two years previously, but that his organization appeared to be shifting its public posture "from one of violence to one reflecting more traditional, democratic values." [..] The idea of finding private sponsors for LaRouche's intelligence operation was shrewd. Some Teamster officials responded right away. But the proposal to merge the LaRouchians and various covert action veterans into a single organization was simply not workable. LaRouche's intellectualism didn't appeal to those who inclined toward traditional rightist groups. The Bay of Pigs veterans in Florida were interested in cocaine, not a coup d'etat. The rogue element among the old boys was preoccupied with laundering heroin money or smuggling arms. Essentially this left LaRouche on his own--and with a problem galling to his vanity. The NCLC had impressive research capabilities, a telex network, a computer, and even a war room. But it lacked the crowning touch: its own "ATeam." LaRouche had learned during Operation Mop Up that most of his followers were klutzes, good only for ganging up on elderly Communist Party members. Even the toughest of his security staff were former college athletes with no military experience. WerBell had a solution. Members of the security staff began trickling down to the Farm for a ten-day course (at $2,000 each) in "counterterrorism." New Solidarity boasted this was a "pilot project" for units to be attached to corporations and the Teamsters. WerBell, in a 1979 telephone interview, said it was simply training in "martial arts, pistol shooting, paramedical skills, the use of shotguns, rifle countersniper activity, countersurveillance, and the control of three-car caravans." According to former NCLC members, the results were not very impressive. Although scores of LaRouchians took the training, followed by karate classes in New York, LaRouche himself had little confidence in them. For his personal security needs, he brought in professional bodyguards and moonlighting police officers. [..] Whatever his motives, WerBell began to exert great personal influence over the NCLC security staff. "I’m very fond of some of them," he told me in 1979. "They're smart as hell." Jeff Steinberg chatted on the phone with him almost daily. It became a sign of status within the NCLC to have met "Mitch" and taken the training in Powder Springs. However, the NCLC leadership also invoked his name in a vaguely menacing manner to keep members of the national office staff in line. One member, after dropping out, walked around for weeks worrying he'd be cut down by a silenced machine gun. [..] At the outset WerBell learned that being LaRouche's handler could be a nervewracking job. LaRouche was persuaded in August 1977 that German terrorists were out to kill him. WerBell sent a Powder Springs police officer, Larry Cooper, to Wiesbaden to reorganize LaRouche's personal security. Cooper sat in on a political discussion with LaRouche and several top NCLC members during which LaRouche suddenly brought up the idea of assassinating President Carter, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, NATO general secretary Joseph Luns, and David Rockefeller. It could be done, LaRouche argued, with remotecontrolled radio bombs activated from public pay phones. [..] Indeed, WerBell had cause for worry--his name had been connected with a radio-bomb assassination scheme once before: During the Nixon administration he had worked with a secret Drug Enforcement Administration unit under Lucien ("Black Luigi") Conein that had planned to assassinate Latin American drug dealers. As a consultant, he had devised remote-control bombs and had provided a business cover for Conein's unit. The plan was scotched when Senator Lowell Weicker found out about it and called hearings. [..]Apparently LaRouche had taken this incident and transmuted it in his own spy novel-saturated imagination into something that could land them both in deep trouble. [..] The loose talk continued with impunity. According to a report prepared by former security staffers for The New York Times, a LaRouche aide briefed the national office staff in May 1979 on a plan for "selective assassination" of opponents. EIR later reported that an anonymous astrologer had named thirteen enemies of the NCLC who might die "within hours" of strokes and heart attacks if LaRouche was ever the victim of assassination or attempted assassination. [..] In 1984 Murdock joined with Steinberg and Paul Goldstein to form a real estate partnership, Dan Bar Unlimited. (The "Bar" was Barney Cochran, who soon dropped out.) They purchased 4,500 acres of timber and farmland in Pulaski County, Virginia, and set up a firing range. According to Virginia authorities, paramilitary training for LaRouche security aides was conducted there beginning in 1984. A Vietnam veteran who lives nearby observed people in camouflage suits, their faces blackened "like for a recon assignment," training in a field. "I heard bursts of rapid fire, like an AR-15 on full automatic," he said. Another neighbor recalled frequent helicopter landings. Murdock had built a perimeter road around the farm and up to the top of the mountain, which was patrolled by jeep.

— King, Chapter Twenty

Most of the leadership believed that LaRouche had deep influence at Langley and that the Source was someone incredibly powerful. Because they believed this, they decided they must be invulnerable to prosecution. Their real if limited success in gaining meetings with CIA and NSC officials helped to feed this view, but it also was stimulated by phony reports from consultants, ... [..] In 1984 the NCLC's fund-raising methods became wildly reckless, and many fund raisers and security staffers seemed to have no fear of the law. They ran the risk of indictment because they believed there was no risk.

Fick realized things were getting out of hand in the summer of 1984, when Goldstein approached him and Roy with a deadly proposition. As Fick later described it to NBC Nightly News, Goldstein’s idea was "that we...go along with him and kill or assassinate Henry Kissinger." According to Fick, Goldstein said he knew where Kissinger parked his car in an underground garage, and that it would be "a relatively easy thing for us to do, to make a bomb, and strap it to his car." Although Goldstein was probably just trying to impress them, the proposal unnerved Fick, and it apparently also worried Roy.

— King, Chapter Twenty-one

Security began in 1973-73 as a small karate-trained team to protect NCLC members from alleged Communist Party bullying. It organized Operation Mop Up and began stockpiling weapons, but soon turned away from any truly risky confrontations with the outside world. It was far safer to harass LaRouche's enemies from a safe range via smear leaflets, anonymous telephone calls, and legal frame-ups. In the wake of the Chris White affair, Security took on the functions of an internal secret police. It watched members for signs of disaffection and harassed any dropout who publicly attacked the organization or tried to get others to leave. The members of Security developed a vested interest in discovering plots everywhere: The more assassins and other enemies they could report to LaRouche, the more power and prestige they gained. Former member Dan Jacobs writes that they effected a kind of "coup" within the organization, with LaRouche's blessings. Jacobs described this as the NCLC's "Thermidor Reaction." NCLC organizational director Warren Hamerman defined Security's mission in 1976 as being "to detect and investigate enemy deployments against the organization, and to plan and execute offensive counterthrusts." The counterthrusts, generally called "counterpunch deployments," included attacks on public figures whom LaRouche accused of being part of the conspiracy against him, as well as genuine opponents such as journalists or rival extremist organizations. [..] Members of Security were responsible for the NCLC's earliest propaganda attacks on Israel and the "Zionist lobby." Major General John K. Singlaub, after several visits from them in 1977, told The New York Times they were "the worst group of anti-Semitic Jews I've encountered." Former members say that Jewish Security staffers went out of their way to display the most fanatical loyalty-and engage in the nastiest harassment of outsiders-because they never knew for sure if they were really trusted by LaRouche and his top non-Jewish aides. [..] Security's duties included providing bodyguards and servants for Lyn and Helga. When the couple moved to the Riverdale section of the Bronx in the late 1970s, Security staffers were assigned to sit with a shotgun at the apartment door. Many had never handled weapons before and presumably knew no more than to point it at any intruder and pull the trigger. [..] LaRouche called for more and more protection during and after his 1980 presidential campaign. [..] The NCLC came to spend millions of dollars each year on the bodyguards who followed Lyn and Helga everywhere in both the United States and Europe. [..] When LaRouche moved to Loudoun County, Virginia, in 1983, he deployed as many as ten guards on each twelve-hour shift at his estate. Supposedly the guards, armed with Walther PPKs and MAC-10s, were prowling their respective free-fire zones under all weather conditions. But LaRouche didn't seem to really care how vigilant they were. In cold or rainy weather, they just stayed in the guardhouse. [..] According to Loudoun County records, some of the Security staffers were walking arsenals; for instance, Rick Magraw, who owned a Colt Commander 45, a Sig-Sauer P.380, a Browning 9 mm, and a MAC-10 submachine pistol. [..] However, Security's work was not just a game (although even the make-believe part served a serious function in maintaining the NCLC's controlled environment and motivating the membership to work hard). Security developed imaginative and effective techniques for gathering intelligence and harassing enemies. Most important was the undercover phone call or interview. Although there were many variations on this tactic, basically it meant a staff member calling or visiting an outsider (usually an enemy) under false pretenses or using a false identity. It was first employed in 1973 when the NCLC was at war with black-nationalist Amiri Baraka. Paul Goldstein sent a directive to "all locals" urging them to set up meetings with "individuals of [the] Baraka type" in order to "pump them for information." He suggested posing as an "innocuous radical or interested sympathizer." LaRouche himself, during his 1980 New Hampshire primary campaign, told the Associated Press that his followers used "all kinds" of covers and impersonation tactics to investigate their enemies. "Where a press is running a direct operation against us...," he said, "that's an open target. We can impersonate them all we want to because they are doing it to us. It's just an open field." Charles Tate testified he saw his fellow Security staffers make hundreds of undercover calls in the early 1980s, often with tape recorders running without the callee's knowledge. "They were pretending to be priests, ministers, rabbis, newspaper reporters, doctors, lawyers, Indian chiefs," he said. [..] A brash and hardworking Security staffer can conduct a phone "sweep" of LaRouche's opposition in a single day. He may openly identify himself as a LaRouchian, use a fictitious identity, or pretend to be a real person, depending on the targeted person's vulnerabilities. [..] For instance, a May 5, 1982, Security document entitled "Harassment Networks" summarized twelve phone calls to alleged LaRouche enemies across the political spectrum, all apparently made by the same person. Among those called were Berlet, Dana Beal of the Yippies, Arch Puddington of the League for Industrial Democracy, Jerry Eisenberg of the Jewish Defense League, Sheldon Ranz of The Generation After/Holocaust Survivors USA, Justin Finger of the Anti-Defamation League, and Fred Eiland of the Federal Election Commission. The list also included a National Jewish Community Relations Council staff member, Detroit financier Max Fisher's secretary, and a rabbi who deprograms Moonies. [..] The LaRouchians also used the telephone as a psychological assault weapon. In 1980, reporters in New Hampshire obtained a copy of a special LaRouche "New Hampshire Target List" of state political figures to be harassed. The names included the governor, the attorney general, the secretary of state, and the mayors and city clerks of several towns. "These are the criminals to burn-we want calls coming in to these fellows day and night," the instructions said. Attorney General Thomas Rath received about fifty phone calls at his home on the Sunday prior to primary day. The callers would say things like "We know where you live."

When the Federal Election Commission was investigating LaRouche's 1980 campaign finances, the LaRouchians made threatening phone calls to Charles Steele, the commission's general counsel. In federal court testimony in 1987, former NCLCer Tate recalled the Steinbergs arriving late at the Security offices one morning. "They said that the reason...was because [Mr. Steele] had been receiving late-night phone calls and had received threats on his life very, very late at night; and that even though they were kind of late that day, they were sure that Mr. Steele's day was going to be even worse and that he had slept even worse...."

Another surrogate assault weapon is the LaRouchian printing press, which churns out smear leaflets and articles against journalists and other enemies, often featuring outlandish sexual charges. In this, LaRouche and his top aides have much practice-they have routinely accused their own rank-and-file followers of sexual misconduct, repressed homosexuality, etc., ever since the egostripping days in the early 1970s. The first public smear sheets were directed against a faction that quit in 1974. They had naively discussed details of their sex lives during NCLC psychological sessions. Upon their resignation, New Solidarity printed up a smear sheet that went into graphic detail. Much of it was taken from a "confession" written by a former member of the faction who remained with the LaRouchians and was pressured to prove his loyalty by tattling on his former comrades. Thousands of copies of the smear sheet were passed out on Manhattan's Upper West Side, where leaders of the faction lived.

As Security became bolder, it ceased to worry about obtaining "confessions" from anyone. It simply made up the smears out of thin air. Russ Bellant, a Detroit freelancer, came home one evening in the late 1970s to find that his neighbors had received invitations to a "gay coming-out" party at his house, Marcie Permut, a twenty-two-year-old researcher for NBC-TV's Chicago affiliate, was working on a LaRouche story in 1984 when leaflets appeared on car windshields on the block where she and her parents lived. The leaflets claimed she was a prostitute and gave her parents' phone number. [..] The Security staff went beyond smear tactics in their 1980 attempts to intimidate Jon Presstage, then a reporter for the Manchester Union Leader in New Hampshire. LaRouche came to Presstage's office for an interview, bringing several bodyguards with guns. They told me there were certain things I could not say in my stories," Presstage recalled on NBC's First Camera. LaRouche "told me that he would make it very painful for me if I wrote certain things. And I asked him, well, what do you mean by painful? And he kind of chuckled with the rest of the people there and said we have ways of making it painful beyond lawsuits." Presstage's family had three cats. "On successive days following the articles," he said, "the cats were found on my doorstep, dead." [..] To assist in Security's harassment campaigns the NCLC maintains a staff of inhouse paralegals and has brought in "hired gun" attorneys to assist with aggressive lawsuits. The extralegal motive of such suits was indicated by a Security memorandum sent out to local NCLC offices in 1984 under the heading "Make the ADL [Anti-Defamation League] Pay Everywhere." It called for filing libel suits and complaints to government agencies against the ADL in every part of the country: "Go to your best and most political [sic] well-placed contacts and have them recommend lawyers who have a reputation for competence, meanness, and who like a good brawl." The memo then ordered that calls be made to local news reporters, giving them an ultimatum to either divulge the "ADL source" of their anti-LaRouche "operation" or else face a libel suit. The goal would be to build a "massive national dossier" on the ADL and tie it down defending itself.

