“The British Empire,” he declared, “is our enemy. It’s the enemy of all decent people on this planet. The British monarchy is an obscene satanic force. And I do not exaggerate when I say satanic. Because Zeus, who is the author of the Roman Empire, and also author of the British Empire, is otherwise known as Satan. Her policy is what? To reduce the population of the planet. Cause mass deaths. Starvation. Killing. Destroy crops. This woman is satanic!”
Michael squinted at the figure on the screen. “The enemies have changed a little,” he said. “It used to be the Queen of England, Henry Kissinger, and me.”
* * *
AMERICAN POLITICAL CULTURE of the late sixties gave life to scores of revolutionary groups. In New York, the Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers brawled with the Maoists and dumped uncollected refuse in the fountain at Lincoln Center; later they quit the city to try a hunter-gatherer lifestyle in the Rockies. In Chicago, the Yippies nominated a pig as a presidential candidate and spread the rumor that they had dropped LSD into the Chicago water supply. In California, the Symbionese Liberation Army used murder, kidnapping, and bank robbery as they struggled to live up to their slogan “Death to the fascist insect that preys on the life of the people.” Some of these groups enriched American cultural life; some soured it with madness and cruelty. Most managed only a few years of existence.
The National Caucus of Labor Committees no longer goes by its original name. It has used many others, sometimes to bamboozle the electorate into voting for its political parties, sometimes to obfuscate its fraudulent and criminal activities. Its politics, too, have undergone a series of mutations—from adherence to the ideas of Karl Marx and Rosa Luxemburg to cheerleading for Ronald Reagan and Vladimir Putin. But it lives on to this day: a political cult that continues to suck the life out of its members on the promise that they are part of an intellectual elite that will, one day, acquire the power and the influence that is rightfully theirs. Its one fixed tenet is the infallibility of its leader, and his complex but essentially meaningless political theories. The man who wooed Michael Vale in that little apartment in New York in the winter of 1971, and who we watched together, more than four decades later, on my laptop in a London café.
“He was a hustler,” said Michael. “The formula of his sick little universe was that anybody who has not yet been enveloped by the higher cause that only he represented was, by nature, subject to the usual vices. He flattered. He offered status. He co-opted me by putting me onto the Central Committee.”
Why, I asked, did Michael not resist?
“I should have stood up to him,” he conceded. “It was my duty to the people who followed me. But I was green. If I’d had another year I could have brushed up on my ideas. You could see it was going to lead to the moral dominance of one figure. That it would lead to the establishment of a series of rigid principles that could turn yes into no and no into yes. He had total dominance over everyone. He could reformulate the whole construction of the universe. What I don’t understand on a personal level is why all those people stayed around him. Wally Hamerman. Bill Jones. Cliff Gaddy. They were my group.”
To me, the answer was simple. Michael had answered it himself. They were his group. He had stripped them of their egos and, unwittingly, prepared them for servitude to another charismatic leader.
11 / BEYOND PSYCHOANALYSIS
UMBERTO ECO’S NOVEL Foucault’s Pendulum is the story of a group of literary men who invent a conspiracy theory. “The Plan” is an incomprehensibly complex plot in which a huge number of interested parties—the Masons, the Nazis, the Jesuits, the Rosicrucians, and practitioners of Brazilian voodoo—are all working to harness a mysterious force called telluric energy, through which they hope to transform the world. In November 2015, shortly before Eco’s death, I interviewed him for a BBC radio program. Afterward I asked his advice on dealing with real-life conspiracy theorists. “It’s hard to protect yourself from this kind of thinking,” he said. “To keep your skepticism. Many people who write about conspiracy theories don’t believe in them.” He chewed on his unlit cigarillo. “Well, not at the beginning.”
