Lyndon LaRouche, the prolific publisher who saw rampant conspiracy in politics, spent five years in prison for tax fraud and accumulated 1.3 million votes during eight bids for the U.S. presidency, has died. He was 96.
LaRouche died Tuesday, his political action group LaRouche PAC wrote on its website, without describing a cause of death. He had lived since 1983 in Loudon County, Virginia.
In his public campaigns and treatises on history and economics, LaRouche called for a return to fixed exchange rates, expansion of nuclear power, quarantine of AIDS patients, a global restoration of railroad transport and the colonization of Mars. While announcing his seventh presidential campaign, in 1999, he warned that the world economy was built on a speculative bubble and was approaching collapse, a prediction that his supporters later pointed to as evidence of his credibility.
Other statements went further afield. During the 1984 presidential campaign, he accused Democratic candidate Walter Mondale of being "a Soviet agent of influence." In a January 2010 article, he said a "mass-murderous partnership between the British monarchy and President (Barack) Obama" sought "to reduce the world's population, rapidly, from nearly 7 billion persons to less than 2."
LaRouche and his supporters accused the mainstream media of unfair coverage. They disseminated position papers and other publications on street corners and college campuses.
LaRouche said his economic forecasts correctly predicted major turns in the U.S. economy from 1957 to 1994. An organization co-founded by LaRouche to promote fusion energy said it helped President Ronald Reagan's administration formulate the space-based anti-missile system known as the Strategic Defense Initiative.
The Anti-Defamation League called LaRouche "a longtime anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist" and "leader of a fringe political cult that defies categorization."
In 1988, a federal jury in Virginia convicted him of conspiracy to commit mail fraud in a case involving $30 million in loans that were in default. He also was convicted of mail fraud and conspiracy to defraud the Internal Revenue Service. Sentenced to 15 years in prison, he was released on parole in 1994.
LaRouche ran for U.S. president in 1976 as the candidate of the U.S. Labor Party, which he had founded three years earlier, and collected about 40,000 votes. He ran in the Democratic presidential primaries in the next seven elections, from 1980 to 2004, drawing as many as 596,422 votes in 1996. He ran his 1992 campaign from prison.
Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche Jr. was born Sept. 8, 1922, in Rochester, New Hampshire, one of three children of Quaker parents. His father worked in the footwear industry, according to a biography on LaRouche's website. The family moved to Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1932.
LaRouche attended Northeastern University in Boston before and after a stint in the Army, serving in Burma and India in World War II. News reports said he was a conscientious objector at the beginning of the war and was assigned to a work camp in New Hampshire.
Based in New York City for almost three decades, he began his publishing career in 1971 by founding a news bureau called the New Solidarity International Press Service, according to his biography. Executive Intelligence Review, his weekly news magazine, began in 1974.