The Unauthorized Biography of Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

September 8, 1922: Lyndon is born to a contentious Quaker family in a provincial New England town. Jessie, a controlling mother who manipulated her abusive husband into a perpetual war against the local Quaker community, now is able to raise her son to be a little oppressive prince dominating over his repressed sisters.[FN 1]

A little pacifist nerd in school, Lyndy was told by his Quaker parents not to hit back when taunted. He rationalized his predicament by identifying with Hans Christian Andersen's Ugly Duckling.[FN 2]

In high school, his parents make him read Kant's Universal Peace to drill into him pacifist Quaker principles. This gives him the opportunity to acquaint himself with Kant's Transcendental Ego. He thinks it's about himself, and thereafter abandons the Ugly Duckling persona and adopts his permanent Transcendental Ego Identity.

The young nerd with thick glasses fails geometry. He is convinced it is geometry's fault that it failed to penetrate his Transcendental Ego.

He manages to be admitted to a third rate college[FN 3] and flunks freshman year. He decides it's the college's fault. The Transcendental Ego is inflated further on the evidence that college has failed to make a dent on it.

He is grateful to be drafted to the military and be yanked out of his college misery in the nick of time. He is even more grateful for his Quaker status which allows him to claim conscientious objector status and avoid combat.

Toward the end of the war, he tires of latrine duty as a CO and agrees to join the war as a noncombatant. No luck. He continues modified latrine duty emptying bedpans in military hospitals. For consolation, he begins to read Trotsky and bicker against American Imperialism that forces him to empty bedpans. (Begins lifelong scatological obsession.) But he has, for the first time, managed to get out of his New England small town provincialism as the Army assigns him to the Burma-India theater.

Mr. Transcendental Ego bumps into some local Indian Marxists[FN 4] over curry and paratha bread and imagines that he has just led The Communist Revolution of India. He learns where the expression "holy cow" comes from and fancies himself an accomplished linguist and etymologist.[FN 5]

Returns stateside after the war, tries college again with the help of the GI bill. Flunks again. He is now a failed, unemployed and unskilled Transcendental Ego. Dad gives him a temporary job in his own shoe business. Spends his spare time reading Marx and trying to figure out how his dad is exploiting him. Dad gets tired of this and arranges to outsource his boy as an industry consultant to the shoe industry.

Trapped between bedpans and shoes, he starts reading up on exotic subjects suitable to his Transcendental Ego: computers, automation and the like. He writes a consulting paper about automation in the shoe industry which gives him the opportunity to claim the title of "Management Consultant" for himself.

Armed with this title, he goes to New York, hooks up with the old Trotskyites and meets his first wife Janice, a trained psychologist from whom he picks up his first psychology vocabulary.[FN 6] Failing (or neglecting) to get consulting contracts, he is content to be financially supported by his wife. He spends his time pestering the old Trotskyites with perplexing, long-winded papers[FN 7] in which he proves again and again that he is indeed the Transcendental Ego.

First wife tires of supporting him, she kicks him out. He finds Carol, a Columbia University educated mathematician whom he manipulates into supporting him. He picks up his first, rudimentary mathematics vocabulary. He continues to pester the Trotskyites with his papers. Nobody buys his Transcendental Ego stuff and he gets more resentful.

During 1966-68, at age 44-46, he bumps into some impressionable 20-something student rebels and convinces them that he is the Transcendental Ego.

When the youngsters start expressing doubt, he flies into a flurry of manipulations and rages as a result of which Carol dumps him.

He goes into a total rage and disappears into his apartment (whose rent is still paid by Carol) for six months. He emerges proclaiming that he has discovered the fundamental principle of revolution: you have to tap the "infantile rage" that is hidden deep within and direct it or "channel it" and "cathexize it" at the "class enemy." To do that, you have to get rid of your Ego, let your Id come to the surface and put your Id under the direction of his Transcendental Ego which from now on will function as your Superego.

Some of the young impressionables buy it, others flee.

He meets Helga in Munchrath and tries his ego stripping tactics on her.[FN 8] Helga's Id comes out and chews up and spits out his Transcendental Ego in no time. A deal is struck: Helga agrees not to tell the world that she tore his Transcendental Ego to shreds and he agrees to give Helga whatever she wants. The little Ugly Duckling of the provincial small New England town has become lunch for the Valkyrie. Duck flambee.