Security waged elaborate counterintelligence campaigns (known among insiders as "damage control operations") to derail media exposes. When it found out The New York Times was preparing an article in 1979, Goldstein and an associate pretended to be defectors and arranged to meet with reporter Howard Blum, They brought along a concealed tape recorder and attempted to provoke Blum into saying something compromising. At the end of the conversation a third Security staffer snapped Blum's picture. The NCLC then called a press conference to announce that it would sue the Times. In fact, LaRouche did name the Times as a defendant in a suit he launched several weeks later against the Manhattan East Side weekly Our Town, which published a LaRouche series by me while the Times's story was still in preparation. Security launched a wave of harassing phone calls to Our Town's offices, while also attempting to jam lines at the Times. One caller to Our Town pretended to be a Times staff attorney seeking information about Our Town's legal strategy. Smear leaflets about Our Town publisher Ed Kayatt were circulated throughout the East Side. Our Town's advertisers and banks where the paper was distributed were threatened with lawsuits. A crude setup also was attempted: A man alleging to be an executive of LaRouche's computer company, Computron, dropped by the office and offered to sell the newspaper stolen financial records. The offer was declined.

For the next few years Our Town experienced mysterious acts of harassment, including bomb threats, the disappearance of office files, and visits from imposters requesting information about LaRouche. In 1983, after hard-hitting anti-LaRouche editorials, the offices were broken into, the typesetting and copying machines and other equipment were smashed, and acid was poured on the wreckage. Although Kayatt could not prove the LaRouchians were behind these actions, he knew of no one else with a sufficiently strong motive.

Security's trickery was used in tandem with legal action against NBC's 1984 First Camera report on LaRouche's ties to the Reagan administration. Prior to the show LaRouche filed a $150 million libel suit to delay or halt it. Security directed Roy Frankhouser to shadow NBC reporter Patricia Lynch around Manhattan, and picketers appeared in front of her office with signs and leaflets calling her a "KGB whore." While she was filming in the Washington, D.C., area, they found out she was scheduled to meet with Senator Moynihan. Pretending to be a Moynihan aide, a LaRouche follower called Lynch's researcher several hours before the interview-ostensibly to get background material for the senator-and probed for sensitive details about Lynch's sources. The LaRouchians then tried to intimidate Moynihan by threatening to publish defamatory material about his family.

LaRouche became worried that his former chief of staff, Gus Kalimtgis, might be cooperating with NBC. Charles Tate has testified that one day in early 1984 LaRouche "came downstairs to the security area in his home at Woodburn and he ordered members of the Security staff to call [Kalimtgis] at his home and threaten his life." Tate said that several staff members dutifully made the calls in LaRouche's presence. Kalimtgis has confirmed that he received several calls threatening himself, his wife and children.

[..] Security began yet another damage control operation, but this time it resulted in obstruction of justice indictments of four members of Security's steering committee--Steinberg, Goldstein, Steinberg's wife, Michelle, and Robert Greenberg--along with erstwhile adviser Frankhouser and LaRouche himself. According to the 1986 indictment and courtroom testimony, the Security staff orchestrated a multilayered conspiracy to derail the investigation. This effort allegedly included destroying records, harassing prosecutors, and sending witnesses to Europe to duck subpoenas.

— King, Cahpter Twenty-three

When a civil liberties group sued the Los Angeles Police Department's former Public Disorder Intelligence Division (PDID), seeking to halt its alleged abuses, local NCLC members popped up as fanatical police supporters. They launched a smear campaign in 1980 against leaders of the Citizens Commission on Police Repression (CCPR), including its founder, Linda Valentino. The LaRouchians "made our lives miserable," she said, "They passed out, it must have been, a quarter of a million leaflets, accusing us of terrorism and drug pushing." The leaflets listed the home and work phone numbers of activists involved in the suit. "For days, we received harassing calls," Valentino said. "I got obscene calls at home in the early morning hours." The leaflets were filled with blatant anti-Semitism, charging that the Israelis, the Lubavich sect of Hasidic Judaism, the Jewish Defense League, Simon Wiesenthal, and a Jewish city councilman, Zev Yaroslavsky, were all in a plot to destroy the PDID so that "Israeli dopers" could take over. One leaflet bore the title "Smash the 'Kosher Nostra'--Defend the LAPD." Said another; "If your child's mind is eaten away by PCP provided to him by Meyer Lansky's drug runners, or if the mayor of your city has his legs blown off" by a JDL hit squad, "the person to blame is Zev [Yaroslavsky]." The leaflets were authorized and paid for by LaRouche's 1980 presidential campaign committee. Similar accusations were printed in [Investigative Leads], which solicited advance orders for an "in-depth special report" analyzing the backgrounds and motives of the plaintiffs in the CCPR suit. Meanwhile, Security prepared for the Los Angeles police a special dossier on Yaroslavsky, including blatantly false accusations against other local and national Jewish leaders. [..] The LaRouchians in the early 1970s had the standard Marxist attitude toward the police. They were actually shocked when Communist Party members responded to Operation Mop Up's savage beatings by asking for police protection. New Solidarity said the CP represented "police socialism" reminiscent of Russia's Father Gapon during the 1905 revolution. But the LaRouchians themselves began to seek police help during clashes with United Auto Workers members in several states in 1975. The violence was mostly the NCLC's own fault. In a basic scenario repeated over and over, they showed up at plant gates with leaflets naming union officials or rank-and-file workers as drug pushers, homosexuals, or Communists. One leaflet said of a Buffalo UAW member: "He can't go home to his wife with the smell of sperm on his breath...so he sleeps in parks...." The NCLC leadership claimed this was a powerful new technique to appeal to the workers' unconscious minds, but the only result was dozens of assaults on the leafleters. In 1971-72 the LaRouchians had provoked similar assaults by standing in front of Communist Party meeting halls and calling those who entered CIA agents, counterrevolutionaries, and "house niggers." LaRouche had then goaded his followers into participating in Operation Mop Up to get even with their attackers. But the clashes at plant gates were something different: LaRouche hardly could mop up the giant UAW. However, his followers did the next best thing by running to the police to get their assailants arrested. This was justified by the belief that the latter were all fascists, social fascists, CIA agents, drug pushers, and terrorists. [..] Robert Greenberg and other Security staffers also developed a more sophisticated method for manipulating the police. They compiled hundreds of Investigative Leads articles, including false or exaggerated charges of illegal activity by their opponents. "They had this cynical attitude," Mordechai Levy said. "They thought, 'Why waste time going after an enemy when we can get the cops to do it for us?' A lot of what they put in Investigative Leads they knew was a total lie." [..] The earliest documented example of this false-witness tactic occurred in 1974. The LaRouchians approached the FBI with a fabricated story about an NCLC opponent, James Retherford, who had taken his small daughter from her LaRouchian mother and fled New York to save the child from being raised in a cultish environment. Hoping to manipulate the FBI into searching for them, the Security staff falsely claimed that Retherford was in contact with Weather Underground fugitives. Although the FBI failed to take this story seriously, the LaRouchians tried again, targeting other opponents. FBI documents released to NCLC members under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that LaRouche emissaries made eleven visits or phone calls to FBI offices between May and July 1976 to present allegations about various leftists and that this was followed by further extensive contact. The FOIA documents, over 5,000 pages, proved so embarrassing that the NCLC went to court to get them removed from the FBI reading room. Yet the NCLC had to admit in court papers that it had "cooperated with the FBI and other federal and local law enforcement agencies" by providing information on the "terrorist activities" of persons associated with the Institute for Policy Studies, a left-wing Washington think tank, and the Repression Information Project, a research collective that had published a pamphlet critical of LaRouche.

In mid-April 1977, two weeks before a mass demonstration against nuclear power at the Seabrook nuclear reactor site in New Hampshire, two Boston area NCLC leaders--Larry Sherman and Graham Lowry--met with Lieutenant Donald Buxton of the New Hampshire State Police to outline alleged plans for antinuclear violence by environmentalist groups. Buxton filed a report treating the allegations as worthy of serious consideration and described the two LaRouchians as "very well informed gentlemen." A copy was obtained by the Clamshell Alliance and made public shortly after the peaceful demonstration. The NCLC also took its allegations about the Clamshell Alliance to the FBI. But an April 28, 1977, FBI memorandum said the NCLC had apparently "fabricated" the information in an attempt to disrupt the demonstration "and cause New Hampshire officials unnecessary problems." The LaRouchians kept trying. One infiltrated a 1979 South Hadley, Massachusetts, planning meeting for another round of Seabrook demonstrations. He reported back to Security that it was "one of the most anal, turd-piling, hairsplitting New Left meetings it has been my displeasure to witness." Nevertheless, his report included a detailed account of the plans under discussion. Although the report contained no evidence of any plans for violence, the LaRouchians told the Boston Globe and law enforcement officials to expect violence. Once again, no violence occurred.

The LaRouchians used the false-witness tactic in 1981 against an enemy they hated even more than the environmentalists-the Yippies. To the LaRouchians, the Yippies were the symbol of everything evil--long-haired potheads who hung out at rock concerts, had no respect for Beethoven, and made constant trouble for LaRouche. They had picketed his headquarters with the banner "Nazis Make Good Lampshades" and on several occasions placed crank calls to Steinberg and Goldstein from pay phones. Aron Kay, the Yippie "pie man," was plotting to land a mushroom pie in LaRouche's face at the earliest opportunity. Security prepared a series of "Dope Dossiers" on Kay, Abbie Hoffman, and other Yippies. A New Solidarity editorial, "Cleaning Up the Filth," described them as "gutter scum" and announced that the dossiers were "being supplied to the New York City Police Department and other law enforcement agencies." The contents of the dossiers were oriented toward inducing the police to investigate the Yippies for possession or sale of marijuana. The LaRouchians were well aware that marijuana possession was low on the police list of priorities, but suggested that the police would thereby find evidence of Yippie involvement in terrorism and other serious crimes.

LaRouche already had developed a general philosophy about this. In a 1979 memo addressed to "key police and security-intelligence agencies" on how to deal with supposed "terrorists" in the "rock-drug counterculture" (an allusion to the Yippies), he claimed that such people are "highly vulnerable" to arrest inasmuch as they live "in significant part in either a criminal or semi-criminal mode of life." He suggested that their activities as protesters and NCLC opponents could be countered by using "arrests for drug violations" to "destabilize" their "political infrastructure" and gather "most useful material" about their political activities. But in 1980 the tables were turned. A college student friendly to the Yippies decided to launch a one-man crusade to "destabilize" and gather "most useful material" about the LaRouchians themselves. Thus did the Security staff encounter Mordechai Levy, a kind of Prince of Provocateurs, who would cause it almost as much trouble as Roy Frankhouser.

— King, Chapter Twenty-four

Security's most amazing operation was its smear campaign against New York attorney and power broker Roy Cohn. It was a classic case of Freudian reaction formation—LaRouche, the Red-baiter of the 1980s, going after Cohn, the former aide to Joe McCarthy; LaRouche, the propagandist for organized crime, going after Cohn, its attorney and fixer; LaRouche, who lives like a millionaire but last paid income tax in 1973, going after Cohn, who evaded the IRS through similar tactics for most of his adult life. No two antagonists ever deserved each other more. [..] LaRouche filed a $20 million suit against Our Town, which retained Roy Cohn as its defense attorney. When Security discovered that Colin had represented Our Town on several previous occasions, they blamed him for the articles. The NCLC issued a leaflet with a picture of Cohn and the caption: "Roy Cohn, the mobster who wants to see LaRouche dead." It described him as a major figure in the above-mentioned Dope, Inc. (a mythical Jewish drug cartel), and one of the plotters behind the assassination of John F, Kennedy. As the weeks passed, NCLC ascribed more and more importance to Cohn in their global conspiracies. [..] Charles Tate says the Security staff believed in the early 1980s that the soft treatment the NCLC received in New York—including Mayor Koch's speak-noevil attitude toward LaRouche mayoral candidate Melvin Klenetsky in 1981—was due to a fear of NCLC smear campaigns. The NCLC's negative personal information about political figures, he said, was actually in files "in alphabetical order" in the Security office. Tate added that he personally interviewed an alleged former intimate friend of Brooklyn DA Elizabeth Holtzman and also received information on her from a paid informant. The aim was to convince prosecutors and politicians that "they don't need an enemy of this type," Tate said. [..] In the 1987 Frankhouser trial, Tate testified that whenever LaRouche couldn't find damaging information "he would invent something." Indeed the LaRouchians followed an age-old smear tactic: Look at a person's lifestyle and figure what might be true, then publish your speculations as fact. A certain percentage of the time you will hit the bull's eye, and the victim will freak out thinking you know more than you do. If it isn't true, much of the public will believe it anyway, and the victim will heartily wish you'd just shut up. [..] The LaRouchians were furious over Cohn's alleged "double cross." They responded with an attack even nastier than Now East—hundreds of thousands of copies of a bogus New York Times supplement, "Profiles of the Times," designed to look like the Sunday book review section but devoted to further exposing Cohn and his associates. Tate says it was Richard's "brainchild," and that Richard devised "what to say and how to say it." On a Saturday night in October 1982, two members of LaRouche's Security staff took "Profiles" around to dozens of newsstands in Manhattan and Queens in a rented van. Wearing dark glasses, they represented themselves as Times employees and instructed the newsdealers to insert the supplement in the Sunday papers. Before the Times management could react, it had reached tens of thousands of readers. "Profiles" contained alleged quotes from former lovers of Cohn, including three men who later died of AIDS. It also contained a fake Barbara Walters interview with Cohn in which he purportedly admitted his homosexuality and discussed in some detail his inner emotional life and illegal dealings with various business associates. [..] A later edition of the Times carried a disclaimer, and many of the "Profiles" copies were never distributed. Yet the prank turned out to be far more effective than Now East. It was reported on the wire services and in daily papers across the country, raising the issue of Roy Cohn's homosexuality with millions of readers. New York's daily papers on Monday reported the indignant howls of eminent persons. [..] Republican gubernatorial candidate Lew Lehrman, himself a target in "Profiles" along with Mayor Koch, said that "so outrageous a personal attack has never occurred in an election in New York State politics." Leonard Harris of the Times said that it was "the poison Tylenol technique applied to newspapers," while another Times executive, John Pomfret, promised that the paper would "pursue vigorously an investigation of this outrage in consultation with law-enforcement authorities." [..] The LaRouchians also targeted Morgenthau. Security notebooks from November 1982 show that they assiduously pursued negative information about the DA and his wife, former New York Times reporter Lucinda Franks. According to one notebook entry, a source at a drug treatment center told them a preposterous story that Morgenthau owned whorehouses. Another entry described an undercover phone call to one of Franks's colleagues. They then flooded downtown Manhattan with leaflets devoted to standard LaRouche charges—e.g., that Morgenthau was a tool of the "Israeli mafia" and that his wife was a "terrorist sympathizer." (She had indeed spent time with the Weather Underground, but for the purpose of writing a book about them.) [..] The LaRouchians boasted in a December 10, 1982, New Solidarity article by Linda de Hoyos (who had been involved in the production of Now East) that they were engaged in an effort to "unnerve" Morgenthau and catch his office "off guard." A December 14 article by Security staffer Vin Berg in Executive Intelligence Review made the threat explicit: "Morgenthau has been involved in many covert operations against LaRouche in the past, but this one is the riskiest, because it is being conducted openly….By stepping into the light of day in this way, Robert Morgenthau has made himself, his financial and political associates, and his record in office matters for intense public scrutiny."

