Another repulsive LaRouche rant

The Aborted Suicide of Washington Star Editor Murray Gart

By Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
New Solidarity, Nov. 10, 1978

[Introduction by Dennis King (2007): This article from 1977 provides us with yet another example of LaRouche's obsession with suicide. In attacking his former college classmate Murray Gart (the editor in chief of The Washington Star, which had just published an article critical of LaRouche's U.S. Labor Party), LaRouche describes a real or fancied Gart remark from 1947 as evidence of an "aborted" suicide. From the angry tone of LaRouche's article, it is clear that he was disappointed that Gart never ended up killing himself. But LaRouche found consolation in the idea that even if physical suicide does not occur, a "moral" suicide is also possible--"a masochistic pleasure which can be repeated, and perfected in exquisiteness over the years."

Visitors to lyndonlarouchewatch.org who have followed our commentary on LaRouche's art of "inducing suicide" should note the following:

1. LaRouche expresses in this article his tendency to harbor longstanding grudges against individuals who he believes have slighted him by failing to acknowledge his genius (or who have simply shown the temerity to disagree with him on some issue). In this case the grudge began thirty years prior to the writing of the article--thus having a time span longer than his grudge against the late economist Abba Lerner (which had its origins in a debate between the two in the early 1970s) but not as long as his grudge (reflected in an article from the 1980s) against the Lynn, Massachusetts teenage girls who would not date him in high school during the late 1930s. (By comparison, his grudge against Molly Kronberg and the late Ken Kronberg dates back only to the early 1990s.)

2. LaRouche makes repeated reference to a "psycho-profile" of Gart that he supposedly had constructed. This is reminiscent of the psychoprofiles that his organization would later develop of Henry Kissinger, Petra Kelly and others (click here) in hopes of creating a controlled aversive environment around them and driving them either to physical suicide or a total mental collapse. (The mental-collapse scenario could be interpreted as a variant of the "moral" form of suicide mentioned by LaRouche in the below article.)

3. LaRouche makes reference to Gart's "spoor," Gart's "peculiar smell" and Gart's "feral skills." In the following year (1978), LaRouche would come out in the open with his Nazi theory about the "British" (a conspiratorial oligarchy of Jewish merchant bankers centered in London) which he described as a hostile species outside the human race. In elaborating this theory, he would refer to the "spoor" of the alleged species and its agents, the "stink" of such agents, and also to the oligarchy's "feral" mentality (click here). In this rhetorical context, it would appear that LaRouche hated Gart not only because of a real or imagined slight from 1947 but also because Gart was supposedly an agent of the Jewish oligarchy's conspiracy against LaRouche. And note the names of the three other individuals attacked by name in LaRouche's article: Nat Hentoff (Jewish), Bernard Baruch (Jewish), Katherine Graham (Jewish on her father's side).

4. As in LaRouche's 1982 rant against Kissinger posted earlier on this site (click here), the "psycho-profile" of Gart had little to do with Gart's actual personality (regarding which LaRouche probably was as poorly informed as he was about Gart's career[FN 1]) but was rather an unconscious projection of LaRouche's own personality traits. Scroll down to the highlighted description of Gart in the third paragraph from the end: "not a bold sort of tyrant, but a sneaky sort of petty tyrant," etc. Read this passage carefully--could any psychiatrist or psychohistorian write a better capsule description of LaRouche himself?]

NEW YORK, Nov. 7 (NSIPS) — On the eve of the Washington, D.C. elections, the Time-controlled Washington Star offered its readers an hysterical libel against the U.S. Labor Party. To those who know the gentleman's psycho-profile, the distinctive features of that libel were the long-standing idiosyncrasies of the mind of chief editor Murray Gart.

The broader significance of the libel is that with Murray Gart as chief editor at the Star and Katherine Graham's Washington Post dominating the capital's press, the average citizen of that city is condemned to a controlled news environment dominated by what may be loosely termed "sickies."

The last time I spoke with Murray Gart, he showed me and my companion a pistol with which, he assured us, he was going to shoot himself. That was Spring 1947, in Boston, Massachusetts. My companion and I laughed: then or now, on serious matters, Murray Gart's opinions are not to be taken seriously.