To hide the ugly reality from his American membership, he launches a perennial reign of terror that over time eliminates the entire leadership[FN 9] of his organization: Gus, Ken, Nick, Uwe H., Carol, Chris, Dick, Allen, Mel, Warren, Christine, Fernando at the NEC [National Executive Committee] level are all purged, forced to resign or let die. Similar fate awaits NC [National Committee], and later EEC [European Executive Committee], members: Pidge, Laura, Linda, Nora, Ken, Molly, Khushro, Moe, Steve, Felice, Robyn, Jose, Dan, Rick, Kathy, Anno, Elisabeth, Michael, Gabriele, Hans, Uwe F., Hartmut, Dino, Philippe, etc.

With his Transcendental Ego mauled by Helga's Id, he no longer aspires to attract serious people to his enterprise. He proclaims that from now on, he will only try to recruit the "neurologically impaired."[FN 10]

The new strategy produces a neurologically impaired organization, the LYM. Whoever does not produce income to feed Helga's requirements is declared a "Boomer" and told to drop dead.

Still, the income is not satisfactory and Helga punishes him by refusing to cohabit and stays in Germany instead. At age 86, alone, angry, bitter, with his Transcendental Ego reduced to a sock-puppet for Helga's Id, he stays in an old farmhouse in rural Virginia posturing and gesticulating incessantly in front of a bunch of teenage neurologically impaireds who are having the time of their life. The closer death and the indignities of geriatric incontinence approach, the more bitter, shrill and desperate his screams and curses become.

Welcome to Hell, old bastard!

Duck! Here Come the Cranes of Ibykus Again!

Reply by "eaglebeak" (Factnet posting, 05-16-2008, 07:14 PM)

A masterwork, borismaglev!

One biographical detail overlooked--the moment at which first wife Janice brings into the world a son, Daniel/Danny LaRouche, and thereby finishes off the Transcendental Duckling's capacity to pose as a husband to her.

Duckling never recovers, dives into pit of faux Freudianism, re-emerges as Western world's foremost proponent of abortion, early and often. Just to be on the safe side.

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Footnotes by Dennis King

[1] In The Power of Reason: A Kind of an Autobiography (New York: The New Benjamin Franklin House Publishing Company, Inc., 1979), LaRouche expressed bitterness regarding his two younger sisters, claiming that they cared only about being popular in high school and thus were embarrassed by their parents' (and his own) weirdness. Of course he didn't phrase it that way; instead, he wrote: "For them, especially the younger, a deep hatred developed not only against the religious side of family life, but against everything which, in her view, differentiated her school friends and their families from the distinguishing common features of my parents and myself." (p. 56) (Note it's "my" parents, not "our" parents.) LaRouche's resentment of his younger sister was also on display on p. 37, where he recalls that when he was four his mother gave birth to "a second, sickly infant girl, and was for a time in poor condition herself." Almost as if he were free associating on a psychiatrist's couch, LaRouche went on to recount in the next paragraph (p. 38) his most "mischievous" childhood act, which had involved using a garden hose to "hydraulically force the mole population in our front yard out into the light of day" (or, to put it bluntly--to drown the infant intruder). I don't think we need to look any deeper for the roots of LaRouche's policy as a cult leader of strongly pressuring his women followers to have abortions.

[2] LaRouche once told a reporter that his childhood had been that of an "an egregious child, I wouldn't say an ugly duckling but a nasty duckling." (Paul L. Montgomery, "How a Radical-Left Group Moved Toward Savagery," The New York Times, Jan. 20, 1974.)

[3] Northeastern University was not Ivy League, it's true. But "third rate university" seems a bit harsh for a school that produced distinguished individuals such as LaRouche's classmates Murray Gart and Nat Hentoff.

[4] In "The Conceptual History of the Labor Committees" (The Campaigner, Oct. 1974), LaRouche (writing as Lyn Marcus) claimed to have met in Calcutta with P.C. Joshi, the secretary general of the Communist Party of India. I am skeptical that Joshi would have had the time or inclination--during a period of great crisis for India and for his own very large party--to meet with a callow 23-year-old American private. But whoever actually met with LaRouche, they were not impressed (according to LaRouche's own account) with his suggestion that the Indian Communists stage an immediate uprising against the British. LaRouche said he walked out of the Communist Party offices thoroughly disillusioned with Stalinism: "By the time [I] reached the bottom of the stairs, [I] was a sort of hardened Trotskyist."

