Kenneth Kronberg

Kenneth Lewis Kronberg (April 18 1948 – April 11 2007) was an American businessman and long-time member of the LaRouche movement, an organization founded by American political activist Lyndon LaRouche and regarded by critics as a political cult.

He was president of PMR Printing Co. and World Composition Services Inc., in Sterling, Virginia, printing businesses set up in 1978 to print material for the LaRouche movement. He was also co-founder and editor of Fidelio, the magazine of the Schiller Institute, a LaRouche movement think-tank founded by Helga Zepp-LaRouche.

Kronberg died after jumping from a highway overpass on April 11, 2007, in what a spokesman for the Loudoun County Sheriff's Office said was an apparent suicide.

Education and career

Kronberg was born in the Bronx, New York. He graduated in 1968 with a degree in philosophy from St. John's College, Santa Fe, New Mexico, then spent a year as a junior fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, California.

He did graduate work in economics at the New School for Social Research in New York, and was employed as an editor by the American Institute of Physics, Marcel Dekker, and John Wiley & Sons.

He directed amateur theater, specializing in Shakespeare, and taught classes in poetry and drama.

Involvement with the LaRouche movement

Kronberg became involved with the LaRouche movement in the late 60s or early 70s after reading a LaRouche newspaper at a friend's house. A friend told Avi Klein of Washington Monthly: "He was sold on the guy from the beginning."

In 1974, Kronberg became a national committee member of the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC), part of the LaRouche movement. He edited their magazines, New Solidarity and The Campaigner, and co-founded and edited Fidelio, a publication of LaRouche's Schiller Institute. In 1978, he left his job to found World Composition Services, which typeset material for LaRouche and a number of other clients.

The Washington Monthly writes that the relationship with LaRouche seemed to be a perfect fit for Kronberg with his publishing experience, because the LaRouche movement's growth was being driven by its publication of political pamphlets and newspapers, which members would hand out on campuses and on the streets.

According to a memorial posted on a LaRouche website, Kronberg also played a leading role in NCLC work to promote the ideas of Heinrich Heine and the Yiddish Renaissance. He did research and taught classes on the English scientist William Gilbert, and on the Roman Empire. His poem honoring Indira Gandhi was given to her son, Rajiv Gandhi, then the Prime Minister of India, who had it published in the April 1987 issue of Congress Varnika, the magazine of the then-ruling Congress Party.

Print shop's financial problems

Nicholas Benton, owner of the Falls Church News-Press and himself a former member of the LaRouche movement, writes that at the beginning of 2007, the LaRouche movement realized Kronberg's printing company (PMR) was on the verge of bankruptcy. He says that the financial problems stemmed from the movement's failure to pay the print shop for its services, as a consequence of which the company was in arrears with its tax payments, including employee withholding.

One ex-LaRouche supporter told Nicholas Benton: "There was never any money at PMR and members were paid only half their salaries, which were already pittances, and then Ken paid himself only once a month."

Death

At 10:17 a.m. on the morning of his death, after reportedly reading the "morning briefing" in his office, Kronberg instructed his accountant by e-mail to transfer to the IRS the $235,000 held in the escrow account. He drove to the post office where he mailed some family bills, then to the Waxpool Road overpass in Sterling.

He died after jumping from the overpass at 10:30 a.m. onto the northbound lanes of Route 28. A spokesman for the Loudoun County Sheriff's Office said the death was an apparent suicide.

Kronberg left his wife of 36 years, Molly; their son, Max Isaac Thomas Kronberg, 22; a brother, Richard Kronberg; two nephews; and three cousins.

Allegations by LaRouche critics

In November, 2007, an article appeared in the Washington Monthly, which made a variety of allegations about Kronberg and his relationship to the LaRouche organization, based on interviews of Kronberg's wife and other ex-members. These sources say Kronberg was "horrified" by the "dark side" of the LaRouche movement, and that in the early 70s, LaRouche began to engage in "ego stripping" sessions with senior members in which the member's core beliefs and relationship with his family were attacked. During one session, Kronberg was allegedly so disgusted that he threw a soda bottle across the room and walked out.

Avi Klein and Nicholas Benton have linked Kronberg's death to a daily internal document, the so-called "morning briefing," which is circulated among members of the LaRouche movement, and which Benton writes they regard as authoritative.

The briefing circulated on the morning of Kronberg's death appears to have been addressed to the movement's younger generation. It attacked the print shop, calling it among the worst of the failures of the "baby boomer" generation — referring to members who joined the movement in the 1960s and 1970s.

It continued: "the Boomers will be scared into becoming human, because you're in the real world, and they're not. Unless they want to commit suicide."