— King, Chapter Twenty-sex

They were trained in adversary techniques to bind them more closely to the NCLC. When greeted with a less than friendly response from a passerby, they would insult him, often calling him a tool of Great Britain or Rockefeller. Occasionally the targeted person was intrigued or amused, and a sale would result. But more often he reacted angrily and walked away. Sometimes matters escalated. As a defector told The New York Times: "They get two inches from a person's face and [verbally] cut them to pieces. They can get anybody to hit them in a second."

— King, Chapter Thirty-one

The national office boiler room developed a boot-camp atmosphere. "There'd be a roll call in the morning," Tate said. "Wertz would call out each name. You were given these gargantuan quotas, and you were expected to work from 9 A.M. until you met the quota, even if that was eleven or twelve at night," Members who didn't meet their quotas were yelled at, denied any days off, or accused of homosexuality or drunkenness. When one party leader's wife failed to meet her quota, her husband beat her up. It worked—she became the most ruthless of fundraisers.

— King, Chapter Thirty-two

1990s

1990

About 100 Democratic leaders gathered here this weekend for a meeting of the Democratic State Central Committee, which was briefly interrupted by several supporters of Mr. LaRouche, a former Presidential candidate who was sentenced to 15 years in prison for conspiracy and mail fraud.

Nancy Spannaus, a LaRouche supporter who had offered to run against Mr. Warner as a Democrat, was prevented from speaking. I have a Democratic program, she said as party regulars shouted No! and Get her out of here!

Alan Ogden, another LaRouche supporter, accused the Democrats of tacitly supporting Mr. Warner and President Bush by refusing to run a candidate. This is not the Communist Party, shouted Mr. Ogden, who was led from the meeting.

Committee members adopted rules that would make it virtually impossible for Ms. Spannaus to win the Democratic nomination. From this time on, any candidate must win the support of 20 percent of the delegates picked at local caucus meetings for a convention to be held.

— "In Virginia, a Challenger to Warner Is Sought" AP February 12, 1990

• Later, in the midst of Bush's remarks at the College of DuPage, in the Chicago suburbs, several protesters began shouting about issues related to political dissident Lyndon LaRouche, and in another area of the arena, an apparently unrelated group lofted a sign reading, "No blood for oil."
  • "Protests greet Bush at Midwestern stops;" CRAGG HINES. Houston Chronicle (pre-1997 Fulltext). Houston, Tex.: Oct 17, 1990. pg. 2

An elderly city woman who donated $1,000 to a fund run by followers of Lyndon LaRouche, an extremist political activist and convicted felon, has been continually harassed by his followers, city police said Thursday.

Ingrid M. Siering, a resident of Caldwell Apartments, has been repeatedly called by the LaRouche organization seeking more money, said her investment broker, Ron Riescher of Fahnestock & Co., a New Jersey firm. [..] The woman allegedly gave $1,000 to the Human Rights Fund, a Leesburg, Va., organization operated by followers of LaRouche. The money was allegedly given by the woman to a man who came to her apartment.

Police reported that the woman has been receiving several calls daily demanding that she give $25,000 more.

LaRouche supporters came to the woman's apartment Friday seeking more money, Riescher said.

— "LAROUCHE GROUP SAID TO HARASS WOMAN" Tim O'Brien Staff writer Albany Times Union (Albany, NY) June 29, 1990 pB7

Two men in their 20s stood at Leonard Mitchell's door in Aurora, Ill., and said they wanted Aurora Police Chief Robert Wadman fired.

"He's a child molester," one said.

Two grand juries have cleared the former Omaha police chief. The woman who accused Wadman of sexually abusing her has been indicted by both the Douglas County Franklin grand jury and a federal grand jury in Omaha on a combined 16 charges of perjury.

The two visitors did not mention those facts, said Mitchell, who recounted the early-October incident in a telephone interview from Aurora last week.

When Mitchell asked who they were, the two identified themselves as followers of Lyndon LaRouche. [..] Mitchell said the two men handed him a reprint of an article that appeared in the Aug. 31 issue of a LaRouche magazine, Executive Intelligence Review. The article makes accusations against Wadman that the two grand juries have said are false.

Wadman lives six townhouse units away from Mitchell. They know each other slightly. Mitchell said he hadn't known anything of the allegations against Wadman before the LaRouchites gave him the reprinted article.

The article said, among other things, that babies were sacrificed in Omaha-area satanic rituals and that the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies were covering up crimes.

Two experts on extreme political groups said the charges in the LaRouche publication are typical of the politically far-out group's tactics [..] "This type of outrageous charge - without substantive evidence - is commonplace in the LaRouche organization and extremist groups in general," said William V. Moore, chairman of political science at the College of Charleston in Charleston, S.C.

Mitchell said of the LaRouche article: "I think it stinks."

The LaRouche group believes its bizarre accusations help it attract attention - something the group desperately wants, Moore said from Charleston.

To gain attention, the LaRouchites typically pick as targets people who are widely known locally, nationally or internationally.

The extremist group has accused former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger of being a Soviet agent and has alleged that the Queen of England is involved in drug trafficking.Conspiracy Theories

The LaRouchites believe they need the attention of the public before they have a shot at gaining more supporters, money, power and influence, Moore said.

"The most insulting thing anybody can do is ignore them," Mira Boland, fact-finding director for the Anti-Defamation League, said from her office in Washington, D.C. [..] "They have a nose for finding controversial issues that capture the attention of the public," Ms. Boland said. "They like to fish in troubled waters."

One favorite LaRouche theme is satanism, Ms. Boland said. If the LaRouchites heard rumors of such activities in Nebraska, that could have drawn them to the state, she said.Group Visited Nebraska

One claim in the LaRouche magazine was that youngsters "were reported sacrificed in satanic rituals" in the Omaha area. No proof was offered to support that claim.

In addition to publishing two articles in their magazine last summer, the LaRouchites organized a 10-member group that spent six days in Nebraska this month, talking to people about the Franklin allegations. [..] Mitchell said the two young men went from door to door throughout his and Wadman's neighborhood distributing the reprints. Many residents were not home, he said, and the reprints were left anyway. There is no indication on the reprints that the magazine is tied to LaRouche. [..] Mitchell said he thinks it was mean-spirited and wrong - even if the charges hadn't been as absurd as they were - for the LaRouche followers to deliver the reprints in the Wadmans' neighborhood.

Wadman and his wife weren't home. Wadman said he found the LaRouche article under his auto's windshield wiper.

Reprints of the LaRouche articles also have been circulated in Omaha and Lincoln. The magazine itself has a worldwide circulation of 8,000 to 10,000, its editor has said.

Wadman said there's no doubt the LaRouche group intended to harm his reputation in the city where he now is police chief. It might have done that, he said. [..] Ms. Boland said she isn't surprised that the LaRouche followers would distribute the articles in Wadman's neighborhood. "They are past masters at harassment," she said.

— LaRouche Article Contains Falsehoods Extremist Group Targets Wadman; [Sunrise Edition] Robert Dorr. Omaha World - Herald. Omaha, Neb.: Oct 28, 1990. pg. 1.b

1991

The Lyndon LaRouche group, an extremist political and fund-raising group, sent people to Omaha to keep the Franklin story alive.

Experts said the motive was to enable LaRouche telephone solicitors to tell potential donors nationwide, mainly elderly people, that the group needed more contributions to put an end to child abuse in Nebraska.

LaRouche publications that were circulated in Omaha, Lincoln, Los Angeles and other cities praised Schmit and DeCamp.

One LaRouche article said: "There is only one investigative group attempting to actually get to the bottom of the child abuse, money laundering, drug pushing and other crimes involved in the Franklin Credit Union case: the Senate Franklin legislative committee chaired by Sen. Loran Schmit. All others, including the State Attorney General's Office, the state police, the federal grand jury, the Douglas County grand jury and the FBI are engaged in a systematic cover-up." June 21, 1991

— Chronology of the Franklin Hoax Casey Set Sex-Abuse Rumors in Motion; [Sunrise Edition] Omaha World - Herald. Omaha, Neb.: Jul 21, 1991. pg. 6.A

1992

President Bush was confronted Wednesday by a supporter of political extremist Lyndon LaRouche, who refused to release his grip during a handshake with the President until the Secret Service stepped in, a White House spokesman said.

The episode occurred at a shopping mall where the President shook hands with hundreds of people during a campaign visit.

Seizing on the opportunity, the unidentified man took Bush's hand and then pulled him closer, keeping a grip on the President, White House press secretary Marlin Fitzwater told reporters.

Fitzwater quoted the man as demanding, "When are you going to let LaRouche out of jail?" The man would not release Bush's hand until Secret Service agents stepped in and took him away, Fitzwater said.

— "LAROUCHE BACKER CONFRONTS BUSH." AP, Albany Times Union (Albany, NY) Feb 13, 1992 pA11

Sen. Bob Kerrey responded strongly to a pair of hecklers at a weekend campaign rally by defending Omaha investor Warren Buffett and telling one heckler "shame on you" for criticizing Kerrey's Health USA proposal.

Kerrey's spirited handling of the two hecklers drew loud cheers and applause from more than 300 supporters attending his presidential campaign rally Saturday night at Rivier College. The Nebraska Democrat appeared to be energized afterward. [..] Kerrey was near the end of his speech - saying, "We've been led too long by the old ideas and old indifference of old men of old money" - when he was interrupted by a supporter of Lyndon LaRouche, a perennial candidate and a felon.

"What about Warren Buffett, your main contributor?" the man shouted. "Isn't he an old man of old money?"

Kerrey appeared incredulous at the question. "Warren Buffett is a great man," he said, prompting applause and chants of "Kerrey, Kerrey."

The heckler continued to shout questions, interrupting Kerrey's attempts to respond. Kerrey partisans, in turn, tried to shout down the heckler.

"Let me wrap this up so we don't deteriorate into a street fight here," Kerrey said at one point. "You can respect right now that I'm trying to present right now my philosophy, my policy, what I want to do. . . ."

After the heckler interrupted again, Kerrey offered to talk with him after finishing the speech.

"How about doing it in public?" the man shouted.

"We'll do it in public," Kerrey shot back. "We'll do it anywhere you want, son."

After more cheers, Kerrey had barely resumed his speech when a second heckler demanded to know why, he said, Kerrey's Health USA bill does not address the AIDS epidemic.

"Health USA does mention AIDS - shame on you for asking me that," Kerrey said. "If you're concerned about AIDS funding, you should not be shouting at me, you should rally to the cause. This is national health insurance that provides full funding for AIDS."

— Kerrey Tries to Win Over N.H. Hecklers; [Sunrise Edition] Paul Goodsell. Omaha World - Herald. Omaha, Neb.: Feb 17, 1992. pg. 5

Tsongas has the corner on wit among this year's contestants.

At a town meeting the other night, after a string of aggressive questions from anti-nuclear activists and backers of extremist Lyndon LaRouche, an apologetic young walked to the microphone and began his question by noting that he represented no far-out group.

"Sit down, then," Tsongas deadpanned.

— '92 Campaign No Laughing Matter; [3* Edition] Bill Lambrecht Post-Dispatch Washington Bureau. St. Louis Post - Dispatch (pre-1997 Fulltext). St. Louis, Mo.: Feb 18, 1992. pg. 1.A

1993

A federal judge convicted two protesters yesterday of unlawful statue climbing in a continuing protest against the Albert Pike statue in Judiciary Square. The statue has been a focus of weekly protests by the Lyndon H. Larouche Jr. organization, which says Pike was a founder of the Ku Klux Klan. After a daylong trial, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth found the Rev. James Bevel and historian Anton Chaitkin guilty of the misdemeanor and sentenced them to a week in jail.[..] Lamberth ordered both men to jail yesterday afternoon, after they declined an offer to remain free on bond pending an appeal.

— "Judge Convicts Two Protesters Of Pike" The Washington Post Apr 20, 1993. pg. C.05

• Yesterday Terry started at two Hardee's restaurants in Bristol. Unfortunately, most of the adults were from Tennessee, and a supporter of political extremist Lyndon LaRouche ran through one of the restaurants screaming, "Come clean, Mary Sue!" "Woke everybody up!" she joked.
  • TERRY JETS AROUND STATE, SHAKING HANDS ' WE'RE FIGHTING BACK, WE'RE COMING BACK,' SHE VOWS. MIKE ALLEN. Richmond Times - Dispatch. Richmond, Va.: Oct 17, 1993. pg. B-1

• Underdog Terry also ran into demonstrators, pushing past a crowd of Allen supporters at Christopher Newport University in Newport News and shouting over supporters of Lyndon LaRouche at a rally in Northern Virginia. As state attorney general, Terry figured prominently in a state-federal investigation that sent LaRouche to prison.
  • TERRY, ALLEN GO DOWN TO THE WIRE CANDIDATES VOTE EARLY, HIT THE POLLS; [FINAL Edition] From staff and wire reports. Virginian - Pilot. Norfolk, Va.: Nov 2, 1993. pg. A.1

1994

Bowling Park Elementary School is Norfolk's crown jewel in this respect.