[5] This is a reference to writings by LaRouche (mostly from the early 1980s) in which he pontificates about the ancient history of the Indian subcontinent and a purported homeland of the Aryans in the polar region. One example is "Religion, Science and Statecraft: New Directions in Indo-European Philology" (EIR Special Report, Jan. 1983). Upon perusing this 35-page report it becomes clear that LaRouche has no expertise in philology, and that the pompous subtitle was merely added to dress up one of his typical rambles through world history, science, religion and philosophy proclaiming dogmatic and unverifiable judgments on just about everything under the sun. Another example is "Olof Palme and the Neo-Nazi International" (EIR Strategic Study, June 8, 1982), which has no more to do with the late Swedish prime minister than the previously cited report had to do with philology, focussing instead on the crankish polar-homeland theories of the Indian nationalist B.G. Tilak (1856-1920), whom LaRouche describes as a "great philologist." From the footnotes and acknowledgements in both reports, it would appear that the research was done by two of LaRouche's followers and that LaRouche flipped through their findings and then went off on his own tangent. I have a feeling that both researchers, who are no longer LaRouchians today, were appalled, even then, by how he used their work.

[6] The story that LaRouche's first wife Janice was a psychologist or psychiatrist has been repeated over and over in the media since the 1970s. In fact, she was not a mental health professional and had no education as such, although, years later when the feminist movement blossomed, she did launch a career counseling and assertiveness training business to help women with work-related problems such as how to break through the glass ceiling in the corporate world. Yet the statement that LaRouche picked up "his first psychology vocabulary" from Janice probably has some truth in it. She was a member of the SWP's Weiss circle, a small, highly intellectual group that centered around Murray and Myra Tanner Weiss, who were very much oriented towards psychotherapy as an adjunct to political action (Mr. Weiss, when I interviewed him about LaRouche in 1979, was practicing as a psychotherapist). LaRouche enjoyed a loose association with the Weiss circle, and this would have stimulated his interest in psychology through both the circle's meetings and his conversations with Janice. Indeed, Mr. Weiss, in his role as editor of the International Socialist Review, the SWP's theoretical organ, would publish in 1962 a critique by "Lynn Marcus" (LaRouche) of the ideas of psychoanalyst Erich Fromm (click here).

[7] This view can be traced back to recollections of LaRouche by former SWP members and is not entirely fair. Several of his papers were in fact published in SWP journals--not a bad record considering that he was neither a leader in the party nor politically very active. I think that what the ex-SWPers were really intending to say was that LaRouche only wrote papers, and failed to participate in the day-to-day political work. As to some of LaRouche's unpublished papers being "perplexing" and "long-winded," this wasn't something very unusual within the internal Trotskyist debates of that period--as I know from my researches on LaRouche's SWP years at the Spartacist League's Prometheus Library and NYU's Tamiment Library. The worst that can be said about LaRouche on this score was that his papers (both published and unpublished) sometimes affected a pompous and know-it-all style--which of course fits right in with borismaglev's basic thesis.

[8] Munchrath is a town in the lower Rhineland of Germany. A former high-level LaRouche follower answered my query about the incident that occurred there as follows: "Lyn took the leaders of his early European organization, most of whom were members of a medical school collective (but not Helga, who never went to university), to Munchrath and brainwashed them (put them through sessions) for several days on end, with Helga [supposedly] achieving all sorts of special breakthroughs. This would have happened in 1972 or 1973 at the latest. Apparently Lyn ran the sessions from bed (he and Helga in bed together, so I'm told by someone who claims to have been a witness)." The ex-LCer also told me that this event "wasn't so much a showdown with Helga as Lyn exercising his new-found talents as mind-controller." However, after Helga became Lyn's wife in 1977 many showdowns between the two were witnessed by members of the organization and by hired bodyguards.

[9] Not the "entire" leadership. LaRouche still has the loyalty of Nancy Spannaus, Jeff Steinberg (more or less) and a few other longtime apparatchniks. And he still has an alliance of convenience (across the Atlantic) with Helga.

[10] In 1984, the physicist Dr. Robert Budwine described for me--in rather graphic language--how neurologically disabled people were placed on display at LaRouche conferences. Budwine cited this an an example of LaRouche's cultism and why he himself had decided to stop attending LaRouchian events. However, this was long before LaRouche made his statement about deliberately targeting the disabled for recruitment.