Lyndon LaRouche’s ties to Ronald Reagan, the Donald Trump of the 1980s
(part one, part two, part three)
In 2017, large segments of the left—especially anarchists—would have you believe that the USA has something in common with the Weimar Republic in 1930 and that it is necessary to punch neo-Nazis in order to prevent Richard Spencer from becoming a new Hitler.
In reality the largest fascist movement in the USA since the 1930s would never have organized its members to march in torchlight parades chanting “blood and soil” even though it was clearly trying to emulate the Nazis. With allies such as the Grand Wizard of the KKK in Michigan, who had been convicted of bombing school buses to protest busing, you’d think that Lydon LaRouche would have created a new party to serve as a pole of attraction. Showing much more savvy than Richard Spencer and his ilk, he instead submerged his US Labor Party into the Democratic Party just as the CPUSA has done since the New Deal.
Between 1982 and 1988, his movement ran in 4,000 Democratic Party primaries and general elections in over 30 states. At the peak of his powers when he was a presidential candidate, LaRouche used to buy an hour’s worth of time on network TV to present his rather convoluted mixture of leftish sounding attacks on the IMF and bizarre conspiracy theories about how Queen Elizabeth was a drug lord. Dennis King describes the scope of his electoral machine:
Its fund raisers brought in tens of millions of dollars while its candidates attracted over 4 million votes, including voting percentages above 10 percent in hundreds of contests. In at least 70 statewide, congressional, or state legislative races, LaRouche candidates polled over 20 percent of the vote. At least 25 appeared on the general election ballot as Democratic nominees, either by defeating a regular Democratic opponent or by running in the primary unopposed. Although none was actually elected to any public office higher than a local school board, hundreds won Democratic Party posts (mostly county committee seats) across the country.
So how would antifa have dealt with this growing menace? By punching people who were passing out his campaign literature? Given the vast network of people taking part in his cult’s election bids, it would have been impossible to make a dent. For all of the talk from the liberal left about becoming the equivalent of the Tea Party in the Democratic Party, LaRouche came much closer to that goal but with one difference. He sought to incubate an ultraright movement in a traditionally liberal party even though a lot of his rhetoric began sounding similar to Ralph Nader’s “anti-globalization” politics and even to Trump administration ideologues. For example, Paul Gallagher ran for governor of New York in 1978 urging the New York bourgeoisie to take the lead in a “national export boom.”
And also like the Trump administration, his candidates were complete racists. During the struggle for busing in Boston, one ran in a district that included South Boston, where white racists were terrorizing Black schoolchildren just like in Alabama and Mississippi a decade earlier. After denouncing busing as a Ford Foundation conspiracy, he got 10.7 percent of the vote. What would antifa have done to suppress his hate speech? Storm into one of his rallies in South Boston and begin hitting people with 2 by 4s? Politics is a lot more complicated than that, especially considering the opposition of Robert Avakian’s cult to busing back then.
LaRouche calculated that his mixture of addled populism and racism would appeal to older and white DP voters in the same way that a part of this demographic decided to vote for Reagan and then for Donald Trump. It was the same voter that George Wallace appealed to in 1968 when he ran for President on an openly racist platform. Like Trump promising the sky to former coal miners, LaRouche tried to win the votes of workers in the nuclear industry who were suspicious of the anti-nuclear direction of the DP. In a speech to construction workers at the Seabrook nuclear power site, he promised to build 2,500 nuclear plants by the year 2000.
Despite continuing to run as a Democrat, LaRouche became an enthusiastic supporter of the Reagan Revolution in 1980. In exactly the same fashion as Bannon and Alex Jones hanging on to Trump’s coat-tails, LaRouche saw Reagan as a defender of nationalist values. In many ways, the fight within the Republican Party in 1979 mirrored that between Trump and Jeb Bush in the 2016 primary. In his speaking engagements, LaRouche concentrated his fire on his father George H.W. Bush who was denounced as a “globalist”. Despite a lot of the craziness in his party press, LaRouche was very much the counterpart of Steve Bannon (granted Bannon can be pretty crazy himself.)
Repeating themes popular on the left back then (and today, for that matter), LaRouche denounced Bush as a tool of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. The steady drumbeat of LaRouche’s campaign speeches likely had an effect since reporters began bombarding Bush with questions about the Trilateral Commission.
Once Reagan was elected, LaRouche felt the same sense of exultation that could be found in alt-right circles but unlike the alt-right, he was much more successful in building ties to a president who was about to carry out a vicious attack on the working class in the USA and internationally.
Showing an ability to suppress some of the wacky stuff published in the cult’s Executive Intelligence Review (EIR), top operatives went to Washington in 1981 to sell their services. They made sure to advertise themselves as boosters of Reagan’s Trump-like policies on the military, the environment, and drugs while making sure to avoid any references to Queen Elizabeth as a drug lord.
