Marcus Raskin died on Dec. 24, 2017, of a heart ailment. Here’s the lead of the New York Times obituary:
Marcus Raskin, who channeled his discontent as a young aide in the Kennedy administration into helping to found the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank that became an abundant source of research about nuclear disarmament, the Vietnam War, economic inequality, civil rights and national security, died on Dec. 24 in Washington. He was 83.
Here is a link to the eulogy that Jamie Raskin delivered at the memorial and celebration of his father’s life at the Sixth & I Synagogue on February 12, 2018. These are the nine lessons he said his father taught him, but I recommend reading the full eulogy for more details about Marcus Raskin’s remarkable life story.
Lesson One: My father taught us that, when a situation seems hopeless, then you are the hope. When everything looks dark, you must be the light.
Lesson Two: Spoil children with love and wisdom, not with things.
Lesson Three: Whatever the background noise, follow the music in your head and the dreams in your heart.
Lesson Four: Go to school to teach as well as to learn and never let your schooling interfere with your education.
Lesson Five: Bring your full intelligence and ethics to work every day and if you can’t, you may need to find a new job.
Lesson Six: Hate war and work as citizens for peace and justice.
Lesson Seven: Act pragmatically, not in the degraded sense of doing what powerful people want you to do, but in the Deweyean sense of promoting experiments to advance the ideals of freedom and the common good.
Lesson Eight: Never give up on anyone, never hate anyone, and act with love whenever you can.
Lesson Nine: No good act in life is ever wasted.
And now for some background. Marcus Raskin came to Washington in 1958 to serve as legislative counsel to several liberal Democratic House members.
He was one of the “best and the brightest” and three years later he was tapped to serve as a deputy to McGeorge Bundy, the National Security Advisor to President John F. Kennedy.
He took the job on April 17, 1961, which just happened to be the first day of the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by anti-Castro Cuban emigres. His outspoken criticism of that fiasco led to a rift with Bundy, and his growing disagreement with the U.S. military escalation in South Vietnam led him to resign from the NSA staff.
In 1963, Raskin left the Kennedy administration and, with former State Department attorney Richard Barnet, founded the Institute for Policy Studies, so they could more freely “speak truth to power.” The IPS’ stated missions have grown to include Peace and Just Foreign Policy, Economic and Racial Justice, and Climate Justice.
Although operating on a shoestring budget, the progressive think tank was so successful in shaping liberal Democratic policies that it actually inspired conservatives to set up their own counterpart in 1973. Paul Weyrich, the Heritage Foundation’s first president, told the Washington Post that the IPS was the model for the later generation of conservative think tanks.
Raskin also played a key role in helping shape the anti-Vietnam War movement in the mid-’60s. He was the co-editor of “The Viet-Nam Reader” (1965), a historical anthology of writings about Vietnam, which inspired “teach-ins” about the war at colleges throughout the country.
In 1967, Raskin and IPS senior fellow Arthur Waskow wrote a manifesto that urged young men to resist illegitimate authority and refuse to participate in the Vietnam War.
They wrote: “Open resistance to the war and the draft is the course of action most likely to strengthen the moral resolve with which all of us can oppose the war and most likely to bring an end to the war.”
In 1968, Raskin was one of the so-called Boston Five who were indicted for conspiracy to “counsel, aid and abet” young men to avoid the military draft.
His four co-defendants, including the renowned pediatrician Benjamin Spock and Yale University chaplain William Sloane Coffin Jr., were found guilty and sentenced to two years in prison. Raskin was the only one to be found not guilty. His co-defendants’ convictions were overturned a year later on appeal.
The IPS came under illegal surveillance by the FBI. Both Raskin and Barnet were on President Richard M. Nixon’s enemies list in the early 1970.
And Raskin was at the center of the release of the Pentagon Papers. In 1971, he surreptitiously received several thousand pages that turned out to be excerpts from a secret government publication detailing the history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
The papers came from a disillusioned former government consultant, Daniel Ellsberg, and Raskin reportedly put Ellsberg in contact with New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan, whose articles based on the Pentagon Papers received a Pulitzer Prize.
In 1976, IPS fellow Orlando Letelier, a leading opponent of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, and Raskin’s assistant Ronni Karpen Moffitt, were killed in a car bombing on Embassy Row in Washington, D.C.
The assassination was carried out by Chilean secret police agents, and declassified U.S. intelligence documents later confirmed that Pinochet had directly ordered the killing of Letelier, who had held top posts in the government of socialist President Salvador Allende, who died during the 1973 coup.
Raskin, who also was a professor of public policy at George Washington University, wrote more than 20 books and served as an adviser to the House Progressive Caucus.
And one interesting footnote: Raskin was a child piano prodigy and left high school in Milwaukee as a teenager to attend the Juilliard conservatory in New York, but he realized he had too much of an anxiety complex to become a concert pianist. So instead he transferred to the University of Chicago, where he got his BA and JD degrees.
Another student in his dormitory, Philip Glass, sought him out and asked Raskin to become his piano teacher. In his eulogy, Jamie Raskin joked that some people say this “explains everything you need to know about Philip Glass’ wild and paradigm-busting music.”
And of course, Marcus Raskin’s legacy includes his son, Jamie. Somewhere up above you can imagine Marcus Raskin looking down with pride at how his son “spoke truth to power” during the Senate impeachment trial.