To write about the history of the Labor Committees is to describe a body of thought that might have been invented by Eco—and to risk your own work becoming infected by its sickness. Intensely detailed, dramatic, and expansive, its mythography encompassed everything and meant nothing. Its adherents were intelligent, knowledge-hungry, articulate people who imprisoned themselves in a paranoid view of reality that was easier to construct than to escape. The principal figures in this story—Michael Vale, Bill Jones, Cliff Gaddy, Warren Hamerman, Jim McGourty—all wandered into its labyrinth. Some took an early opportunity to turn back toward the daylight. Others became lost in it for decades. One remains inside, counting the bricks. Nobody, however, was more effectively entombed than the man who built it and sits at its center today. Lyndon LaRouche. The cult leader formerly known as Lyn Marcus.
To British readers his name may mean little. American readers will know him as the longest-running gag in U.S. fringe politics—an unlovable conspiracy theorist and eight-time presidential candidate. His most enduring contribution to the culture is probably the name-check he received in a 1996 episode of The Simpsons, in which aliens kidnap presidential candidates Bill Clinton and Bob Dole and immerse them in tanks of bubbling pink liquid. “Oh my God!” wails Homer, “Lyndon LaRouche was right!”
To his supporters, however, he is a colossus. To them, Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche Jr., born September 8, 1922, in Rochester, New Hampshire, is the world’s greatest economist. He is also the rightful successor to Gandhi, Lincoln, de Gaulle, and Martin Luther King. His writings—The Third Stage of Imperialism, “Beyond Psychoanalysis,” and Children of Satan III: The Sexual Congress for Cultural Fascism—are landmarks in the history of ideas. His thinking inspired the Reagan administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
“In only a few decades in the late twentieth century,” said Warren Hamerman, in a speech at a 1990 Labor Committees conference, “the ideas generated by Lyndon LaRouche and our association, enriched by co-thinkers in every conceivable area of human knowledge and activity—from politics and physical economy to philosophy, natural law, the arts and sciences—have swept across the globe like seeds in a strong wind, and blossomed forth afresh from individuals on every continent on Earth.”
If you’re wondering why you’ve not heard this before, never seen LaRouche’s portrait on the wall of any of our great institutions, or perhaps on the front of a postage stamp or the cover of Time magazine, it’s because these glowing opinions have never penetrated beyond the membership of his own organizations. I’m pretty sure that number doesn’t include you, because if you were a current member of the LaRouche group, you’d have no time for a book like this. You’d be standing on a street corner holding a poster of Vladimir Putin cuddling some kittens, or asking passersby to hand over their money to help prevent the Queen of England from blowing up the world.
* * *
IN THE BEGINNING, there was LaRouche. And he was a Quaker. But not the nice kind you see on the side of the cereal boxes. The Quakerism followed by his parents, Jessie Weir LaRouche and Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche Sr., was rigidly fundamentalist and strongly conspiratorial, and it provided young Lyndon with the playbook for his career in political cult building. It asserted the literal truth of the Bible. It considered Quakers who did social work in their communities to be Communists in all but name. It made trouble.
When Lyn was nineteen, his father was expelled from their local Friends Meeting House in Essex County, Massachusetts. “We believe Lyndon H. LaRouche is guilty of stirring up discord in this meeting,” pronounced the Quaker Board of Overseers, “that he is responsible for circulating material injurious to the reputation of valued Christian workers; and believe that his conduct brings the Christian religion into public disrepute.” The family’s response was to print up more pamphlets and broadsides attacking the “pro-Co
mmunist” New England Quakers, and join a chapel in South Boston, which they soon took over and renamed the Village Street Society of Friends.
Young Lyndon was bullied by his father and bullied at school. His mother insisted that he should never return the blows, no matter how strong the provocation. He obeyed, enduring beatings at home and in the classroom. To compensate, he developed a vicious tongue, which only amplified the violence.