The inner-city school already has collected $880,816 from the Carnegie Foundation, the State Department of Education and the federal government over two years for special programs to improve academics, teach families how to raise their children and provide before- and after-school day care. It's called Cozi, a combination of reform ideas from two national Ivy League educators, Edward Zigler and James Comer. [..] Since busing for desegregation ended at elementary schools in Norfolk in 1986, Bowling Park has stood alone among the 10 all-black schools in consistently high student test scores and solid teacher morale.

In September and October, the school had been the target of a small group of protesters, most supporters of Lyndon LaRouche. They complained that the school's efforts reflect a statewide trend toward "brainwashing" children and attempts to break up the family. Clark, his staff and most of his parents held firm, even holding a "counterprotest" against the protesters in October.

Jerry Belsky, the leader of the opposition group and a candidate for city council in May, said though they haven't done any protesting in more than two months, they plan to start again soon.

— NICHOLS ASKS STAFF TO HELP CUT BUDGET ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE, HE SAYS, FROM PROGRAM CUTS TO MERGERS.; [FINAL Edition] RODNEY HO, STAFF WRITER. Virginian - Pilot. Norfolk, Va.: Jan 13, 1994. pg. 14

Before the debate began, most attention in the Capitol was turned on [James] Gierach, as organizers and reporters waited to see if he would try to crash Tuesday's debate.

The Illinois News Network, the sponsors of the debate, didn't invite Gierach or Sheila Jones, a follower of political extremist Lyndon LaRouche, to participate, saying polls showed they didn't have enough voter support.

In the hours before the debate, Gierach wandered the quiet, marble halls of the Capitol, talking with his wife, mother and an assistant and trying to develop a plan. He tugged on the locked doors of the Senate hearing room where the debate was to be held.

As the debate neared, Gierach approached the room again, this time with a folding chair in hand. His assistant, Sistrunk, said, "We have a right," and a minor scuffle ensued. Sistrunk was cuffed and led away by secretary of state police, but was released before the debate was over.

In a rambling press conference before the debate, Jones said that she, too, had applied to be in the debate but was rebuffed. A representative of INN, however, said she had no contact with the debate organizers.

— BURRIS, PHELAN HAMMER AT NETSCH TAX-HIKE PLAN; [NORTH SPORTS FINAL Edition] Peter Kendall Rick Pearson, Tribune Staff Writers. Tribune reporter Eric Krol contributed to this report.. Chicago Tribune (pre-1997 Fulltext). Chicago, Ill.: Feb 23, 1994. pg. 1

OBTAINING 10,000 signatures on nominating petitions gets your name on the Democratic Party ballot for governor in Illinois, but James E. Gierach and Sheila A. Jones found out it takes a lot more to be taken seriously.

Both were kept not just outside a recent live radio debate at the Capitol in Springfield but some distance from the door, lest they might decide to disrupt the three invitees: Roland Burris, Dawn Clark Netsch and Richard Phelan.

Gierach earned the concern by holding a sit-in that resulted in cancellation of a nonbroadcast debate in Chicago the week before; Jones had long been viewed with suspicion for her alignment with Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr., and her statements about conspiracies in world politics.

Both were deemed unworthy of participation for lack of support.

— "LACK OF SUPPORT DOGS 2 HOPEFULS ON STATE BALLOT" Patrick E. Gauen Illinois Political Correspondent. St. Louis Post - Dispatch (pre-1997 Fulltext). St. Louis, Mo.: Mar 9, 1994. pg. 05.B

• Sheila Jones, the current LaRouche candidate for governor, used to ridicule Harold Washington as fat, disgusting and stupid. And one LaRouchie told me that he could prove Washington was a child molester. When I challenged him to provide evidence, he said I was probably a child molester too. He retreated when I offered to rearrange his facial parts. [..] In the past, the LaRouche people have made personal threats when I wrote about them. The last time it happened, I called their office and told them that I have many large, mean friends, which is true. I promised them that if any of their threats became reality, my friends and I would visit their office. And there would be a terrible sound of crackling limbs. The threats stopped.
  • THEY'RE BACK AND LOOKING FOR DUPES; [NORTH SPORTS FINAL Edition] Mike Royko.. Chicago Tribune (pre-1997 Fulltext). Chicago, Ill.: Mar 11, 1994. pg. 3

Such views touched off gasps and some heckling from the audience Sunday at a forum at Parkway East Junior High School featuring Clement and three other Democrats seeking the party's Senate nomination in the Aug. 2 primary. Some Clement supporters among the 90 spectators, in turn, shouted their agreement when he cited certain points. "We were the most interesting thing about that forum," Clement chuckled Monday. He was the only one of the nine Democratic hopefuls not invited to the forum, which was sponsored by the St. Louis County Democratic Party. He was allowed to participate after he grabbed the microphone and demanded to be included.

— "LAROUCHE CANDIDATE STIRS CROWD; "Jo Mannies Post-Dispatch Political Correspondent. St. Louis Post - Dispatch (pre-1997 Fulltext). St. Louis, Mo.: Apr 26, 1994. pg. 02.B

...the three Republican candidates for governor ...

U.S. Rep. Helen Delich Bentley, Del. Ellen R. Sauerbrey, the Maryland House minority leader, and 1990 GOP standard-bearer William S. Shepard told a Maryland Chamber of Commerce breakfast crowd of more than 500 that businesses have been hurt by excessive environmental and land-use protection efforts. [..] ...three Democrats -- Baltimore state Sen. American Joe Miedusiewski, former Howard County Sen. Edward J. Kasemeyer and former Baltimore Del. Frank A. Conaway -- ... Three other Democratic candidates -- Prince George's County Executive Parris N. Glendening, Lt. Gov. Melvin A. Steinberg and state Sen. Mary H. Boergers -- ... [..] A 10th candidate and seventh Democrat in the field, Lawrence K. Freeman, a follower of Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr., was not invited to participate in the forum. But he and a representative interrupted opening statements by the other nine, demanding to be heard. Instead, hotel security men escorted them from the ballroom of the Inner Harbor hotel where the breakfast meeting was held.

— "Environmental rules too strict, GOP hopefuls say CAMPAIGN 1994 -- THE RACE FOR GOVERNOR :[FINAL Edition]. " John W. Frece. The Sun [Baltimore, Md.] 5 May 1994, 1B.

One source of unrelenting attacks on Bishop Samuel Ruiz Garcia and the Chiapas peace process is the combined U.S. and Mexican operation of U.S. political extremist and conspiracy theorist Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. Typical of those attacks is this statement published in the April 25 issue of the Leesburg, Va.,-based Larouche newspaper, The New Federalist: "By focusing on the role of Chiapas' schismatic bishop, Samuel Ruiz, in fomenting the Chiapas insurgency and on the foreign interests that are pulling his strings ..."

And yet, some Mexican observers think, LaRouche's newspaper, news service and the Spanish-language version of his magazine Executive Intelligence Review, Resumen Ejecutivo, are not as threatening to Ruiz as the MSIA, or the Ibero-American Solidarity Movement, apparently an offshoot of LaRouche's one-time Labor Party operation in Mexico.

LaRouche has been a candidate for U.S. president four times, and in a current news release on a visit to Russia he describes himself as a "U.S. Democratic Party presidential pre-candidate." He is also associated with Labor Party organizations in other Latin American countries, such as Venezuela.

According to columnist Miguel Angel Granados Chapa of Mexico City's Plaza Publica, MSIA "supports a ferocious campaign against the peace process" and distributes "posters that defame mediator Ruiz."

Granadas contends that MSIA "is one of the bastions of the Labor Party in the United States. This party's other front organizations in force today are the Center of Economic Investigations and Resumen Ejecutivo." Granadas locates all these LaRouche Mexican entities at the same house in Colonia San Rafael, Mexico City, "also the address given by the Labor Party in its Mexican version when it first appeared among us some 20 years ago. Today the name Labor Party is not used and the organization that carries out its functions is mainly the MSIA." Accusing the Labor Party and MSIA of "verbal terrorism," Granados said that fiscal aggression is not absent. [..]

— Coleman, Bill, and Patty Coleman. "LaRouche is behind attacks on Ruiz. " National Catholic Reporter. 30.n31 (June 3, 1994): 8(1).

Dateline: STOCKHOLM [..] A conference of the United Nations Development Study Program here entitled "Change: Social Conflict or Harmony?" managed a warm, thoughtful litany of all the good to be done and ideas to be carefully munched. There were some complaints that huge emergency relief operations and attempts at peacekeeping were draining UN resources and distracting it from the task of assuring economic and social progress in poor countries.

The only real disruption of the amiable atmosphere was from an interloper representing the American right-winger Lyndon LaRouche, whose new crusade is against efforts to tamp the population explosion. "It's fascism with a feminist face," he shouted before he was expelled. Everyone was embarrassed.

— If the United Nations Gives Up, Urgent Work Won't Be Done; [2 Edition] Flora Lewis. International Herald Tribune. Paris: Jul 29, 1994. pg. 4

In the final week of the hotly contested Mexican presidential campaign, Jesuits here and Bishop Samuel Ruiz Garcia were threatened with death by a group that calls itself The Squadron for the Defense of the Catholic Faith and Peace in Mexico.

These threats, most analysts here believe, are a part of a deliberate right-wing campaign to frighten and, discredit any group that sides with the poor in opposing the government and the PRI, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which has ruled Mexico for 65 years. [..] Placards with similar threats depicting Ruiz as a rattlesnake have also been seen throughout the country, especially since the National Democratic Convention held in the Lacandon jungle last week. [..] Both the Mexican bishops' congress and the Mexico City archdiocese were taking the death threats seriously. Bishop Ramon Godinez Flores, secretary general of the bishops' conference, called the anonymous attack "cowardly" and the work of "ignorant people who know nothing of the word of God." [..] Asked who authored these threats, Fr. Carlos Bravo, editor of the Jesuit magazine Christus, said, "It is fair to assume that they come from the same people who accused Bishop Ruiz of San Cristobal in January of being the instigator of the war in Chiapas. These attacks, we know, were the work of the Movement for Iberoamerican Solidarity, an affiliate of the Mexican Labor Party, which is, in turn, an offshoot of Lyndon LaRouche's international organization."

— Coleman, Patty, and Bill Coleman. "Threats target Jesuits, Ruiz as Mexican fight for power moves to polls. " National Catholic Reporter. 30.n37 (August 26, 1994): 9(1).

[Oliver] North sounded hoarse - who wouldn't after five months of nonstop jawing - and had to holler to be heard above a handful of hecklers who chanted throughout his speech.

North learned that there is only one thing more annoying than having a quartet of LaRouchites at your rally: a quartet of LaRouchites with a megaphone.

"Send Ollie to jail, Send Ollie to jail," sang the followers of political extremist Lyndon LaRouche who have been all over North like a cheap suit since his campaign began.

As North took the podium they switched: "Son of a Bush, Son of a Bush," they chorused - their favorite anti-North catcall.

The cacophony clearly annoyed North.

"Let me tell you how it feels," North began, jerking his head toward the knot of protesters. "In spite of that trash on the bottom of Mount Trashmore, let me tell you how it feels to be ahead at this point in the race."

— HECKLERS TALK ``TRASH WHILE NORTH SERMONIZES; [FINAL Edition] KERRY DOUGHERTY, STAFF WRITER. Virginian - Pilot. Norfolk, Va.: Oct 30, 1994. pg. A.4

1995

• In its Nov. 9 issue, the daily published a statement by Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson on his return from the funeral of Yitzhak Rabin. Carlsson states: ``I remember how I, for example, in an article in this newspaper, reacted against the selling of dartboards with the picture of Olof Palme.... Far to the right there was the EAP [the European Labor Party, Swedish co-thinkers of Mr. LaRouche], which in its leaflets were calling Olof Palme `mentally ill' and `murderer.'... I will never get rid of the thought that the act of the murderer, be it spontaneous or planned, was influenced by the hatred which, after years of campaigning, was `permitted.'...
  • LaRouche Blasts Swedish Prime Minister Carlsson's Lies About the Murder of Olof Palme, Nov 10, 1995 [7]

OF all the myriad words spoken at the day-and-a-half long inaugural annual conference of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University this week, the best overall description came not in the summation, but in the introductions. [..] Of course, there was one almost reassuring constant that twice erupted - disrupted - this very profound conference of exploration and enlightenment. If there is a single thing that can be counted on in this world today, it is: A follower or more of the goofy Lyndon LaRouche will rise and scream total ignorance.

They alone confirmed the purpose of this week's inaugural conference. They demonstrated the staggering need for all of us to seek every opportunity to listen and learn from some of the best in the world.

— Well said by Jimmy Baker, et al., at Rice; [3 STAR Edition] Op-Ed. JANE ELY. Houston Chronicle (pre-1997 Fulltext). Houston, Tex.: Nov 15, 1995. pg. 26

1996

(Readers may have come across other LaRouche supporters outside post offices or at airports, supporting nuclear weapons as a means to achieving a lasting peace and accusing the British royal family of heavy involvement in the international cocaine trade. As purveyors of obnoxious behavior, they have Scientologists and Hari Krishnas beat hands down.)

— Trees and volcanoes cause smog] (More myths from the "Wise Use" movement Callahan, Tim. The Humanist. Washington, DC: Jan 1996. Vol. 56, Iss. 1; pg. 29

Defectors tell of "psycho sessions" and relentless demand for cash inside the Citizens Electoral Council. A political group accused of dirty tricks and the brainwashing of recruits faces increasing hostility. Martin Daly reports.

A Melbourne woman has appealed to the American consulate to prevent her 16-year-old son from being taken to the United States for training with an extremist right-wing political cult, run by a convicted criminal, Lyndon LaRouche. [..] The CEC denies the allegations and blames former members for spreading "lies" in an attempt to destroy the CEC and Lyndon LaRouche in Australia.

