Strange Twists Mark Prop. 64 Campaign

In the long history of bizarre California election fights, these last days of the campaign over Lyndon LaRouche and his Proposition 64 have earned special mention.

LaRouche claims to be in the vanguard of a worldwide revolt against government “lying” about AIDS. But with the election Tuesday, his supporters have raised almost no money in California and their phone lines have been cut off for non-payment.

In the backers’ only media event of the final week, campaign treasurer Ted Andromidas stood outside the federal courthouse in Los Angeles Wednesday and accused the White House and Soviet KGB of plotting against LaRouche.

While sparsely attended, that event only served to call attention to the LaRouche organization’s mounting legal troubles. This month alone, a judge has frozen the group’s California political funds in a suit that alleges fraud against the elderly, a Boston grand jury has indicted five LaRouche groups and 10 key followers on credit card fraud charges, the FBI has accused LaRouche of running a violence-prone extremist empire and has seized truckloads of records. The California Department of Corporations has opened an investigation of LaRouche-affiliated activities here.

LaRouche himself has not set foot in California during the campaign. But Wednesday he made an appearance of sorts--appearing by satellite from Washington on KABC-TV to defend the initiative against a prominent opponent, Dr. Mervyn Silverman, the former public health director of San Francisco.

The nearly 10 minutes was devoted to claims promoted in the main only by LaRouche--who has no formal training in science or medicine--that AIDS can be spread by insect bites or as a result of being close to infected persons.

“The insect bite mechanism . . . is thoroughly established,” LaRouche said, going further than his own advisers who argued in a California court and to reporters last month that there is only “the potential” for insect spread.

Silverman, director of an AIDS task force for the California Medical Assn., said insects and casual contact have been repudiated as AIDS dangers by all leading U.S. experts and most worldwide. Otherwise, AIDS would be widespread among the young and very old--and especially among doctors and hospital workers--instead of occurring mainly among sexually active adults.

“It’s just sheer nonsense used to panic people who are already confused about a very tragic disease,” Silverman said. “It is sex and it is drugs” that spread AIDS.

Perhaps the strangest event of the campaign occurred this week in Riverside, where someone mailed bogus letters that purport to be an endorsement of Proposition 64 by 21 prominent--and now angry--professors at the University of California, Riverside.

The three-page letter, first received by The Times and the chairman of the UCR Academic Senate, attacks gays and a local state assemblyman, Steve Clute (D-Riverside), who is locked in a reelection fight. It bears a photocopy of the university seal and the letterhead “UCR Faculty for 64,” a group that does not exist. Although it lists an incorrect zip code for the campus, the letter was described as looking authentic.

Philosophy professor Oliver A. Johnson said he was surprised to hear from a reporter that he is listed as chairman of the group. “I’m planning to vote against Proposition 64,” said Johnson, whose signature was forged onto the letter.

“I certainly feel I was slandered,” said Prof. Carl F. Cranor, chair of the university’s Department of Philosophy.

There is no evidence to link the letter to either side of the Proposition 64 campaign. Meanwhile, the sponsors of the measure have begun mailing to voters a 24-page pamphlet produced at LaRouche headquarters in Virginia with their unique version of the evidence about AIDS.

Through Wednesday, the LaRouche-affiliated campaign behind Proposition 64 had raised about $283,000, almost all of it from the National Democratic Policy Committee and another LaRouche organization, Caucus Distributors Inc.

The main opposition group, backed by the California Medical Assn. and gay organizations, has raised more than $2 million to defeat the measure, according to financial reports and campaign officials.