A Mission Statement... May 21-Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., had arrived in India with a group of U.S. forces, when word arrived in April 1945, that President Franklin Roosevelt had died. A group of soldiers asked to have an evening meeting with LaRouche. He simply told them: the President is dead, and we have to, ourselves, all the more, assemble ourselves, and devote ourselves to the mission of President Roosevelt. That was the beginning of Lyndon LaRouche's mission, now almost exactly seventy years old, which still today is not over, -although it has now come to a critical fork in the road over the past roughly two weeks. "We were coming towards the end of the actual conflict in Europe, and then beyond," LaRouche remembered today. "And so, what I was left with, was the Southeast Asia area. I got more or less tied to that region, plus Russia. And what I otherwise had gotten into." LaRouche wrote to General Dwight Eisenhower in 1948, asking him to run for President, which would have denied the wretched Harry Truman a second term, and replaced him with someone who aspired to what Franklin Roosevelt had represented. At that time, Eisenhower was being brought in as the new president of Columbia University in New York. "Eisenhower was the one person I had access to," LaRouche said today. "He was then going into his position at Columbia; that was my access to him." We now know that all four of Franklin Roosevelt's surviving sons, were themselves also writing just such letters to Eisenhower at the same time. Nevertheless, he waited out Truman's term before running, and winning, in 1952. What some regard as LaRouche's excursion into the socialist movement during the 1950s and early 1960s, was actually much more specific. He supported and then joined the Socialist Workers Party, an American Trotskyist party, because it was fighting McCarthyism (better called Trumanism), as LaRouche was also doing on his own. No other such national organization was doing this, including the Communist Party.