But Ms. Stratford, one of a number of Australians to split from the CEC, said she was alarmed by the allegations. She also feared her son would be put through a LaRouchian "Cadre School" in the US, which she described as a brainwashing session to bind followers to the organization. [..] Former CEC members said the organization, often under the direction of a LaRouchian, Mr. Allen Douglas, from Leesburg, Virginia, held frequent cult-like "psycho sessions," during which members were abused and told they must accept their crimes - including masturbation, sodomy and homosexuality - if they were to be cured.

Motherhood and the influence of women over offspring was often derided. Women were frequently referred to as "witches."

One founding CEC member, Mr. John Koheler, of Kingaroy - who resigned after the LaRouchians "hijacked" the organization - said the CEC responded to his opposition to the Americans by telling him he was "blocked" and "paranoid."

"I told Al Douglas that he was a fascist bastard and then they said I was doubly paranoid," Mr. Koheler said.

Mrs. Rhonda Rotaru, of Colac, wife of Mr. Alex Rotaru, who said he was an "intelligence" officer for the CEC, also went through a "psycho session" because she refused to move to Melbourne with her husband. Mrs. Rotaru said she was criticized for breastfeeding her son at two years of age. "I always thought breastfeeding was just a natural part of womanhood," she said. "They said it was bad for a young child to be so dependent on its mother and that I would ruin his life. They made me feel as if I was the worst person in the world."

Mrs. Rotaru said the CEC tried to break her marriage. Her husband said he was called an "animal" during a "psycho session" and was asked if would leave his wife and children to live nearer the CEC in Melbourne.

"They inquired into my relationship with my mother," he said. "That was pretty much standard procedure. It was an interrogation. The whole aim was to create a new person, making your past totally irrelevant and giving you a new personality. "No matter what you said, it was your mother's fault. It was pretty hideous stuff. Many people broke down and cried." [..] A former Queensland sheep farmer, Ms. Julie Warner, accused the CEC of contributing to the breakup of her marriage, which led to the loss of her three sons in a separation case. She said she was virtually forced to remain in the US, fund-raising on the telephone for the organization, while the LaRouchians worked on her to wipe out her "mother complex" mindset.

"They would tell you there was something wrong with your mind, if you are not pulling huge dollars in," said Ms. Warner, who blamed CEC "brainwashing" for bringing her close to suicide. [..] She said the CEC encouraged her to leave her family: "They wanted to know how much money I would be getting from the property if the marriage broke up." [..] Mr. Victor Barwick, one of three sons of Queensland farming couple Doreen and Billy Barwick to join the CEC, said he went through "psycho-sessions" in Melbourne and in the US. He said Al Douglas told him he was having a "psycho-sexual relationship with my mother. I was only 17 at the time", Mr. Barwick said.

Mr. Barwick said that on a trip to the US, Mr. LaRouche told him there "was a dark age coming, that learning would be done away with and that most people would be slaves." Mr. Barwick was paid $200 a week by the CEC for fundraising up to 12 hours a day, six days a week.

— Families fight back

The Age/January 30, 1996

By Martin Daly www.rickross.com/reference/larouche/larouche12.html

Ross Perot, in a 65-minute address at the University at Buffalo's North Campus in Amherst on Thursday, [..] The candidate faced a lively audience that often shouted approval, sometimes heckled and went beyond heckling to interruption by one student associated with extremist Lyndon LaRouche.

— PEROT ATTACKS CLINTON ETHICS IN UB TALK; [CITY Edition] ROBERT J. McCARTHY - News Political Reporter. Buffalo News. Buffalo, N.Y.: Nov 01, 1996. pg. A.1

He is one of the most accomplished and inventive conspiracy theorists on the entire political spectrum, and his organization has a well-deserved reputation for conducting smear campaigns against various targets, among whom have been Walter Mondale, Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, and the queen of England. [..] One thing is very certain: Lyndon LaRouche has spent much of the past twenty years cultivating a vast array of enemies, some of them not much less "extremist" than he. On the other hand, his distorted view of the world and his demonstrated hostility toward various groups, including Jews, has produced some justifiable alarm. [..] The NCLC remained small and little was heard from the group until 1973. Then, from May to September of that year, the NCLC engaged in what it described as "Operation Mop-Up," a series of violent confrontations with SWP and CPUSA members in which several people were injured. In the following years the NCLC began to transform itself from a more-or-less traditional--if somewhat kooky --Marxist-Leninist organization into a conspiracy-oriented political cult. [..] The primary evil of the LaRouche organization and groups like it lies not so much in their particular ideological pronouncements or the positions they take on various issues, but in how they treat their opponents and in the vision they maintain of the civil liberties of all Americans. Here the antidemocratic and anti¬civil libertarian nature of LaRouche and his followers is manifest, and it is primarily on these grounds that they should be opposed.

— George, John (1996-05). American Extremists: Militias, Supremacists, Klansmen, Communists & Others. Prometheus Books. ISBN 1573920584. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help) pp. 283-297

1997

• La Rouche's publications and organization aggressively attacked black leaders from a variety of political perspectives, including Congressman Parren Mitchell, then head of the Congressional Black Caucus, Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, and Jesse Jackson. La Rouche's followers even carried out a racist assault against prominent activist/artist Amiri Baraka.
  • No Compromise with Racism: Farrakhan, Chavis and Lyndon La Rouche, by Dr. Manning Marable, Jan. 17, 1997, The Columbus Free Press

1998

Nevertheless, when the National African American Leadership Summit called for a national political convention at St. Louis in September 1996, at least three thousand representatives gathered to participate. On the convention's final day, the Reverend James Bevel, one of Martin Luther King Jr.'s former lieutenants and a recent convert to political conservatism, was given the podium. Bevel proudly introduced "the man of the hour," Lyndon LaRouche. Many in the audience were stunned: they immediately recognized LaRouche as a leader of fascist extremism in the United States and a defender of the former apartheid regime of South Africa. Instantly the crowd turned against Bevel and LaRouche, booing them off the stage. A fistfight erupted between several black nationalists and some of LaRouche's supporters, which was broken up by Farrakhan's security force. [..] In these same years, LaRouche courted leaders of the Ku Klux Klan and white fascism. In 1974 his front organization, the National Democratic Policy Committee (NDPC), collaborated with racist groups in Boston to support an anti-busing candidate for Congress. The following year, the NDPC initiated a legal defense campaign on behalf of Roy Frankhouser, Grand Dragon of the Pennsylvania chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. LaRouche later provided intelligence information on the U.S. anti-apartheid movement to the apartheid regime in South Africa. [..] In 1973 the La Rouchites initiated "Operation Mop Up," a series of violent assaults against members of the U.S. Communist Party Armed with clubs, pipes, and other weapons, LaRouche's cult tried to disrupt public meetings and physically intimidate radical activists. Much of LaRouche's violence and hatred focused on the black movement. In 1977 he declared that African Americans who fight for equal rights are obsessed with "zoological specifications of microconstituencies' self interests" and "distinctions which would be proper to the classification of varieties of monkeys and baboons."

— Black fundamentalism Manning Marable. Dissent. New York: Spring 1998. Vol. 45, Iss. 2; pg. 69, 8 pgs

That's what 35 demonstrators said during an hour-long, afternoon rally on the Bergen County Courthouse steps on Saturday. "We are with him, and against any talk of impeachment," said Jerry Plancher, a Democratic committeeman from Ridgefield, who said the people of Bergen County organized the rally to show support for Clinton. [..] As he reeled off Clinton's accomplishments, Plancher competed with noise from groaning buses, airplanes, and the chants of supporters for former presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche, who were also demonstrating, in rhyming verse, to support the president. "Get the smut off your computer, jail the special prosecutor," sang LaRouche supporters.

— BERGEN RALLY DRAWS CORE OF CLINTON SUPPORTERS; By TINA TRASTER, Staff Writer. The Record. Bergen County, N.J.: Sep 27, 1998. pg. a.18

It began as a financial scandal and took an improbable turn - producing sensational accusations that a dozen prominent Omaha men had abused teen-age boys and girls at drug-fueled orgies.

Franklin Community Federal Credit Union failed 10 years ago Wednesday. The collapse still ranks as the largest insolvency of a financial institution in Omaha. Counting lawsuit settlements and all other recoveries, Franklin's assets fell $30 million short of paying losses. [..] The Franklin financial scandal was real. The sex- and drug-party accusations turned to dust, an enduring lesson of how a giant lie and a whirlwind of gossip can reap a painful harvest. [..] Casey told the investigator that Alisha Owen, who was serving a check-fraud term in the Nebraska Center for Women in York, was ready to talk about a child-abuse ring led by King.

Casey had a history of dishonesty. He falsified his credentials to get a job at Boys Town, which fired him in 1974. He once led two Los Angeles Times reporters on a wild-goose chase across the Far East in a fruitless search for kidnapped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst, who never was there. Many people who know Casey described him as a con man, the Franklin grand jury said.

Owen and Casey had been patients together at St. Joseph Mental Health Center in Omaha. While there, they concocted a tale of incredible proportions.

The investigator, Lincoln detective Gary Caradori, went to York and videotaped Owen's accusations. Owen said she had taken part in dozens of sexual free-for-alls at King's apartment suite in the Twin Towers building west of downtown Omaha.

She said she was forced to have sex with then-Omaha Police Chief Robert Wadman and others. Owen claimed that Wadman fathered her child. Blood tests eventually proved that Wadman wasn't the father.

Two street hustlers who were friends of Owen's backed up her story. The two, Troy Boner and Danny King, who is not related to Lawrence E. King, added their own lurid details. [..] The grand jury investigated accusations of a nationwide pedophile ring, rumors of satanic activity and the claims of sexual abuse of children. [..] Wadman was cleared by the Franklin grand jury, but he became the victim of an extremist group that sent people to Omaha to keep the Franklin story alive for its own fund-raising purposes.

The Lyndon LaRouche group pursued Wadman to his new job as police chief in Aurora, Ill., distributing literature accusing him of sexual abuse in Omaha. Wadman resigned under pressure as Aurora's police chief. He took the same job in Wilmington, N.C. The accusations followed him there too, and he quit.

In neither city, Wadman said, did he resign solely because of the Franklin accusations. But in both police departments, he said, he was an outsider trying to make changes and the suspicions made that impossible.

Today, he said, Franklin is only a bad memory and his life is going well.

— Scandal Nearly Swallowed Omaha Credit Union Failed In November 1988; Key Players in the Franklin Case; Franklin Chronology; [Sunrise Edition] ROBERT DORR. Omaha World - Herald. Omaha, Neb.: Nov 1, 1998. pg. 1.a

1999

Former staffers at both the Liberty Lobby and LaRouche's group claim both outfits have cooperated closely on several projects. In the March 2, 1981 issue of its newspaper Spotlight, Liberty Lobby cynically defended the relationship this way: "It is mystifying why so many anti-communists and `conservatives' oppose the USLP [U.S. Labor Party-- LaRouche's original electoral arm, ed.]. No group has done so much to confuse, disorient, and disunify the Left as they have...the USLP should be encouraged, as should all similar breakaway groups from the Left, for this is the only way that the Left can be weakened and broken." More recently, Spotlight has distanced itself and Liberty Lobby from the LaRouchians over the issue of the LaRouchians' questionable and illegal fundraising activities. [..] LaRouche's cadre roamed the streets of New York, Philadelphia, and other cities with clubs and chains beating up trade union leaders, activists, socialists, and communists. [..] LaRouche's lawyers have repeatedly sued activist critics who describe him as a fascist, racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-Jewish bigot, lunatic cult leader, neo-Nazi racial theorist, crook, and demagogue. LaRouche has lost every case. One jury in Virginia found that calling LaRouche a "small-time Hitler" was not defamatory and then awarded damages to the news organization sued by LaRouche. [..] Sam Schwartz, a faculty member at Bronx Community College in New York, received a phone call from a LaRouche attorney threatening to sue Schwartz penniless unless he stopped telling students that LaRouche was an anti-Semite and fascist. Several African-Americans active in St. Louis who objected to the presence of the LaRouchians in a local antiwar coalition were also threatened with lawsuits for their critical characterization of the LaRouche movement. [..] [Russ] Bellant warns that some of the LaRouchite documents may be forged. "They did create a passable bogus copy of a section of the New York Times blasting their enemies," he points out. [..] The Iran Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era, combines into one book chapters written by Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott and Jane Hunter. On page 67 in a chapter written by Peter Dale Scott it is asserted that the LaRouche organization "previously posed as left-wing but in fact harassed anti-nuclear and other left-wing demonstrations with the help of the right-wing domestic intelligence group known since 1979 as Western Goals." It is documented that the LaRouchites spied on and harassed the left, and it is documented that Western Goals spied on and harassed the left, but it does not automatically follow that they worked together to spy on and harass the left. The evidence linking the two groups is this: General Singlaub, at the time on the board of Western Goals, once lectured to a group that included some LaRouchians at a training center run by Mitch WerBell. Singlaub met LaRouchians from time to time when he visited WerBell, who served as an intelligence adviser to LaRouche. The LaRouchians in 1977 gave the New Hampshire State Police background material on anti-nuclear activists including several pages from a private Rees newsletter. At the time, Rees was not connected to Western Goals. In fact, Western Goals had not as yet been founded.

— "RIGHT WOOS LEFT" Political Research Associates

Corrections, 1999 - revision 3 Revised Draft: February 22, 1994

First Draft: December 20, 1990

• Susan is hardly the only protestor with an abrasive personality. Like most people, I first encountered followers of Lyndon LaRouche in an airport, when one shouted at me, "Even guys with beards can support nuclear power." In my case he was wrong. But I was strucke by how unconcerned he was with making a favorable impression on others. So sure of the scientific correctness of LaRouche's weird economic analyses, his followers were just waiting for their vindication. They displayed the arrogance of certainty in addition to the irritation of difficult personalities.
  • The Art of Moral Protest: Culture, Biography, and Creativity in Social Movements By James M. Jasper University of Chicago Press, 1999 ISBN 0226394816, 9780226394817 p. 222

2000s

2000

Until recently [Larry] Hansel, 41, had been a member of a "family" although, as became increasingly evident after the tragic event, he was always something of a black sheep. When he climbed into his pickup the morning of June 4, 1991, he was on a scouting expedition. His search-and-destroy mission was only hours away.