The Reagan White House and LaRouche saw eye-to-eye particularly on the need for Star Wars and pushing for nuclear power. They had even beaten Reagan to the punch. In the late 70s they were lining up rightwing atomic scientists like Edward Teller to support the goals of the Fusion Energy Foundation that promoted a Star Wars type anti-missile defense, fusion energy, and bigger and more powerful thermonuclear devices. While Teller considered them too weird to network with, a close friend of his and highly respected scientist named Robert Budwine from the Livermore Labs was drawn into their periphery. King, a consummate researcher, wrote:
Budwine became deeply intrigued by the LaRouchians and was drawn for several months into the periphery of their cult life. Among other things, he attended the NCLC annual conference in January 1984 at LaRouche’s Virginia mansion, where the baroque harpsichord background music struck him as “an attempt to re-create an eighteenth-century salon.” He formed friendships with Uwe Parpart and other NCLC members, and spent several hours in private discussions with LaRouche on Indo-European root languages, Riemannian geometry, and other LaRouche hobbies.
As King also reported, LaRouche recruited Winston Bostick, the former chairman of the Stevens Institute of Technology physics department, and Friedwardt Winterberg, a fusion specialist with the University of Nevada’s Desert Research Institute, into the FEF. Bostick became a leading figure, speaking at its conferences, writing for its journal and serving on the editorial board of another FEF publication, the International Journal of Fusion Energy. In a 1984 telephone interview he said he supported LaRouche’s attempts to promote “German military, scientific, cultural, and economic traditions.” Meanwhile, Winterberg hailed LaRouche as having the “most scientifically founded” program of any presidential candidate and allowed the FEF to publish his Physical Principles of Thermonuclear Explosive Devices in 1981, sending him on overseas speaking tours.
By providing a platform for softball interviews, the EIR cultivated ties to the Republican Party elite. Among the politicians whose views could be seen in this fascist journal were Agriculture Secretary John Block, Defense Under Secretary Richard DeLauer, Commerce Under Secretary Lionel Olmer, Treasury Under Secretary Norman Ture, Assistant Attorney General Lowell Jensen, Murray Weidenbaum, the chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, and Senators Orrin Hatch and John Tower. No matter how much Richard Spencer has praised Donald Trump, he never could have gotten through the front door to the equivalent of such pols today. That’s the big difference between LaRouche and the alt-right. He was far more interested in influencing public policy than doing half-assed imitations of a Nuremberg rally.
The most important inroads, however, were with the National Security Council and the CIA. LaRouche followers met frequently with Richard Morris, the top aide to National Security Adviser William Clark. They also got the ear of other NSC officials such as Ray Pollock and Norman Bailey.
From the CIA, the cult developed ties to CIA deputy director Ray Cline, who was deeply involved with the rightwing death squads in Nicaragua and El Salvador, as well as former CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton, who headed up surveillance of anti-war protesters and left groups in the 60s and 70s. Once again we are indebted to King’s superlative research to see how internecine the ties were between LaRouche and the CIA:
In the early years of the Reagan administration the LaRouchians established direct channels into the intelligence community. Admiral [Bobby] Inman appreciated their “flow of materials” to help fill the gap left by [Stansfield] Turner’s cutbacks [Carter’s CIA director]. LaRouche was allowed to brief two aides to John McMahon, Inman’s successor, at CIA headquarters in 1983. According to court papers, an aide to Federal Emergency Management Agency director Louis Guiffrida frequently met with the LaRouchians and even came to NCLC headquarters for a day’s briefing. Jeffrey Steinberg visited the National Security Council eight to ten times between June 1983 and June 1984, according to his deposition in LaRouche v. NBC. Articles in EIR were peppered with quotes from unnamed “CIA Sovietologists” and “DIA analysts.”
The real question is what bearing the obsessions of the Southern Poverty Law Center and “It’s Going Down” have to do with arguably the most powerful fascist movement since the 1930s. What do you do when the fascists operate as a wing of the Democratic Party, are focused on electoral activity and generally avoid street-fighting? LaRouche had finally decided not long after he abandoned stormtrooper type activity against the left in the early 70s that his role was to bloc with the most reactionary forces in American politics. It started with his ties to the KKK and other fringe figures on the ultraright and eventually evolved into providing intelligence to the CIA and other security agencies about the left. Constituting a private investigative agency, his followers worldwide fed information to headquarters about anti-nuclear activists, peace groups, and anybody else who wanted to challenge corporate power. LaRouche also came to the conclusion that in addition to snitching on the left, it was worth his while to make a good living at it. He sold his dossiers on the left to whoever was willing to pay the hefty price. He also began running a multi-million dollar hustle that parted older and often half-senile Republican Party voters from their bank accounts. His phone bankers were very aggressive and very skilled. Eventually this caught up with him in on December 16, 1988, when he was convicted of conspiracy to commit mail fraud involving more than $30 million in defaulted loans. He spent five years in prison as part of a fifteen year sentence.
Even though the LaRouche cult is still operating today, it no longer has the influence it once had. You might even argue that it is no longer fascist but simply just one more ultraright outfit of the sort that the Koch brothers fund and toward the same end.
In my next and final post in this series, I will describe where the group stands today and the possibilities for a new American fascism that had the reach and power of this cult during its heyday.