Sudden Exposure

- His rimless glasses, thinning hair and off-the-rack gray suit make him look more like a middle-management bureaucrat than the leader of a paranoid political cult. But when Lyndon LaRouche opens his mouth, the conspiracy theories come tumbling out. In a rare public appearance last week at the National Press Club, LaRouche leveled a litany of accusations at the likes of White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan (for "drug-money laundering" while head of Merrill Lynch), former Ford Foundation President McGeorge Bundy (for financing the Weatherman radicals in the late 1960s), and even one Agnes Harrison, 60, a former president of the Leesburg, Va., garden club (for belonging to a "highly organized nest" of Communist fellow travelers).

Ignored by all but a tiny percentage of voters through three almost invisible tries for the White House, LaRouche has been reveling in his newfound notoriety since two of his followers won the Democratic nominations for Lieutenant Governor and secretary of state in the Illinois primary. LaRouche, 63, a Communist before shifting to right-wing populism in the early 1970s, thundered that the "forgotten majority" had selected him to "stick it to Washington." Now that he was in the public eye, he gloated to reporters, "you can't put the genie back in the bottle."

LaRouche evaded straight answers with accusations and complicated conspiracy theories. When an NBC reporter asked him to explain the finances that support his organization and his heavily guarded 170-acre estate near Leesburg, LaRouche shot back, "I can't talk to a drug pusher like you." What about his reputation for anti-Semitism? That, he explained, resulted from his linking of Jewish Gangster Meyer Lansky to Banker David Rockefeller, which in turn led to the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, to fugitive Financier Robert Vesco and to a cocaine connection that involved, among others, assorted Bulgarians and a former President of Colombia who was a close friend of former President Jimmy Carter's. Clear?

Not all the publicity is to LaRouche's benefit. Since the LaRouchites' win in Illinois, the Democratic Party is screening local candidates to weed out LaRouche followers. Moreover, continued exposure may sink his cult in a sea of ridicule. Said Wesley McCune, director of Washington-based Group Research Inc., which studies right-wing organizations: "Now everybody can see just how crazy he is."