Aaron Russo

Aaron Russo belongs to that generation of children of the great New York Jewish immigration who, in the aftermath of the Second World War, transformed the American cultural landscape. The New York native was born in Brooklyn in 1943 and raised in Long Island. His trajectory, singular among all others, led him from the rock concert halls of the 1960s to the Hollywood sets, and then to the political platforms of a most radical libertarian activism. A protean figure — entertainment entrepreneur, award-winning producer, candidate for public office, and finally pamphleteer of suspicion —, Russo embodies a certain American disquiet, oscillating between the dream of the self-made man and the virulent denunciation of established powers.

For the historian attentive to Jewish diasporas, his path illustrates a recurring type: that of the son of immigrants who climbed every rung of material success only to install himself, in his mature years, as a self-proclaimed guardian of liberties. This Great Book undertakes to retrace this existence from the available sources — press obituaries, encyclopedic entries, and testimonies — while scrupulously distinguishing what the archive establishes from what legend has embroidered.

Aaron Russo's origins are rooted in the working-class New York of the war years. Born in Brooklyn in 1943, he grew up on Long Island, in a commercial milieu where entrepreneurial spirit served as pedagogy. Although he never advanced beyond secondary education, Aaron Russo became a millionaire in show business. This lack of university studies, far from being a hindrance, became one of the identity traits he later claimed with an almost polemical pride, in the pure tradition of the American self-made man.

His entry into the world of entertainment came early. He began organizing rock'n'roll concerts in a local theater while still in high school, according to a biography he wrote and published on his website. This detail warrants the historian's caution: it comes from an autobiographical account, whose contours are naturally tinged by self-promotion. Nevertheless, the precocity of his business sense is confirmed by the rest of his career. He worked in the family business before managing the Chicago nightclub, the Kinetic Playground, from 1968 to 1973, with a long interruption due to a fire.

Russo first built his reputation in Chicago. At the helm of the Kinetic Playground, he took part in the musical ferment of the late 1960s. There he booked The Doors, The Who, The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and other popular bands of the era. When he opened his own club in Chicago, Russo claimed to have promoted some of the most famous rock bands of the 1960s, including Janis Joplin and The Grateful Dead.

To these established achievements one must add a claim that the archive records without resolving. Russo stated that he was the first to book Led Zeppelin in a venue in the United States, the "Electric Theater" in Chicago in 1968, later renamed the "Kinetic Playground." This assertion, passed down by the man himself, belongs more to memory than to verified documentation, yet it fits within the coherent chronology of his activity. The fire that brought the club's operation to a halt marked the end of this first period, and Russo henceforth turned his energy toward artist management.

Russo's career turning point was his encounter with Bette Midler. Over the course of his career in the entertainment industry, Russo was Bette Midler's manager from 1972 to 1979, as well as the manager of the Manhattan Transfer, and the producer of the films The Rose and Trading Places. In the 1970s, Russo managed Midler's career, producing the "Clams on the Half-Shell Revue" with the singer; during this period, he also directed the Manhattan Transfer.

His breakthrough came with cinema. In 1979, he produced The Rose, which gave Midler her first leading role. The film, in which the singer played a self-destructive rock star, sealed Russo's transition into feature film producer. Russo thus turned to producing feature films, including The Rose, which starred Midler in 1979, followed by Trading Places in 1983, with Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd.

These successes were crowned with professional accolades. He received an Emmy for a television special devoted to Bette Midler, as well as a gold record for producing the soundtrack of The Rose. His catalog as a director and producer expanded over the course of the decade: he also produced Wise Guys and directed Rude Awakening in 1989. Russo thus established himself as a recognized figure in Hollywood, having reached the summit of an industry he had entered without a degree or initial capital.

In the early 1990s, the showman transformed into an activist. Russo became involved in political issues in the early 1990s when he produced and starred in a documentary titled Mad As Hell, in which he criticized the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the federal government's "war on drugs," the proposed national identity card, and government regulation of alternative medicine. This filmed manifesto foreshadowed the themes that would structure the whole of his second public life: distrust of the federal state, the defense of individual liberties, and the rejection of all centralization.