On America’s entry into the Second World War, Lyn registered as a conscientious objector and was sent to an internment camp in West Campton, New Hampshire, where he took part in medical experiments that included being covered in lice and told not to scratch. It may have been this treatment that persuaded him to enlist in the army as a noncombatant medic. He spent the rest of the war in Burma and India, bandaging wounds, applying iodine, reading Marx, developing a hostile view of the British, and learning to play chess against four opponents at a time.
The next phase of LaRouche’s life is a story of failure and frustration. He studied physics at Northeastern University and dropped out after a year. He suffered periods of illness, which included two bouts of hepatitis and a problem with his immune system that required months of bed rest and treatment with bee venom. He traveled the country scripting radio commercials and spent his free time getting into barroom brawls. He tried to follow in the footsteps of his father, a management consultant to the footwear industry.
Success eluded him. He studied computer programming and offered companies advice on how to reduce labor costs through automation, but few wanted his services. He wrote a paper titled “Shoe Data Processing Comes of Age,” but nobody published it. He joined the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party and married Janice Neuberger, the secretary of its New York branch. They had a son, Daniel, in 1956 but the relationship did not endure.
In the early sixties, Lyn was struggling to find a job beyond the voluntary work he did for the SWP. Even there, he wasn’t much welcome. “He was a loner,” recalled the activist Clara Fraser.
He was never active, never involved in any mass movement or internal organizational work. What he did was write—and write and write and write, until we all wished he’d be stricken by digital rheumatism. They said he was an economist, but nobody seemed to know where he worked or what he did. Sometimes I would feel sorry for him and go up and say hello; he never replied except in a mumble or a curt rejoinder. Once I mustered the audacity to ask him to explain his latest document. My polite interest evoked nothing but a look of utter contempt.
One member of the Socialist Workers Party, however, was more sympathetic. Carol Larrabee, a Brooklyn-born, NYU-educated math teacher, became LaRouche’s lover and, by 1964, had allowed him to move into her apartment on Morton Street in Greenwich Village. The building had a history: her flat was directly below one that had served as a meeting place for the Soviet spy ring that included Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
Carol was the breadwinner, though Lyn, like many male revolutionaries of this period, still expected his dinner on the table every evening. In 1966 they split with the SWP and formed their own Marxist group, the West Village Committee for Independent Political Action, whose membership fitted snugly into Carol’s living room, or that of their friends, a pair of married Columbia graduate students named Nancy and Edward Spannaus.
In large groups, LaRouche had a tendency to fade into the background, but in small ones he could dominate—particularly if they were composed of people who were younger and less experienced. In 1966 he found his perfect niche: a neighbor pulled a few strings and secured him some teaching hours at the Free University of New York, a radical enterprise that ran five classrooms in a loft near Union Square.
LaRouche was a surprise hit. Those who attended remember him as a dazzling lecturer with a facility for making thrilling connections between far-flung ideas. (“Thoughts going off like bombs,” one told me.) Lyn Marcus—as he had begun to call himself—quoted Rosa Luxemburg and Émile Durkheim. He drew lines between math and cybernetics and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. He explained the falling profits of American companies with reference to the tool-making capacity of apes.
One former pupil, Nick Syvriotis, a Greek socialist exiled in New York, sounded awestruck five decades later. “He presented the most credible, most articulate and best-argued version of Marxist economics that I had ever heard,” he told me. It was a prophecy of doom, but with a happy ending for everyone in the classroom. LaRouche argued that too much capital remained locked, unspent, within the financial system. American profits were declining, therefore wage cuts and government austerity were on the way. This, he said, would create a disaffected working class in need of intellectual leaders. With the right tutoring, a small cadre like theirs would be able to provide them, ready-made.
“The other thing that appealed to me very much,” said Nick, “was that his interpretation of Marxist economics was not about redistribution. Every other Marxist organization that I knew was talking about giving the workingman his due and taking surplus value away from the capitalist and giving it to the proletarian. But he talked about missile production, high productivities, technological expansion. I was hooked. It was a love at first sight.” Instead of telling his students to pity the exploited workers, Lyn Marcus asked them to imagine being the planners and thinkers of a high-tech future. He asked them to imagine them taking Marxism to Mars.