Hansel's ... explosive behavior had been building up in him for some time - for much longer than the three months since he'd lost his job. [..]

He was particularly fond of quoting the Old Testament prophets of doom. Politically he leaned toward Lyndon LaRouche and in 1984 even sought election as a delegate pledged to LaRouche, a far-right-wing activist who that year was seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. Hansel got 521 votes in his district, finishing near the bottom of the ballot. [..] Among the charges that were brough against Hansel were two counts of murder.

— Violence in the Workplace: A Prevention and Management Guide for Businesses By S. Anthony Baron page 4 et seq. 2nd edition, Pathfinder Publishing, Inc., 2000 ISBN 0934793700, 9780934793704

2002

• Vad som främst kännetecknade partiet var skruvade konspirationsteorier och grova personangrepp riktade inte minst mot Olof Palme, som beskylldes för att vara agent, än för CIA, än för Sovjetunionen.
• What is mainly characterized party was screwed conspiracy theories and serious personal attacks directed not least against Olof Palme, the accused to be the agent, than the CIA, than for the Soviet Union. [per Google translation]
  • SOU 2002:87 Rikets säkerhet och den personliga integriteten, Swedish Government Official Report, p. 239

• After David Senter convinced the national leadership of AAM to repudiate LaRouche, he received death threats, which prompted him to send his wife and chidlren back to Texas for safety. He also sought help from Washington, D.D., Capitol Police who provided round-the-clock security and advised him and Marvin Meek to wear bulletproof vests. And so when LaRouche supporters in AAM ran into difficulties organizing their anti-Federal Reserve protests in February 1983, it was only logical that they blamed David Senter.
  • The terrorist next door: the militia movement and the radical right By Daniel Levitas Macmillan, 2002 ISBN 0312291051, 9780312291051 p.214

2003

Things got so contentious at the May 15 46th District Democrats meeting at the Olympic View Church on NE 95th Street that one party member called the cops. It wasn't typical internal political fisticuffs that caused the ruckus, though. It was infiltrators from the ubiquitous Lyndon LaRouche campaign.

"It's like a cult," says one 46th District (North Seattle) Democrat. Fifteen LaRouche supporters showed up to the meeting, kept interrupting scheduled speakers, and even sang "We Shall Overcome." Cops escorted them out. AMY JENNIGES

— "In Other News...: Disrupted Democrats ", AMY JENNIGES, The Stranger, May 29, 2003 www.thestranger.com/seattle/in-other-news/Content?oid=14415

Hecklers at the event, apparently supporters of perennial candidate Lyndon LaRouche, had already interrupted the debate once, and began shouting again as Lieberman spoke.

— Lieberman, Dean Take Off Gloves as Foreign Policy Dominates Democratic Debate David Lightman. Knight Ridder Tribune Business News. Washington: Sep 10, 2003. pg. 1

The debate was repeatedly interrupted by demonstrators who were followers of perennial candidate Lyndon Larouche, and Sharpton implored and scolded them at every turn, claiming they were deliberately attempting to disrupt the first Democratic debate focused on issues of importance to the black community. "You're going to respect us on this stage because we've got something to say," he said after one interruption.

"Amen," Lieberman said.

"I take that as an endorsement," Sharpton said to laughter.

— Lieberman, Dean Spar Over Middle East in Debate; [FINAL Edition] Dan Balz. The Washington Post. Washington, D.C.: Sep 10, 2003. pg. A.01

The debate was repeatedly interrupted by the hecklers shouting pro-LaRouche slogans. Sharpton repeatedly appealed for quiet, but Lieberman joked: "The only good news for all of us is that [Arizona Sen.] John McCain told me that no one's been elected since 1972 that Lyndon LaRouche and his people have not protested, so this is good news."

— DEMOCRATS CLASH IN DEBATE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES AIM AT BUSH BUT DISAGREE ON IRAQ, ISRAEL; [REGION Edition] ANNE E. KORNBLUT AND GLEN JOHNSON, BOSTON GLOBE. Pittsburgh Post - Gazette. Pittsburgh, Pa.: Sep 10, 2003. pg. A.8

2004

[John] Edwards seemed buoyant, ... [..]A noon speech at the Manchester Public Library was interrupted three times by two different members of the audience. One, a supporter of Lyndon LaRouche, was drowned out by the crowd chanting, "Go, John, go!" until aides removed the man.

— THE NATION; THE RACE TO THE WHITE HOUSE; Twists and Turns in New Hampshire; Campaigns recalibrate after Iowa surprises, with no one eager for frontrunner status.; [HOME EDITION] Eric Slater and Matea Gold. Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles, Calif.: Jan 21, 2004. pg. A.1

With an eye on the outcome in Iowa, Gen. Wesley K. Clark emphasized his national security experience on Wednesday ... [..] Sometimes, as the general goes from town hall meeting to town hall meeting, he demonstrates remarkable patience, as he did on Tuesday night when followers of Lyndon LaRouche, the perennial presidential candidate, repeatedly interrupted him, one of them singing over General Clark's discussion with a voter.

— Clark Shifts His Trail Talk To Match New Landscape Edward Wyatt. New York Times. (Late Edition (East Coast)). New York, N.Y.: Jan 22, 2004. pg. A.23

• Something went wrong toward the end of the event. There was an extended disruption by a group of LaRouche people hollering something about Dick Cheney. It was very ugly, as is the LaRouche movement's style. [..] But even this couldn't deter the Deaniacs or puncture their mood. "Dean! Dean! Dean!" they chanted, each time some LaRouche lunatic's Dick Cheney lecture needed drowning out. "We want Dean!"
  • Revised Predictions by David Tell, The Weekly Standard., 01/27/2004 1:30:00 PM

At a Howard Dean campaign stop in New Hampshire Monday, Franken lost control of himself when lunatic-fringe acolytes of Lyndon LaRouche began heckling the former Vermont governor.

As The Post's Vincent Morris reported, Franken charged one protestor, grabbing him from behind in a bear hug and slamming him to the floor. "I got down low and took his legs out," says Franken.

— SMACKDOWN! New York Post. New York, N.Y.: Jan 28, 2004. pg. 032

• In late December and early January, the repose of my study was disturbed by a sound-truck belonging to Lyndon LaRouche--sometimes on its own, blaring beneath my window, and sometimes as part of a minuscule procession, a pathetic gaggle of LaRouche's lunatic supporters. On one occasion there was a flat-bed truck with half-a-dozen people standing on it and beating their breasts against the cold--or possibly for joy--while purporting to represent "the LaRouche youth movement." Someone banged a drum and all cheered to the strains of the Hallelujah Chorus, blaring through the speakers. On the side of the truck was a banner which read: "Dump Cheney, Vote LaRouche"--which to say the least of it shows an imperfect understanding of the way our electoral system works. [..] All LaRouche succeeded in doing was disturbing the peace of the city, for some weeks to no particular end but the gratification of his own conceit of himself as a "leader." During that time, he began all his campaign announcements, even those by the sound-truck, with the words: "This is Lyndon LaRouche, candidate for Democratic party nomination for president. I have approved the following message"--as if we were all as paranoid as he, so that it were necessary to forestall the suspicion that he might be reading a message he had not approved. The idea seemed to be to convey the impression that he headed up some vast organization where eager underlings were constantly producing shiny new policy statements to his specifications and bringing them to him for his approval. Naturally, he assumes that prestige attaches to having someone else write his words for him, rather than to writing them himself--which one assumes he actually does, since they all sound alike.
  • Bowman, James. "Beast-man politics. " New Criterion. 22.6 (Feb 2004): 61(5). . Gale. 2 Apr. 2008 Foundation for Cultural Review Gale Document Number:A113523066

Many people seem to think that the more dramatic their antics are, the more attention they will garner, and the more support they will get. They don't seem to realize that such tactics often backfire. For example, look at the Lyndon LaRouche supporters who periodically appear on our campus. They are notorious for heckling anyone who disagrees with them, and as a result they have only hurt their own cause.

(Of course, if you've ever looked into LaRouche's ideas, you know how paranoid and anti-Semitic they are. That's another reason why they haven't garnered much support, but that's beside the point. The protesters are so unlikable that few students even listen to their ideas in the first place.)

— "Student voices with little to say" Peter J. Spalding, "opinions" Daily Bruin, USC. Published: Wednesday, March 24, 2004, Updated: Wednesday, July 2, 2008. www.dailytrojan.com/2.1621/student-voices-with-little-to-say-1.219640

Bush campaign officials have acknowledged efforts to keep hecklers out and that, on at least one occasion, some Democrats who signed up to attend a speech by Vice President Dick Cheney were asked to sign a pledge endorsing Bush.

The door policy at Kerry's events is a little looser and, perhaps as a result, he sometimes faces hecklers or disruptions, like one at Monday's event staged by apparent supporters of failed presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche.

Kerry laughed off the encounter. Separately, he got in a dig at Bush:

"I trust that no one here had to sign a loyalty oath to get in," Kerry said. "Everybody is free to ask whatever you want."

— Next debate to give hopefuls a `real' town hall; [Final Edition] Anne Gearan Associated Press. Journal - Gazette. Ft. Wayne, Ind.: Oct 5, 2004. pg. 5.A

Nader’s question-and-answer session was frequently interrupted by interjections from the floor, as some audience members shouted accusations and questions at the candidate while he spoke.

The final three minutes of the session were chaotic. A group of supporters of former presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche began chanting a song mocking Nader.

“He’s trying to destroy our constitution! Don’t you see, people?” yelled Tory Harrison, a member of the LaRouche group.

“Stop closing your brain down!” Nader retorted.

— "Nader Defends Decision To Run", October 05, 2004 12:00 AM By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM Crimson Staff Writer, The Harvard Crimson , www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=503650

You know it's almost election time when a particular voting bloc starts infiltrating campaign events. John Kerry's meeting in the gymnasium at Winnacunnet High School in Hampton was about ready to start yesterday morning when police officers descended on the bleachers and handcuffed four young men, hustling them out the door as the men sang a hymn-like song.

Others popped up, increasingly agitated and demanding that the officers explain why the men were ejected. In response, cops hauled out another seven men and women. Some went quietly. The man dragged out screaming "This is fascism!" did not.

That's when it became clear what was going on: Lyndon LaRouche, of course. Supporters of the 82-year-old presidential fringe candidate were a familiar sight as last January's Democratic primary approached.

Yesterday, about a dozen people posing as students were taken out before calm descended - for about an hour and a half. As Kerry wrapped his Q&A session a couple more LaRouches revealed themselves.

"If you want to beat Bush in Nove-emm-ber," they crooned in unison, "all you have to do is listen to LaRouche . . . "

Kerry, well acquainted with the LaRouche tactics, calmed the crowd as they were removed. When asked by a sympathizer why people were kicked out before the meeting started, Kerry was honest: "Because they were gonna sing like the other people."

— "You know it's almost election time when a particular voting" Concord Monitor"". Concord, N.H.: Oct 5, 2004. pg. A.01

One would hope that in an academic community such as Harvard’s there would be little room for lowbrow baiting and outright heckling in the face of a distinguished guest. One might also hope that the guest wouldn’t lower himself to the levels of disrespect and obstinacy broached by his audience. For those who attended presidential candidate Ralph Nader’s speech at the John F. Kennedy, Jr. Forum this past Monday, such hopes were dashed. [..] Throughout the question and answer session a contingent of Lyndon LaRouche supporters also rudely catcalled, heckled and chanted over Nader and other attendees in a fairly base display of disrespect.

— "Discourse, Not Disrespect: We are disappointed with those who were impolite at Nader’s speech in the Forum" Editorial, October 08, 2004 12:00 AM By THE CRIMSON STAFF, The Harvard Crimson www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=503699

According to a 1985 Washington Post series, there were sandbag-buttressed guard posts and metal spikes in the driveway. The gun-toting guards alarmed the locals. So did LaRouche's rhetoric. LaRouche said he needed the security because teams of assassins were gunning for him and just might start slaughtering people on the streets of Leesburg.

Civic leaders who criticized LaRouche were denounced by followers and in LaRouche literature as commies, homosexuals, drug pushers or international terrorists. According to one published report, LaRouche denounced the Leesburg Garden Club as a "nest" of Soviet sympathizers. One lawyer who opposed LaRouche on a zoning matter went into hiding after what she told the New York Times were menacing phone calls and a death threat. [..] MICHAEL WINSTEAD WAS SO SHAKEN AFTER HE QUIT the LaRouche Youth Movement that he barely spoke to anyone for weeks, he says.

Eventually, he sent anti-LaRouche letters to local newspapers and colleges where he'd tried to recruit for the movement. He chatted in anti-LaRouche Internet discussion groups, trading war stories with former followers, sparring with current devotees. In May, he mentioned on one electronic bulletin board that he had given an interview to a reporter asking about LaRouche and Jeremiah Duggan.

Soon afterward, the New Federalist, a LaRouche newspaper, ran a photo of Winstead on its front page under the headline: "The Washington Post's Latest Pervert: Michael Winstead." The accompanying article suggested that Winstead and The Post are part of the worldwide conspiracy against Lyndon LaRouche.

