The mysterious death of Lyndon LaRouche’s printer

For forty years, the Lyndon LaRouche movement has been a ubiquitous, if diminishing, presence in the political landscape of America, and of Washington. LaRouche has made eight runs for the presidency, including one campaign from prison. […]

One of the LaRouche movement’s longest-serving loyalists was Ken Kronberg. A handsome classics scholar and drama teacher, Kronberg owned and managed PMR Printing, the outfit that has generated the idiosyncratic propaganda that sustains LaRouche’s entire enterprise. Last year, the LaRouche organization spent more than $2.5 million—at least 60 percent of its publicly reported expenditures—on printing and distributing pamphlets. […]

On April 11, 2007, Kronberg sat in PMR’s offices in Sterling, Virginia, forty-five miles northwest of Washington, to read the “morning briefing,” a daily compendium of political statements that reflect the outcome of the executive committee meetings held at LaRouche’s house in the nearby town of Round Hill. This particular briefing struck unnervingly close to home. Written by a close associate of LaRouche’s and addressed to the movement’s younger followers, the brief bitterly attacked what it called the “baby boomers” in the organization—members like Kronberg who had joined LaRouche in the late 1960s and early ’70s. The brief named “the print shop”—Kronberg’s operation—as a special target. “The Boomers will be scared into becoming human, because you’re in the real world, and they’re not,” the brief read. “Unless,” the writer added, the boomers “want to commit suicide.”

This note may have had an effect. At 10:17 a.m., Kronberg sent an e-mail to his accountant instructing him to transfer $235,000 held in an escrow account to the IRS. He got in his blue-green Toyota Corolla and drove east. He mailed some family bills at the post office, then turned around onto the Waxpool Road overpass. Just before 10:30 a.m., Kronberg parked his car on the side of the overpass, turned on his emergency lights, and flung himself over the railing to his death. (Although LaRouche’s home is only fifteen miles from the St. James Episcopal Church in Leesburg, Virginia, where Kronberg’s funeral was held, LaRouche didn’t show up for the service.) […]

From the very beginning, the LaRouche movement has been a thoroughly paper-based cult. Its strange propaganda, disposable to most people who encounter it, has been central to both the movement’s proselytizing activities and its finances. Although most of PMR’s problems stemmed from LaRouche’s own impecuniousness and his insatiable demand for printed materials, Kronberg’s financial and legal troubles infuriated LaRouche. LaRouche was furious because he was frightened. Ink is the lifeblood of the LaRouche organization, and in PMR’s impending demise, he could see the likely death of the organization itself.

The LaRouche movement has been called many things: Marxist, fascist, a political cult, a personality cult, a criminal enterprise, and, in the words of the Heritage Foundation, “one of the strangest political groups in American history.” More than anything else, however, what it resembles is a vast and bizarre vanity press. […]

Ken Kronberg belonged to this first wave of converts. […]

Kronberg quickly proved himself a skilled and popular editor and typesetter for the group’s twice-weekly political newspaper, New Solidarity. Two years later, he was named to the organization’s national committee—making him a rising star in a core of approximately twenty-five organizers supposedly responsible for policy and operations. In truth, LaRouche made all the decisions.

Some of those decisions tested Kronberg’s loyalty, but he passed the trials with distinction. In 1971, Kronberg had met Molly Hammett, an energetic and sharp-tongued twenty-three-year-old. In 1973, Hammett joined the movement so that she could marry Kronberg; soon afterward, she became pregnant. However, LaRouche had impressed upon his followers that the fate of humanity lay in their hands; families were a dangerous distraction. Responding to that sentiment, Kronberg persuaded her to have an abortion. (The couple later had a son, Max, in defiance of LaRouche.)

Events took an even darker turn in 1972, when LaRouche became convinced that Chris White, his ex-wife’s new boyfriend, had been brainwashed by the British to assassinate LaRouche. He undertook a two-week “deprogramming” of White, a process that started in Kronberg’s apartment on West Seventy-third Street. According to a tape recording later obtained by the New York Times, these sessions were marked by “sounds of weeping and vomiting.” At one point, according to the Times, a voice could be heard saying, “Raise the voltage.”

The so-called Chris White Affair horrified Kronberg, according to several of his friends from that era. So did a technique known as “ego-stripping” that LaRouche began to practice on senior cadres. (In one such session, a former member told me, a disgusted Kronberg threw a soda bottle across the room and stormed out.) Still, convinced that LaRouche was a genius destined for the White House, and gratified to play an integral part in his rise, Kronberg rationalized his leader’s seemingly crackpot ideas. […]

What LaRouche wanted was to become president of the United States. […]

LaRouche’s increased visibility came with a price. By vaulting himself onto the national stage, he was attempting to convert a small-time, somewhat manageable propaganda production outfit into a national political machine that required substantial infusions of money. As always, LaRouche looked toward the printing operation to underwrite his aspirations.