Most of the foibles of a person's youth and young manhood are properly passed over--except for jocular, private chats with them--as of no public importance as incidents in and of themselves. The 1947 suicide-threat by Murray Gart is an exception to that rule: it aids us in securing a most efficient peek into the continuing character of the individual then and now.

A short time after the aborted suicide incident, Gart moved to Toronto, Canada, on the payroll of a wire service. From there, by various peregrinations, he moved to Time magazine, where he was for a long period chief of reporters. After the Time interests bought control of the Washington Star, Gart was placed in the position of the Star's chief editor. During recent years, I have repeatedly struck upon Gart's personal spoor, including a handful of Gart's immediate subordinates. Gart has not matured since 1947.

Back in 1947, Gart was an admirer and associate of "radical" jazz-freak Nat Hentoff. Like Hentoff, he was an early member of the "beat generation," oozing the cynical Weltschmerz peculiar to that sort of existentialist "subculture." Gart on campus was a person of strongly argued if ephemeral opinions, but utterly lacking in governing principles. He was a suitable candidate for the variety of journalist he was then soon to become.

Everyone who knew Gart personally during that period knew this Gart profile. Therefore, my companion and I did not take his suicide-threat seriously, even when he displayed the pistol he was showing around campus as the instrument he purported would be employed in the existentialist act of self-consumption.

He moved up the steps of Northeastern University's Richards Hall to his next class. Gart alone knows what happened to that pistol he brandished on that occasion. Occasionally, existentialists do, of course, commit the forms of suicide which appear in coroners's statistics; more often, they prefer to commit moral, not physical self-destruction, the former a masochistic pleasure which can be repeated, and perfected in exquisiteness over many years.

Gart "The Leftist"

Murray Gart was and is a "closet socialist," of the Fabian variety. He knows, of course, that I have knowledge of "where the monkey sleeps" on this point, and is perhaps fearful that I might advertise my knowledge of his background. He is, to be precise, the sort of "closet socialist" he and his cothinker Nat Hentoff have continued to be over the past 30 years.

Shortly before the cited incident of the suicide threat, another incident occurred which, to those who know Gart's profile, is a crucial fact for identifying his psycho-political profile.

One day, Murray Gart ran from one to another of his circles of acquaintances on campus, including this writer, announcing what he purported to be a titanic scientific discovery. During the preceding two days, according to his report, he had been reading some of the initial chapters of David Ricardo's Principles, and from this reading, he insisted to all who would listen, he had determined that Karl Marx had merely cribbed his own economics from a David Ricardo who was, in Gart's view, superior to Marx. Gart had never assimilated more than gossip concerning Marx, and had not the slightest perception of any aspect of political economy, Marxist or otherwise.

Gart was the phony the incident indicates: a Fabian-influenced sort of pseudo-intellectual "socialist," conceptually a semi-literate sophist who has faked his way through life with aid of a certain feral skill, with a certain aptitude for chameleon-like changes of protective coloration in whichever environment of opinion he is propitiating in search of personal advantage at that moment.

Gart's Fear of LaRouche

Gart's gossiping criticism of me during early 1947 tells much more of his character than mine at that time.

During late 1946 and early 1947 I was the target for recruiting efforts by various groups, including the American Veteran's Committee, the Student division of Americans for Democratic Action, and various "left-wing" and "right-wing" groupings on and off campus. In this setting, an Anglican-linked Anglophile group on campus had taken up the cause of the Baruch Plan. These persons were deploying in the manner of the amateur political-intelligence operatives, under off-campus guidance by professionals. A debate between pro- and anti-Baruch Plan forces was organized on the initiative of the Anglophile types, which the campus American Veterans Committee was to sponsor and which that AVC chapter invited me to chair and moderate. This arrangement was aborted through complaints against me by both the Anglophile right-wingers and the local Communist Party members and fellow-travelers.

Meanwhile, between the two points, my initial nomination and the withdrawal of the nomination, I had conducted some significant research, seeking out such resources as Professor Victor Weiskopf on the feasibility of fission-energy production. The facts, and conclusions given to me by Wieskopf [sic] and others intersected my studies of the requirements for the industrial development of India, and showed me the fraudulent character of the Baruch Plan as well.

