Playing Hide And Seek With Lyndon LaRouche

The conversion was swift and sudden. Strolling through D/FW Airport last December, Carl Huddleston, a University Park resident and customer administrator with Xerox Corporation, came upon the teachings of Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. You’ve seen the LaRouchies in airports, with their signs depicting Henry Kissinger in a Nazi uniform. Huddieston saw them too, and it changed his life. Soon Huddleston was reading “tons of [LaRouche] stuff and attending meetings on Friday evenings at the GreenLeaf Hotel in Dallas, where local LaRouche followers were given, he says, “updates from all over the world.” After several such meetings, he was asked if he’d like to run for chairman of his precinct.

“I didn’t have the time to play the rich man’s game,” Huddleston says. “I have a wife and four kids and I have to work two jobs to support them. I said I wouldn’t even have time to campaign. [They] said that didn’t matter, that the chances were good I would run unopposed any way.”

Huddleston agreed (though he did draw an opponent), and became one of the thirty-one LaRouche followers to run for Dallas County Democratic precinct chairmanships. He became a textbook example of what local Democrats say is the classic LaRouche campaign strategy: quietly running candidates-preferably unopposed- in grassroots races, while allowing voters to think they are standard-brand Democrats. Like most of his fellow LaRouchies, Huddleston lost on May 3, partly because of his extremist beliefs. Like his guru LaRouche, he believes that many top U.S. government officials are “working hand-in-hand with Moscow” and that AIDS is a form of Soviet biological warfare somehow transmitted by mosquitoes from Florida.

But there were other reasons for the rout of the LaRouchies: local Democratic leaders became alarmed a few months ago after two LaRouche candidates were victorious in statewide primary balloting in Illinois. That’s why local Democratic Party leaders rushed to identify LaRouche candidates and to organize a write-in campaign in races where they were running unopposed.

“These people are neo-Nazi in their thinking,” says Mike McKool, former Dallas County Democratic Party chairman. “They don’t want to campaign, they want to get quietly elected. We’re taking them seriously, however, because we don’t want them to get a toehold here. But they’re no more members of the Democratic Party than Adolph Hitler was.”

But Huddleston stands firm. “I guess you could call me a redneck or a paranoid, but the U.S. today is not in a position to bargain for anything but our lives. We’re in a battle for survival. We have been since World War II.”