* * *
THE STORY OF Lyndon LaRouche’s transformation from night-school lecturer to the leader of an international network of political radicals can be told in two ways. The first requires an understanding of how the West Village Committee for Independent Political Action used a joint protest against a proposed hike in New York bus and subway fares to build an alliance with the Columbia University chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, and then, during the tumultuous campus strikes of the spring of 1968, cooperated with and connived against the various SDS splinters to emerge in March 1969 as a new and more populous organization called the National Caucus of Labor Committees.
A less headachy way to think of it would be as a kind of fishing expedition, in which LaRouche, Carol Larrabee, and a small band of friends launched a successful campaign to poach members from the SDS, which was a deeply unstable organization teeming with clever young people looking for leadership and exciting new political ideas. When Columbia students occupied the campus in April 1968, LaRouche walked among them, giving impromptu lectures on Rosa Luxemburg and her theory of the mass strike. After the police had roared in with tear gas and billy clubs and cleared the demonstrators from the site, LaRouche gave more classes to those freshly discharged from police custody.
At a conference in Philadelphia in March 1969, the National Caucus of Labor Committees announced its existence, a group of men and women who would be the brains of the imminent workers’ state. “The revolutionary intelligentsia,” argued LaRouche, “is thus the embryonic representation of a new human species, a Promethean species which seeks to reproduce its own kind from the ranks of the working class. This includes, in part, the development of individuals as such, but more general and essential is the work of calling the new species of humanity into being.”
How do you create a new human species? The answer is, of course, you can’t and you don’t. But it is perfectly possible to lose yourself in the mad task of trying. And in this, Lyndon LaRouche was entirely successful.
* * *
MICHAEL VALE HAD stepped out of the Next Step and into the National Caucus of Labor Committees out of pure political pragmatism. He began backing away from Lyndon LaRouche as soon as he joined. “I didn’t trust him,” he reflected, “and he didn’t trust me.” He sensed that the NCLC chair regarded him as a threat, “so I just shut up.” It was, he admitted, an abdication of responsibility toward the men who had followed him: “When people, wrongly or rightly, are looking for your guidance, that’s your burden. And I opted out. On the bogus argument that it was their decision. It wasn’t their decision. It was my decision. It was a
terrible thing to do.”
Jim McGourty had no such doubts. For him, joining with LaRouche was a logical move—a kind of radical national service. “You’ve got to come back and take responsibility for the future of your country,” he told me. “And what better way to go than with an organization that represented change and betterment for the United States? The Labor Committees weren’t crazies like the Weathermen. We had policy. We were against drugs. We were for nuclear power. Laser technology. You wouldn’t hear that from the Maoists, would you?”
It was my third trip to see him at his home in Loudoun County. The 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign was entering its final few months, and Jim, a Republican voter baffled and horrified by the rise of Donald Trump, was keen to discuss a more comprehensible period of American political extremity. He had something for me to read. A thick file of correspondence from the early 1970s, which, he said, would explain what was in his mind after his return from Sweden.
Most of the letters were addressed to his brother, an engineer who helped design communications systems for NASA. The subject matter was wide ranging, the tone urgent. Jim wrote about cybernetics and urbanization and political populism. He wrote about the NCLC’s desire to recruit scientists for a campaign to hasten the development of nuclear fusion technology. But the address in the top right-hand corner of each page revealed the place to which all this had led him: Building 10140, Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. These little sheets of paper also told the story of the exposure of Jim’s false identity, his arrest, court-martial, and imprisonment. Campaigning for a crash research program in fusion technology had not put him behind bars. He was propelled there by LaRouche’s big strategy idea for 1973: Operation Mop-Up—the NCLC’s scheme to achieve political dominance by neutralizing the competition on the American left. Using martial arts.
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