In the discussion period following a tiresome, inconsequential debate between a supporter of the Baruch Plan and a Communist Party representative (who the right-wing Anglophile had recruited to the debate in place of a non-available Soviet consular representative), I proposed the alternative of a global agreement for development of fission energy, citing the India case, as a means of pooling fissionable resources for peaceful development needs. My intervention carried the opinion of the audience overwhelmingly for the debate--and was followed by an escalating wave of various harassments around campus.

The principal "line" which the circles around Gart participated in against me at that time was the profile of me as a person characteristically beating his head against the wall. Gart was merely an incidental participant, not a motivator of that particular slander-venture, but Gart liked to pontificate even then, even if this involved only borrowed opinions. Gart's recommendation for an "improvement in my character and conduct" was most revealing--of Gart.

To sum the point up, Gart insisted to me that the way to success in life was to bend with whatever prevailing winds of opinion and mood offered the best downwind-sailing.

Gart had--and has--no consistent convictions but his own personal ambitions. To aid in maintaining the flexible qualities of conscience and opinion this opportunism requires, Gart keeps his distance from all serious ideas, changing ideas as a "fashion-plate" changes styles of costumes.

The "closet socialist" character of Gart is consistent with that sort of existentialism and sophistry which combine to make up the principal phenomenal features of his psycho-profile. Gart resents anyone who embodies a consistent, purposeful direction. Gart hates the "Cartesian tyranny of reason" and those features of industrial-capitalist society, the dirigist impulses of successful industrial capital-formation. His "anti-rationalist" and anti-"big industry" Fabianism exemplify the "socialism" of the person who hates the "tyranny of reason," hates the obligation to be governed by consistent, rigorously-developed conceptions of practice. He is essentially a "libertarian," a person whose hatred of reason rebels against any threatened interference in that chameleon-like opportunism of shifting, shallow opinions which is his preferred way of life.

Yet, Gart admires--and propitiates--success. He admires the kind of success he associates with hucksterism, while hating the success he associates with industrial progress through rigorous adherence to the "rationalist" principles of technological progress. Gart is an infantile personality, who demands a world ruled by the magical powers of sheer sophistry, who admires that sort of success which offers him the services of a "surrogate mother," a witch-mother whose magical powers can be commanded to Gart's benefit through propitiation.

Gart the "libertarian" is also, like all "libertarians," a petty tyrant by "instinct." He is not a bold tyrant, but a sneaky sort of petty tyrant. His subordinates soon learn his sneaky ways, and learn to propitiate Gart, to anticipate his whims, knowing how Gart shapes the careers of those over whom he exerts his petty tyrannies.

Therefore, it is unimportant whether Gart or one of his footlicking underlings actually wrote the libel published in the Washington Star. The libel has the peculiar smell of Gart, and the complicating motive of the slander goes back to the days when Gart confided to me his intent to commit suicide.

Obviously, I could tell much more about Gart, but the point is made.

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[1] LaRouche--who would later be described by a delusional official of Reagan's National Security Council as having "one of the best private intelligence services in the world"--managed to hopelessly scramble the simplest facts about Gart's journalistic career in the following sentences:

A short time after the aborted suicide incident [which supposedly occurred in 1947--DK], Gart moved to Toronto, Canada, on the payroll of a wire service. From there, by various peregrinations, he moved to Time magazine, where he was for a long period chief of reporters.

Though [Gart's] major had been economics, he started a career in journalism as a reporter for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin in 1949. The early 1950s saw Gart working as a reporter and editor for small papers in Kansas and New Jersey, but these posts led to a job as the Toronto bureau chief for the Time-Life News Service in 1955. Gart would remain with Time-Life for the rest of his career, working in various positions in Boston, Chicago, and London during the early 1960s and reporting on events in Asia and the Middle East; in the late-1960s, he was assistant managing editor for Forbes magazine, becoming chief of the Time-Life office in New York City in 1969 and assistant managing editor of Time magazine in 1972. When Time-Life purchased the Washington Star newspaper, Gart was named its editor in 1978. [Click here for the full Contemporary Authors Online biographical sketch of this distinguished American.]