— No Joke; Eight-time presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche may be a punchline on 'The Simpsons,' but his organization -- and the effect it has on young recruits -- is dead serious; [FINAL Edition] April Witt. The Washington Post. Washington, D.C.: Oct 24, 2004. pg. W.12

• When I arrived as a frreshman at Columbia College in 1969, I wandered into an open meeting of two factions of SDS, including the very macho Weatherman. At one point, some disappeared into a corridor and came back asking for "some good men" to help repel an expected invasion of Lyndon LaRouche's Labor Committee (as I recall).
  • Foreward to the Thirtieth Anniversary Edition, by R. Brian Ferguson. Women of the forest By Yolanda Murphy Columbia University Press, 2004 p xv ISBN 0231132336, 9780231132336

2005

• At Drexel University, for example, Mr. Santorum was greeted by protesters, was heckled during his speech by people declaring their loyalty to Lyndon LaRouche, and was asked several questions by young people on issues that had little to do with Social Security, including gay marriage and the global fight against AIDS.
  • "On Social Security, a Political Appeal to the Young Draws the Attention of Their Elders", ROBIN TONER February 23, 2005, New York Times

Early in 1973 a group came out of SDS called the National Caucus of Labor Committees, led by Lyndon LaRouche, decided that it was going to violently crush the Communist Party, in what they publicly called "operation mop-up." They accused the CP of obstructing their efforts to take over the National Welfare Rights Organization. They had trained themselves in the use of special clubs called nunchakus, made of two pieces of wood, which could do more damage than a solid club. They trianed to use other weapons as well. Their first attack on April 11 target supporters of the Young Workers Liberation League, the youth group of the CP, at Temply University in Pliadelphia. The surprise attack with clubs and pipes injured a number of people. The Millitant ran an editorial calling for repudiaiton of the NCLC campaign. We called for a united defense of all organizations attacked by the NCLC, and were succesful in winning road support on the left and from civil libertarians to denounce the NCLC. Even with their own supporters under a potentially dadly attack, the Communist Party responded in a divisise way. The Daily World, the CP newspaper, tried to link the NCLC to "Trotskyites." On April 23, the NCLC attacked a meeting held at Columbia University to hear candidates for Mayor of New York City. On the speakers platform were a Democratic contender, CP candidate Rasheed Story and Joanna Misnik, who was speaking for Norman Oliver, the SWP candidate. About 60 NCLC supporters armed with nunchakus and other clubs, and brass knuckles, charged the platform. SWP and YSA members, as well as CP members and Columbia students defended the candidates. The defenders had to break off chair legs in order to defend the people on the platform, whom the NCLC thugs were trying to reach. They were after Storey in particular, SWP and YSA membes, who outnumbered the CP supporters at the meeting, formed a cordon to get him out safely. and Storey thanked them for their help. In the end, the attakcers retreated, taking their wounded with them. Six members of the SWP were hurt. But the meeting was broken up. [..] In retaliation for the SWP and YSA's role at Columbia, the NCLC announced that we were now targets also. On May 5, in Detroit, they attacked an educational meeting sponsored by the SWP and YSA. This time we were prepared to defend the meeting with a aquad of marshals with baseball bats. The NCLC goons were driven off with many casualites on their side. One SWP member, Don Bechler, had to be treated at a hospital. That night, the International Socialists, Workers League, and Spartacist League joined us in physically defendig an SWP mayoral cmapaign meeting, and the NCLC didn't attack. A number of groups, including members of the YWLL, agreed to defend a meeting scheduled for our vice presidential candidate, Andrew Pulley, on Detroit's Wayne State University. The NCLC, apparently despairing of attacking well-defended meetings, decided to go after individuals. They jumped three members of the SWP from behind on a street in New York. They used nunchakus and pipes, Jesse Smith suffered a broken arm and many bruises. Ken Shilman and Rebecca Funch were beaten but not seriously hurt. The NCLC pulled back from their campaign following this incident. The NCLC had claimed to be social. But their violent campaign against socialist organiztions was a strong signal that they were moving far to the right. We began to hear stories of NCLC members recruiting people in bars to "get the commies" before their attacks. The police were very reluctant to arrest any of the thugs, some of whom had an appearance and behavior that led us to suspect they were cops.

— Sheppard, Barry (2005). The party. Resistance Books. pp. 326–328. ISBN 1876646500, 9781876646509. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help)

• One jump-start for passage of broad-based disability rights legislation came from the insensitive remark by President Ronald Reagan... During the Bush-Dukakis presidential campaign in August 1988... After initially refusing to be drawn into the controversy, Vice President Bush responded in August 11, 1988, by urging Congress to enact the Americans with Disabilities Act. [..] Reagan's insensitive "invalid" comment therefore, may have helped lead to George H. W. Bush's support of the ADA. [Colker 2005]
  • The disability pendulum: the first decade of the Americans with Disabilities Act By Ruth Colker NYU Press, 2005 ISBN 0814716458, ISBN 9780814716458 p.4 [8]

2006

Two hecklers, described by the White House and the NAACP as followers of perennial presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche, tried to interrupt the president's 33-minute speech and were escorted out.

— Bush appears before NAACP for 1st time of his presidency G. Robert Hillman. Knight Ridder Tribune News Service. Washington: Jul 20, 2006. pg. 1

Q NAACP the President has been President for five years now, and he told them that he regretted the fact that many African Americans distrust the Republican Party. What has he done for five years to change that? [..] Q What did the President think of his reception?

MR. [Tony] SNOW: I haven't talked to him. I mean, he looked like he enjoyed it. It was interesting. I guess there was a LaRouche who disrupted things we were told that the disruptor was a member of Lyndon LaRouche's whatever. And Julian Bond expressed some unhappiness about that.

Q There were two of them.

MR. SNOW: There were two of them okay, the LaRouches. (Laughter.) But in any event

— WHITE HOUSE CONDUCTS DAILY PRESS BRIEFING, JULY 20 US Fed News Service, Including US State News. Washington, D.C.: Jul 20, 2006.

Addressing the NAACP's annual convention for the first time as president, [Pres. George W.] Bush ... [..] At one point, a heckler could be overheard yelling about Vice President Dick Cheney, the war in Iraq and the Middle East. NAACP officials said the man, who was escorted from the hall, was a follower of Lyndon LaRouche, an idiosyncratic occasional presidential candidate who rails against the Bush administration, especially its prominent neoconservatives.

— Bush recognizes distrust by blacks: He speaks to NAACP for 1st time in office Julie Hirschfeld Davis. Knight Ridder Tribune Business News. Washington: Jul 21, 2006. pg. 1

Observers said those who kept singing several times as Lieberman tried to speak were from the Lyndon LaRouche Party. LaRouche is a perennial presidential candidate.

At one point, Lieberman accused them of being Lamont supporters, but the Lamont campaign said they had nothing to do with it and helped remove them.

— Last of U.S. Senate debates; Big 3 slug it out again; Hecklers disrupt lively exchange Mary E O'Leary. New Haven Register. New Haven, Conn.: Oct 24, 2006. pg. A.1

Protestors entered an event hosted by L.O.G.I.C., a campus organization devoted to pursuing the ideas of Ayn Rand, to decry the statements of a speaker at the group’s previous event.

Last week the group brought Yaron Brook, president and executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, to speak on campus. [..]According to several students who attended the event, the audience included a number of supporters of Lyndon LaRouche, a political activist with a vocal following.

The group of LaRouche supporters, who clash ideologically with the conservative L.O.G.I.C. group, accused Brook of being a Nazi, and questioned whether students would support his views if the context were different – if, for example, he had suggested that the Ku Klux Klan lynch hundreds of thousands of blacks, said George Rogers, 23, a guest at the event.

They also mocked Brook’s argument by calling the Ayn Rand Institute a sex cult, and then distributed condoms emblazoned with the pictures of wanted Islamic terrorists, claiming that the condoms would protect users from terrorism. [..] According to students who attended the event, LaRouche supporters dressed up as Ayn Rand and former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and began singing inflammatory songs in the middle of Bernstein’s speech.

Michelle Fuchs, who was attending the event, said event organizers called university police after LaRouche supporters and audience members became engaged in heated verbal disputes.

She added that after officers asked the LaRouche supporters to leave, they did so without incident.

— "Students clash over ideology at on-campus event" By Anthony Pesce & Julia Erlandson, Daily Bruin, UCLA, Updated: Friday, October 27, 2006 at 7:48 p.m. Published: Friday, October 27, 2006 dailybruin.ucla.edu/stories/2006/oct/27/students-clash-over-ideology-a/

A battle of political extremists ended in the throwing of meat and condoms Friday as about a dozen protesters from the LaRouche Youth Movement interrupted a lecture by an Ayn Rand Institute speaker.

Department of Public Safety officers asked the protesters to leave after they threw meat and condoms and interrupted the speaker by singing politically charged songs. The protest was one of several the LYM has organized against ARI events. [..] Witnesses said that as [Andrew Bernstein of Marist University] spoke, an LYM member unwrapped a raw steak and slammed it onto Bernstein's notes on the podium.

"I believe he said, 'On behalf of the LaRouche campaign, we dedicate this raw meat to you for supporting a philosophy that results in the death of millions of children,'" said Blake Adams, a freshman majoring in business administration and a member of the Objectivist Club.

Witnesses said that the protesters also stood up and sang in unison about the death of Muslims during the Iraq war.

"During parts of the lecture, they sang songs in protest against the treatment of Muslims," said Ilya Golosker, a sophomore majoring in electrical engineering. "People started yelling and interrupting Bernstein."

"Nuclear holocaust is the ARI policy," said Michael Steger, a spokesman for the LaRouche Political Action Committee, "Their director, Yaron Brook, is a Nazi who has called for the death of civilian Muslims to end the Iraq war."

Witnesses said a purple-robed protester also interrupted the lecture, claimed that he was Ayn Rand and threw condoms with Vice President Dick Cheney's and other political figures' faces on them at the audience.

DPS Chief Carey Drayton said DPS officers asked the protesters to leave, and they complied. No arrests were made and no force was used.

"It was very peaceful," Drayton said. "No one had to be held."

Steger said the disruptions were "acts of civil disobedience."

"Bernstein and the ARI are pushing a policy of genocide," Steger said. "We were responding to this speaker's policies using our rights of free speech. It is the moral obligation of college campuses to challenge professors and lecturers with policies of genocide."

LYM members frequently pass out literature to students espousing the values of their leader, Lyndon LaRouche. Some have criticized LYM for being "cult-like."

"It's an easy way out to attack us as being a cult," Steger said. "If they accuse us of being a cult against genocide, and they are a group for genocide, then fine.

"We targeted the audience, not Bernstein," Steger said. "We wanted to ask them if they are going to tolerate a pre-emptive nuclear strike as a policy for the United States.

"We were respectful to mankind. Were we respectful to Bernstein? Yes, he's part of mankind - we'll give him that much." [..] The incident was part of several protests by LYM against ARI across the country, including one at UCLA Oct. 19.

— "Activists lob meat, condoms" Kaelyn Forde Eckenrode, Daily Trojan, USC, Published: Tuesday, October 31, 2006 Updated: Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Joe Lieberman opted for a relaxing night of campaigning, beer in hand, at Mayor Mike's in downtown Hartford. [..]

Lieberman lasted maybe 15 minutes before he was heckled from the restaurant by young Lyndon LaRouche supporters, who kept popping up along the bar like gophers coming out of their holes. Singing loudly -- but in perfect harmony -- and throwing handfuls of fake dollar bills into the air over Lieberman's head, the LaRouche crew seemed to stun the older crowd of Lieberman supporters who gathered to hobnob with the sitting senator. Lieberman entered the bar about 7 p.m., just as the debate between Lamont and Schlesinger started playing on one of the large television screens. As he walked in, with a close-up of Lamont's head looming over the room, a LaRouche supporter, disguised in a wig and make-up as conservative columnist William F. Buckley, began yelling and throwing green "Buckley Bucks." Soon, the singing began. "If you want a third world war, vote for Joe, Bill Buckley's whore," the LaRouche supporters sang. Then came a bit about impeaching Vice President Dick Cheney and about Lieberman, or Cheney -- it was hard to decipher which -- being something unprintable. The LaRouche youth, as they called themselves, came to Connecticut from around the country specifically to heckle Lieberman because, they said, Buckley supported Lieberman when he unseated Republican U.S. Sen. Lowell Weicker in 1988. [..] LaRouche supporters consider Buckley a fascist, said Jon Stuart, 22, of California, and think Lieberman is a "bought and paid for stooge" of the Bush administration. But they're not supporting Lamont in the race against Lieberman, Stuart said. "We don't do that," Stuart said. "We're a political action committee and our campaign is to go after Lieberman." [..] At first, Lieberman supporters tried to drown out the LaRouche supporters by chanting "Go Joe go!" but they were no match for the well-rehearsed young men and women who had spread themselves around the bar. Lieberman, who ditched his beer about the same time someone changed the channel from the Senate debate to the West Virginia- Louisville football game, beat a quick path to the door just as the kid in the Dick Cheney mask appeared. As he made his way out of the room, Lieberman's staff tried to block the LaRouche supporters from following him, forming a human shield at the far end of the bar. A considerable amount of shoving and muttered threats then followed. As the kids filed out of the restaurant, still throwing their green fliers, former Mayor Mike Peters shouted from his perch at the end the bar, "You've got to clean up when you're done."

— Last Call's Early For Joe As Hecklers Crash Party Elizabeth Hamilton. Knight Ridder Tribune Business News. Washington: Nov 3, 2006. pg. 1

Thumbs down to the childish supporters of fringe political figure Lyndon LaRouche, who have immaturely caused several headaches for the re-election campaign of U.S. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, D-Conn. At least twice, Lieberman has been ambushed by LaRouche supporters, who seem to seek only to drown out the senator's voice. The first was during a televised debate between Lieberman and his two major opponents, Ned Lamont, the Democratic nominee, and Republican Alan Schlesinger. The most recent incident took place during a campaign stop to Mayor Mike's, a bar in downtown Hartford. According to the Hartford Courant, Lieberman had been in the bar barely 15 minutes before the LaRouche supporters jumped out of nowhere, singing loudly in perfect harmony and calling Lieberman, among other things, a "whore." While LaRouche's supporters have the right to voice their opinions -- a sacred right, at that -- these few troublemakers have offered nothing but heckling and immature name-calling. Never mind the fact that LaRouche isn't even running for office. Some advice for LaRouche's supporters: If you're going to speak your mind, have something relevant, or at least civil, to say.