Avi Klein reports that Kronberg was also shocked by the so-called Chris White affair in 1972, when LaRouche became convinced that White, his ex-girlfriend's new partner, had been brainwashed and sent by British intelligence to assassinate him. LaRouche "deprogammed" White over a period of two weeks. The New York Times obtained a tape recording of the sessions, during which "weeping and vomiting" could be heard, as well as someone saying "Raise the voltage," though LaRouche later said this had to do with the bright lights used during the questioning, not an electric shock.

Despite his misgivings, Kronberg believed LaRouche was a genius. Klein writes that Kronberg "rationalized his leader's seemingly crackpot ideas," telling family members that LaRouche didn't really believe all the things he was saying.

Klein alleges that in March 2007, the LaRouche Political Action Committee told Kronberg that they had decided not to pay the money they owed him, and that they also asked that he return a $100,000 advance to the company, which Avi Klein writes Kronberg had already spent. Klein writes that Kronberg feared the movement would raid an escrow account that held $235,000 the company owed the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

Molly Kronberg

Kronberg's wife, Marielle ("Molly") Hammett, was for years deeply involved with the movement, being elected to the National Committee in December 1982 and remaining a National Committee member until she was expelled from the organization in August 2007, after she had begun publicly blaming LaRouche and the organization for Kronberg's suicide.

Kronberg and Hammett met in 1971. She joined the movement in 1973 so that they could marry, becoming pregnant shortly afterwards. According to Klein, Kronberg persuaded her to have an abortion, because LaRouche taught that families were a "dangerous distraction." Dennis King writes that the pregnant wives of members would be taken to abortionists by the "coat-hanger brigade," women from the national office trusted by the leadership. The Kronbergs went on to have a son, Max, 12 years later, "in defiance of LaRouche," Klein writes.

She helped to found the New Benjamin Franklin Publishing House in 1978, which published Dope Inc., a LaRouche book that named the Queen of England as the head of an international drug gang. Avi Klein writes that Molly had to take out personal loans to pay her husband's printing company for the publication costs, and when they proved insufficient, she traveled across the country trying to persuade LaRouche supporters to sign promissory notes to the movement.

As part of the LaRouche trials of the late 1980s, starting with LaRouche's own federal trial, conviction, and imprisonment, Molly Kronberg was tried with other LaRouche followers in 1989 in New York and convicted of one count of scheme to defraud. She was sentenced to five years probation; the other LaRouche followers convicted, Robert Primack and Lynne Speed, were sentenced to prison, although Lynne Speed was later able to argue successfully before the state Court of Appeals that the Judge's leniency towards Kronberg should extend to herself as well.

According to Avi Klein, Molly Kronberg strenuously opposed having LaRouche testify in the New York trial.

Molly Kronberg early on developed significant political differences with both the LaRouche organization, which supports Democratic Party candidates, and apparently with her own husband, making contributions of $1,501 to the Republican National Committee and the election campaign of George W. Bush in 2004 and 2005. According to Klein, LaRouche felt that this "foreshadowed her treachery to the movement." The evidence of Molly Kronberg's political differences can be traced back to 1990-1991, when she removed her name from the masthead of New Federalist, which she edited. Although she continued to edit New Federalist until it ceased publication for lack of funds in 2006, she never again would allow her name to appear on the masthead.

Molly Kronberg told Klein that her husband killed himself to draw public attention to the print shop's financial position and the reasons for it, and that it was "...as such ...the bravest political act of his life."

So long as Kronberg was in control of the printing operation, Klein writes, he hoped he was safe from LaRouche movement attacks on his family, because the print shop was so central to the movement's existence. When he realized it was about to collapse, he reportedly told his wife, four days before his death: "I will be vilified. You and I will be vilified like nothing you've seen yet. It will be ugly; it will be brutal. This is going to be the worst week of my life."

In an interview conducted by PRA, Molly Kronberg stated that she believes her husband's suicide was an attempt by him to escape the "terrible tension [in her opinion caused by LaRouche's alleged anti-semitism and megalomania], and his legal and financial entanglements on behalf of the organization" and expressed concern that the Schiller Institute "may be in danger of becoming a killing machine." The interview indicates that Molly was politically at odds with LaRouche and therefore presumably with her husband for many years.

LaRouche movement response

In a release dated August 14 2007, entitled "UPDATE: Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy At It Again, With a New Twist," the LaRouche organization anticipated Klein's article, suggesting that it was a product of the same right-wing circles that targeted Bill Clinton during his presidency, the "very same apparatus that waged a billion-dollar slander campaign against the President and the First Lady throughout much of the mid- and late 1990s." The release mentions Richard Mellon Scaife and John Train as alleged funders of these activities. These activities include, according to the release, the productions of Dennis King and Chip Berlet (of PRA,) who are said to have been recently "reactivated."

External links

• Memorial website by Kronberg's cousin, Stewart Newfeld
• "The Immortality We May Share," memorial to Ken Kronberg by Lyndon LaRouche
• "In Memorial: Indira Gandhi," poem by Kronberg