His commitment carried him to the polls. In 1998, Russo took his political interests to a higher level by running for governor of the state of Nevada as a Republican. He finished second in the party primary with 26% of the vote against three opponents, then backed the Democratic candidate, Las Vegas Mayor Jan Laverty Jones, against his primary rival Kenny Guinn, who won the general election; Russo subsequently parted ways with the Republican Party.

The platform he defended then sums up his doctrine. During the campaign, he presented himself as a defender of states' rights who would prevent the Internal Revenue Service from harassing the residents of Nevada, would block the transit of nuclear waste at the state's borders, and would prevent the taxation of tips. Illness came to thwart the continuation of his electoral path. Proclaiming himself a defender of liberty and individualism, Russo announced a second candidacy for governor of Nevada in 2002, but he withdrew from the race when he was diagnosed with cancer.

Restored for a time, Russo set his sights on the highest office. In January 2004, he declared his candidacy for the Libertarian Party's nomination for the presidency of the United States and was regarded as a leading contender. The party's national convention produced a remarkably narrow vote. At the May 2004 Libertarian National Convention, Russo received 258 votes against 256 for Michael Badnarik.

Despite this remarkably close result, the outcome went against him. In January 2004, Russo had declared his candidacy for the Libertarian Party's presidential nomination, but he was unsuccessful. This defeat by a handful of votes marked the end of his direct electoral ambitions; from then on, he redirected his energy toward the weapon most familiar to him, documentary filmmaking, in order to carry his message to the broader public without the filter of party machinery.

Russo's final great project was an activist documentary that became his ideological testament. In 2006, Russo completed a documentary titled America: Freedom to Fascism, presented as an indictment of the IRS. A former rock'n'roll promoter and manager turned political activist, Aaron Russo set out to investigate the truth behind the Internal Revenue Service in order to determine whether there was any law requiring Americans to pay an income tax.

The film's ambition went beyond the tax question alone. The film focused on the growing erosion of civil liberties in the United States since 1913, the year the Federal Reserve System was founded, and examined the IRS, the income tax, the Federal Reserve, national identity cards (the REAL ID Act), RFID chips implanted in humans, Diebold electronic voting machines, and globalization. This accumulation of themes places the work on the borderline between investigative documentary and conspiracy theory — hence the register of intersection adopted for this chapter, where the author's activist claims clash with facts disputed by nearly all legal scholars and historians of the American tax system.

The author's voice hovered over the whole: acclaimed as a filmmaker, Aaron Russo conducted an investigation into the creation of the Federal Reserve and into the controversial legislation — or its absence — requiring American citizens to pay income tax. This film lastingly fixed the public image of a combative Russo, as it emerged in the posthumous tributes.

Aaron Russo's life came to a close at the end of a long struggle. The New York native died of cancer before dawn one Friday, surrounded by his family at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, according to Heidi Gregg, his companion of more than twenty years, who noted that he had been fighting the disease for nearly six years. Aaron Russo, who managed Bette Midler and later produced films such as Trading Places, died at the age of 64. The epitaph offered by his companion sums up the unity of a fragmented existence: "Aaron was a freedom fighter, a filmmaker, and a lover of life."

From Brooklyn to the Libertarian primaries, from the Kinetic Playground to the Oscars of entertainment, Russo crossed half a century of American cultural and political history. His trajectory, deeply American, attests to the mobility of a son of working-class New York who became a mogul of show business, then a professional dissident. The historian will remember two Russos who are in fact one: the accomplished craftsman of entertainment, whose successes are documented and awarded, and the pamphleteer of his final years, whose theses call for critical examination. Between the memory he constructed of himself and the archive that verifies or qualifies it, there remains the figure of a man toward whom his era was never indifferent.