— Best and the rest for the past week Connecticut Post. Bridgeport, Conn.: Nov 4, 2006.

Three of the four youths who disrupted Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman's campaign event Friday in Hartford with an obscenity- tinged serenade remained in jail Saturday.

[], 22, and [], 25, both of Brookline, Mass., and []of Oakland, Calif., were held on $1,500 bail. They were charged with interfering with police, breach of peace and resisting arrest. [], 23, of Brookline, Mass., charged with breach of peace, was released on a promise to appear in court

The four followers of perennial presidential candidate Lyndon H. LaRouche wanted to call attention to the alleged suppression of free speech on American campuses, according to Barbara Boyd, a spokeswoman for the Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee.

Besides singing, the youths threw fliers at the senator and his supporters while Lieberman made the stop at El Mercado, the Spanish marketplace on Park Street in Hartford. LaRouche singers heckled Lieberman during a debate last week and again Thursday night in downtown Hartford.

According to the LaRouche website, Lieberman has joined with Lynne Cheney, wife of Vice President Dick Cheney, in forming a group involved in "nazi-style intimidation and repression on college campuses."

— Hecklers At Event For Lieberman Remain In Jail William Hathaway. Knight Ridder Tribune Business News. Washington: Nov 5, 2006. pg. 1

...the Connecticut Veterans Day Parade... [..] There was a moment of political drama early in the parade when a Lyndon LaRouche supporter -- who had been arrested Friday after heckling Lieberman -- was arrested again after berating Lieberman once more.

— Honoring Veterans: Immigrant Who Served With Patton Calls U.S. `Wonderful Country' Matthew Kauffman. Knight Ridder Tribune Business News. Washington: Nov 6, 2006. pg. 1

According to LaRouche Youth Movement activists at UC Irvine, OC Weekly is part of a conspiracy "to impose fascism, no matter what," a "cabal" whose members run in a direct line from Vice President Dick Cheney to Village Voice Media editorial boss Mike Lacey. [..] LYM's swap-meet intellectualism accounts for the fact that UCI students familiar with LYM can't say precisely what the group stands for or who Lyndon LaRouche is. [..] "What's the point?" asks another undergrad. "They're into agitation for the sake of agitating people."

If no one's clear on the group's politics, its tactics are unmistakable: recruitment and protest; the students who requested anonymity said they'd be hounded by LYM activists if their names were associated with any criticism of the group. At a Nov. 6 campus speech by Ayn Rand Institute president Yaron Brook, LYM activists stood and sang, called Brook a Nazi—and were promptly arrested by campus police. Of the 15 protesters thrown into UCI squad cars, campus police officials told the Weekly that only one was a UCI student, and he was not an LYM member. The others, said campus police chief Paul Henisey, were from Los Angeles County.

That suggests that LYM has failed to leverage its near-constant presence on the UCI campus into a significant local—what's the word?—cadre.

— "Lyndon LaDouche: Followers of crackpot felon accuse Weekly of being Cheneys tool" Will Swaim, published: November 23, 2006 www.ocweekly.com/content/printVersion/51435

2007

There were two things that surprised me about the AEI forum on Friday on the Iraq "surge" and attendant MoveOn.org demonstration against it. First, there was singing. Outside. Among the protesters. A group of about six youngish people in rain ponchos were singing something that sounded a little like a hymn or chants in the style of plainsong. They were doing it in a round, so I couldn't really hear the lyrics.

I asked the protest organizer, MoveOn's Tom Matzzie, who the singers were and he answered with surprising vehemence: "They're not with us." They were, in fact, supporters of perennial presidential candidate and conspiracy mongerer, Lyndon Larouche. Upon scrutiny, the lyrics of their chants did suggest a certain "outsider" quality. As I recall, one went: "George W. Bush / He is a fool / Dry Drunk / Coke fiend / He must go away, away / He cannot stay." Well, it's an improvement on "The Queen of England pushes crack."

Even better: it was probably the least annoying Larouchies have ever been.

— "AEI, AEI, Oh." Posted by anamariecox January 7, 2007, Swampland: A blog about politics. TIME [9]

Boston University officials are encouraging students to contact police if trespassers on private property harass them, following an incident last week when political activists disrupted a class to push their agenda in front of more than 300 students. The incident marks the third time members from the LaRouche Youth Movement, a group supporting the anti-Bush Administration views of Lyndon LaRouche, have trespassed on BU property, said BU Police Department Sergeant Jack St. Hilaire. Last fall, BUPD issued trespassing warnings to LYM members entering classrooms at two separate incidents, St. Hilaire said.

During the most recent incident Jan. 23, LYM members entered Morse Auditorium before the class started, sang and distributed literature, students in the class said.

"We came in, and there were all these guys lined up at the front of the room," said College of Arts and Sciences sophomore Rebecca Slocum. "They started singing some impeach-President-Bush song and handed out fliers.

"Some people in the back of the classroom told them to leave," she continued. "That's the first time I've seen them in a classroom. I don't know how they got in. I think [the professor] was just as startled as we were." [..] Although LYM members, who have become a staple in front of Marsh Chapel for several semesters, have a right to express their political agenda along the public sidewalk, they illegally trespassed on BU property last week by entering the classroom in Morse, said BU spokesman Colin Riley. [..] International relations professor William Keylor, who taught the class in Morse Jan. 23, said he was unable to speak to the approximately 12 activist members, who were "acting in such a strange fashion" and "abruptly finished their performance" before class began. [..] CAS sophomore Andrew Kane said after a casual conversation with LaRouche activists last year, he was repeatedly approached on campus and received threatening phone calls, although he only gave them his name and not his phone number.

"They are just too confrontational," he said. "I don't think they have a right to harass people like that."

— "Activist group trespasses on BU property" Christa Majoras, The Daily Free Press, Boston University, January 31, 2007

• Franken’s wrestling background hit the news in early 2004, when he helped subdue a heckler at a speech by former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, then a Democratic presidential contender and now chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Franken rebutted reports by some news outlets that he body-slammed the heckler — identified as a supporter of fringe political figure Lyndon LaRouche — stating that he had grabbed the heckler’s legs with a wrestling move and that others involved in the dustup caught the man before he hit the ground.
  • "Political Trivia for Feb. 6", Bob Benenson, February 5, 2007 New York Times

2008

Before Albert Howard and Dennis Kucinich called for hand recounts of the presidential primary votes, there was Lyndon LaRouche.

Following his loss in the 1980 Democratic New Hampshire primary, LaRouche took recount requests to a new level, demanding that Secretary of State William Gardner include un-cast blank ballots and disqualified absentee ballots in the tally, according to news reports from the time. The protests of LaRouche supporters forced Gardner to attach a note to each challenged ballot citing the protest and Gardner's ruling.

All told, reports from the 1980 recount make the current tally - for all the internet attention and commentary from election-integrity skeptics - seem positively civil and low-key.

That 1980 campaign was littered with examples of legal squabbles

and questionable practices. Voters complained that LaRouche campaign workers asked them to illegally apply for absentee ballots. LaRouche - leader of the National Caucus of Labor Committees - threatened reporters and politicians, and the police received complaints about LaRouche workers making harassing phone calls and hassling residents who failed to take campaign literature, according to news reports.

The Associated Press obtained a list - with the heading "New Hampshire Target List" - found in the room of a LaRouche campaigner. The list included the names of Gardner, then-Attorney General Tom Rath and then-Gov. Hugh Gallen, among others, and stated, "these are the criminals to burn - we want calls coming into these fellow day and night." LaRouche also alleged that he was the target of an assassination plot, and that thousands of New Hampshire LaRouche votes were directed to other candidates. He traveled, according to news reports, with a troop of armed bodyguards.

When all was said and done, the recount didn't do much to change LaRouche's primary fortunes. He picked up 19 votes on the Democratic primary side, bringing his total to 2,326. He picked up 11 Republican votes, bringing his total in that primary to 19.

— Threats? Cops? Larouche? Now that was a recount! LAUREN R DORGAN, SARAH LIEBOWITZ. Concord Monitor. Concord, N.H.: Jan 20, 2008.

2009

A Los Angeles judge has granted a preliminary injunction against a political action committee associated with political activist and economist Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. that has been soliciting donations in front of grocery stores in Southern California.

LaRouche has compared President Obama's proposed health care reforms to those of Adolf Hitler. In July, The Kroger Co., which owns the Ralphs and Food 4 Less chains, filed suit against the LaRouche Political Action Committee, which is based in Leesburg, Va.

According to the complaint, store rules prohibit individuals from selling commercial literature or soliciting donations on its property and require that they remain at least 20 feet away from an entrance. Activities are prohibited between 11 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. and 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. on weekdays.

On Aug. 21, a judge granted an order for preliminary injunction against the LaRouche PAC.

[..]

According to the Kroger Co.'s injunctive complaint, during the months of June and July, several individuals associated with the LaRouche PAC set up tables fewer than 20 feet from store entrances in order to distribute brochures and solicit donations. On most occasions, store officials, believing that the representatives were breaking store rules, called the police.

The incidents occurred on June 6, June 29, June 30, July 1 and July 7 at Ralphs stores in the Southern California cities of San Pedro, Granada Hills, La Crescenta, Brea and Manhattan Beach and at a Food-4-Less store in Hawthorne. In most cases, the LaRouche PAC representatives posted signs depicting Obama with a mustache in the style of Adolf Hitler or handed out literature decrying the "Obama Nazi Healthplan."

Several customers complained about the posters, the complaint says.

In court documents, the LaRouche PAC argued that the law involving political action at shopping centers in California is unclear.

"The evidence will show that Ralphs only became concerned about the political activity when the message of the Defendant involved the current health care proposal by the President," the LaRouche PAC said in court documents opposing the injunction. "Up until then there appeared to be no problem with public access."

— LaRouche PAC Enjoined From Politicking Outside Calif. Grocery Stores. Amanda Bronstad. The National Law Journal. August 26, 2009. [10]

Trader Joe's wants Lyndon LaRouche's Political Action Committee enjoined from protesting outside its stores. The company claims LaRouche acolytes have harassed customers outside 60 of its California stores while protesting health-care reform, calling Trader Joe's patrons "Bitches" and "Hitler Lovers." [..] "At the Trader Joe's in Irvine, the LaRouche Activists wore swastikas, which brought some customers to tears," according to the complaint. Tension between activists and customers nearly led to a fistfight outside one store, and in screaming matches have forced police to be called to remove the activists, driving customers away, the complaint states. Trader Joe's says it has been bombarded with complaints from people saying they will not shop at the stores until the LaRouche people are gone.

— Trader Joe's Wants LaRouche PAC Barred By ELIZABETH BANICKI Courthouse News Service [11] September 04, 2009

So when [Henry] Gasparian, 70, saw a poster of President Obama with a Hitler mustache near the entrance to the Edmonds Farmers Market Sept. 5, he concedes his reaction was "personal and emotional."

He tried to grab the fliers being passed out by supporters of Lyndon LaRouche, a perennial presidential candidate who has likened Obama's health-care proposals to the Nazi extermination of Jews and other "undesirables."

Two young LaRouche workers told police that Gasparian repeatedly pushed them and grabbed one of their arms. Gasparian said it was they who first pushed him.

Now Gasparian is charged with two counts of fourth-degree assault in Edmonds Municipal Court for what he describes as an attempt by "an old man to say you cannot insult the president with this outrageous campaign."

The Edmonds incident has been echoed around the country over the past few months. LaRouche supporters have disrupted town hall meetings on health care, including most famously, the young woman who asked Rep. Barney Frank in August why he supported a "Nazi health care plan." The Massachusetts Democrat replied, "On what planet do you spend most of your time?"

The LaRouche Political Action Committee Web site says "Stop Obama's Nazi Health Plan" and encourages visitors to download the Obama-as-Hitler poster and take it to town hall meetings.

In Washington state, LaRouche workers have set up tables outside of post offices, at the Evergreen and Puyallup fairs and other public venues.

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Henry Gasparian said that he had seen news reports that included the images of Obama as Hitler, but wasn't prepared when he saw the poster outside the crowded Edmonds market.

The police report says that Gasparian yelled at the LaRouche activists from his car, "flipped them off" and repeatedly yelled obscenities. The activists told police that he returned on foot and assaulted them without provocation.

Gasparian left the scene after the confrontation, but said he drove past the table about two hours later. When he saw a police officer nearby, he said, he stopped and questioned him about the activist's right to use the Nazi imagery.

The LaRouche workers saw Gasparian and identified him to the officer as the man who had earlier assaulted them. That's when Gasparian was handcuffed and arrested. He said three or four patrol cars surrounded the intersection of Fifth and Main "as if they had caught Bin Laden."

Aramis Gasparian, 29, bailed his father out of jail 8 hours later. He said his father had never had more than a speeding ticket before this incident.

"It's shocking, to say the least. He's 70 years old," the son said.

Gasparian immigrated from Armenia in 1993, the same year both his parents died. A classically trained musician with degrees in English and journalism, he settled in the Seattle area and found jobs in sales until health concerns forced him to retire.

A week after his arrest, Gasparian was still emotional. He said he recalled his miserable childhood in Armenia, where, because of the war, some days he had no more to eat than a small piece of sugar or bread.

His father, drafted by the Soviets to fight the Nazis when Gasparian was just 1 year old, returned home six years later, unrecognizable, injured both physically and mentally.

Historical accounts say that a half-million Armenians fought for the Soviets against the Germans. Half were killed, including Gasparian's two uncles.

"I saw Hitler's soldiers. I saw swastikas every day. To call Obama stupid, even criminal, OK, that's politics. But Hitler? It's hurting to anyone no matter who is president," he said.

— Hitler poster provokes Edmonds incident Lynn Thompson September 17, 2009 Seattle Times, [12]