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ShareDavid E. Schob is a member of the history department at TexasA&M; University.
LYNDON LAROUCHE AND THE NEW AMERICAN FASCISM. By Dennis King. Doubleday, $19.95.
CLASSICAL European fascism of the 1930s variety found neither a deep wellspring nor a significant following in American political life, except perhaps for the short-lived German-American Bund, which campaigned on the eve of Pearl Harbor against American assistance to nations resisting German and Italian aggression.
Yet in a chilling echo from the past, America has experienced during the 1970s and 1980s the revival of a movement best summed up in the words of its own leader, Lyndon H. LaRouche:
"It is not necessary to call oneself a fascist. It is simply necessary to be one!"
Born in 1922 of parents with fanatical religious ideas, LaRouche filed first as a conscientious objector and later as a noncombatant during World War II. He joined the Socialist Workers Party in 1948, meandering from one splinter group to another.
In the 1960s he grew enamored of European fascism and began spouting anti-Semitism. By the early 1970s his National Caucus of Labor Committees had recruited 600 hard-core members in 25 cities. Severing former left-wing ties, they moved to the right. Reaching out to the Ku Klux Klan, LaRouche declared the death of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust a hoax.
Dennis King, an experienced journalist, began following LaRouche's strange, meteoric movement 10 years ago as it gained national prominence and a bizarre respectability.
The communist victory in the Vietnam War provoked mixed feelings of guilt and anger in many Americans. Seizing on a political turn to the right, LaRouche's movement embraced those who hated the American Civil Liberties Union, Jews, bankers, communists, intellectuals and the mass media.
According to King, two-thirds of the membership was drawn from Americans of 55 or older who seemed to be out of the mainstream, "the remnant of the small-town America of a generation ago."
LaRouche legitimatized his brand of politics in 1979-80 by moving into the Democratic Party, where he appealed to some disgruntled Democrats, particularly farmers and blue-collar workers in the Midwest.
King observes that the Democratic Party was a prime target for internal burrowing because many responsible conservatives had deserted to the Republican Party, leaving behind a political vacuum into which LaRouche and his followers stepped.
Within six years LaRouche's movement was claiming victories at primary election levels, most notably a political upset in Illinois during 1986. Speaking as the conscience of his party, a deeply disturbed and worried Sen. Daniel Moynihan, D-N.Y., declared: "To the disgrace of our party no effort was made to keep the fascists out of our ranks and off our ballots."
King traces this quest for power as LaRouche and his organization raised millions of dollars through questionable credit card methods, established an "internal security cadre" and created an intelligence network on national defense, claimimg to advise the CIA on policy matters - a claim that ultimately embarrassed even the conservative Reagan administration.
In a calculated hate campaign, LaRouche and his followers leveled preposterous accusations at visible figures. Queen Elizabeth of England was called the head of an international Jewish drug conspiracy; Henry Kissinger was labeled a Soviet spy.
King criticizes the news media for not exposing LaRouche earlier in the game, blame that must be shared by others who similarly dismissed him "as an eccentric whose ideas were too bizarre to worry about."
The final episode in the LaRouche movement came in late January after this book already had gone to press.
Judge Albert V. Bryan of the federal district court at Alexandria, Va., sentenced the 61-year-old LaRouche to 15 years for tax evasion and swindling $30 million dollars in political-fund contributions.
King argues that LaRouche and his movement achieved what prominence it did not by chance, but because a pathetic minority of Americans were receptive to his ideas. They believed in him, and he defrauded them.