By this point, the group had already established a number of publications, including a newspaper, a wire service, an arts magazine, a news magazine, numerous science magazines, and a theoretical journal. (As a general rule, the less each publication contained of LaRouche’s writing, the better it sold.) The movement also traded on LaRouche’s supposed cachet in the intelligence world to peddle “special reports” that could be bought for up to $250 per copy. These were typically popular only in Third World embassies, where officials—under the impression that LaRouche was still a Marxist—were convinced that he possessed secret knowledge about international politics. By 1980, the group was clearing almost $200,000 a week from campaign contributions and donations to various LaRouche-connected nonprofits and magazine subscriptions, all of which were treated as belonging to a single account. (This marked the beginning of the group’s problems with the FEC, which penalized the organization after discovering that it had illegally reported numerous magazine subscriptions as political contributions in order to qualify for more matching funds.)

It is nearly impossible to make sense of the LaRouche movement’s convoluted finances. However, one fact is clear: although the print shop generated crucial short-term cash flow from subscriptions and report sales, this income never came close to covering the group’s payroll, rent, and advertising costs. […] By the early 1980s, the committee had outstanding accounts with most of the large printing shops in New York.

In response, LaRouche encouraged members to set up private editorial and printing companies. […]

Hoping to achieve a better result in subsequent elections, LaRouche became more grandiose in his operations, and the fund-raising methods employed by his printing shop became correspondingly more dubious. […]

Molly Kronberg was often involved with deceptions practiced by members of the organization. In 1978, she had helped to open the New Benjamin Franklin Publishing House in order to serve as the publisher of Dope Inc., a massive project that famously named the Queen of England as the head of the international drug trade. It was first serialized in Executive Intelligence Review and later published as a book. Under pressure to pay PMR for printing the books, Molly took out modest loans. They weren’t enough. She began traveling around the country and pressuring LaRouche supporters to sign promissory notes to the movement on wildly generous terms. She was eventually arrested for her role in another creative hoax, in which a Wall Street economist loaned the company more than $75,000 to republish what he thought would be the works of various nineteenth-century economists he admired. However, as Dennis King reports, “the only books that were published were by or about LaRouche.”

In 1989, Molly was put on trial in New York state court with a number of other cadres. She tried to prevent LaRouche from testifying in her defense, believing that he would not make a good impression on the jury. To LaRouche, this was a grave betrayal. Eager for any public platform he could get, he insisted on speaking on her behalf. Molly was eventually sentenced to five years of probation for defrauding lenders.

LaRouche himself was in prison by then, having been convicted in 1988 for mail and tax crimes by a Virginia federal court and sentenced to fifteen years. PMR was a direct beneficiary of these schemes, but because Kronberg had never been involved in soliciting loans and did not play an active role in the group’s finances, he managed to escape indictment. […]

For many members, the period of LaRouche’s imprisonment in the early 1990s offered a rare time of sanity. Some followers drifted away; others stayed and tried to clean up the organization’s finances. The first thing they turned to was PMR, which was in deep trouble. LaRouche owed it money for numerous printing orders, and in 1992 he ran for president from jail, burdening the company with yet more unpaid bills. In desperation, Kronberg had started to skim FICA payments, and the IRS had noticed. Anxious that the print shop not go under, the organization borrowed heavily […]

To LaRouche, however, the group’s gravest problem was that it no longer distributed his literature very effectively. In 1999, when the conditions on his parole were lifted, he devised a bold plan: a new youth movement that would fan out to major cities and college campuses around the country, pushing LaRouche publications and reestablishing him as a major player on the national scene.

The remaining senior members enthusiastically supported the initiative. This was a big mistake. Experts who study political cults have observed that such groups thrive on an imagined enemy in opposition to which the group constructs it own collective identity. LaRouche had always encouraged members to believe they were the victims of mass conspiracies (usually perpetrated, according to LaRouche, by John Train, a New York investment advisor and cofounder of the Paris Review). While LaRouche maintained his belief in these plots, he concocted a sinister new nemesis: the baby boomer.

This perceived enemy was a very useful device to LaRouche as he formed his new group, the LaRouche Youth Movement. This group attracted very different people from those who had joined the movement with Kronberg. The later recruits were mostly college dropouts, many of them mentally unstable, whom LaRouche pressured to leave school and live in organization group homes. In order to seal their allegiance, LaRouche latched on to the boomers as a perfect indoctrination device, a way to channel the rage new acolytes felt toward their parents at a nearby, internal enemy: the founding generation of his own followers.

Things quickly took a nasty turn. Death, LaRouche warned repeatedly, was the best choice for the boomers, whom he called a “mass of maddened lemmings” and a “leaf of poison ivy.” In a speech in Los Angeles, he directed the Youth Movement to take a hard line with the organization’s older members. “They will stubbornly, angrily, furiously, cling to their mores. And you simply have to push, as I do. Ride roughshod,” he said. “Because, they’ll do everything they can to sabotage you, by using peer group pressures among themselves. They’ll conspire—they actually will form little conspiracies, and they’ll go behind your back.”

As his finances became more precarious, LaRouche grew obsessed with the adversary he had created. He became convinced that the older members who ran his printing operation were engaged in a conspiracy to destroy him. […]

What was really killing LaRouche’s enterprise (in addition, of course, to its peculiar philosophies and inability to keep a simple balance sheet) was that its leader was clinging to a dying medium. Enamored by print, he had failed to exploit the Internet. The Web could have solved many of his problems. Compared to printed material, online propaganda is virtually free to produce, and the Internet offers limitless space for disquisitions on esoteric subjects. (If anyone was made for blogging, it was surely Lyndon LaRouche.)

But LaRouche’s politics had always focused on physical infrastructure—in recent years, for instance, he had championed massive maglev construction and giant waterworks projects. […]

When the group’s older leaders eventually ventured online, they often stumbled. They were slow to grasp that although the Internet allowed the free dissemination of ideas, it also made criticism equally accessible. Around 2003, the organization set up a discussion board and then a Yahoo group, but both were discovered by a former member who delighted in asking inconvenient questions about Jeremiah Duggan, a young Briton who died in 2003 under mysterious circumstances at a LaRouche conference in Germany. Organization members shut the boards down and tried a more proactive approach, popping up on anti-LaRouche sites to defend the organization. That tactic only inspired more criticism, and confirmed to posters that the LaRouche organization was worried about what they were saying. Eventually, Youth Movement members were ordered to stay off social networking sites like MySpace, which LaRouche deemed an “Orwellian brain-washing operation.”

Instead, the organization persisted in its print habit. This dependence weighed heavily on Ken Kronberg, because PMR was once again in trouble. […]

Two weeks before Kronberg’s death, LPAC informed him that they were cutting him off. Seeing little point in paying bills to a company poised on the brink of insolvency, LPAC also demanded the return of a recent $100,000 advance, which PMR had already spent. Kronberg worried that the organization would try to raid the escrow account, which then held $235,000 earmarked for the IRS.

As long as Ken controlled the printing operation, he believed that he played too important a role in the movement for LaRouche to risk launching personal attacks against his family. As it became clear that PMR was about to fold, Ken realized that he was no longer protected. Four days before he died, he told Molly that he was going to have to shut down the companies. “I will be vilified. You and I will be vilified like nothing you’ve seen yet. It will be ugly; it will be brutal,” he told her. “This is going to be the worst week of my life.” The morning briefing confirmed that Ken and his family were now vulnerable to the relentless psychological abuse LaRouche directed at members who had displeased him. When Ken committed suicide, he didn’t leave a note, but Molly and other members are convinced that his death was an attempt to draw attention to the organization’s troubled finances, and as such was the bravest political act of his life.

Ken Kronberg’s death threw the LaRouche movement into chaos. Molly was still on the national committee, and at first senior members reached out to her. But her colleagues soon started to suspect that she was leaking internal information on the Internet, and one morning she woke up to find that her organization e-mail accounts had been blocked. LaRouche drafted an attack on her, saying that donations of $1,025 she had made to Republican causes in 2004 and 2005 foreshadowed her treachery to the movement. Defying LaRouche, other members delayed publication of his screed for a day. LaRouche was forced to acknowledge that internal unhappiness was widespread: “It is not [the members’] fault,” he said, “if some things for which they have worked so hard, and sacrificed so much, did not produce the results they had the right to achieve.”

For LaRouche, this admission was startlingly candid. In the almost forty years since its inception, despite spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a week in operations and annually printing millions of books and magazines, the LaRouche operation has had no significant effect on American politics. It is remarkable in its impotence.

Despite the unrelenting loyalty of his followers, LaRouche has never come remotely close to being elected president. In fact, no LaRouche cadre has been elected to office at any level higher than school board. Nor have his economic theories attained any kind of recognition. The LaRouche-Riemann Method, an economic model that LaRouche calls “the most accurate method of economic forecasting in existence,” has gone unnoticed by the social science indexes. Many former members admit to not understanding it.

In one perverse way, of course, the movement did work. For thirty years, Ken Kronberg printed, and all the other members edited and distributed, everything that LaRouche wrote, whether anybody understood it or not. If, in the late hours of the night, LaRouche determined that 50,000 copies of his latest essay on the Treaty of Westphalia needed to be distributed around the country, his followers did their best to oblige. That model, however, couldn’t be sustained forever.

Two weeks after Ken died, PMR finally ran out of ink and paper. The IRS took action to collect LaRouche’s 2004 campaign debts to the company. Fund-raisers were ordered not to sell any more subscriptions to LaRouche publications, while current subscribers have been directed to unappealing electronic versions. With no ability to get credit and with its publications shuttered, the group now copies one-pagers at Kinko’s. Most humiliating of all, it has been forced to operate on the Internet. On its Web site, LPAC now urges readers to print out and distribute its fliers themselves.

Meanwhile, membership at the Washington, D.C., branch of the LaRouche Youth Movement is said to be disintegrating, and its pamphleteers are seen far less frequently than in previous months. The 2008 election will be the first in thirty-two years in which LaRouche has not sought the presidency. Recently, a senior member published an article that dared to speculate on a topic that once would have been unthinkable: a post-LaRouche world. “What was so upsetting,” said one longtime member and friend of Kronberg’s who is no longer with the group, “was to realize how pointless it all was. How we had no effect at all.”

This is a summary extract from the full article as it appeared on Washinton Monthly, November 2007
Full Article [Cached]