Others affiliated with the institute included 1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern, writer and civil rights activist Roger Wilkins, documentary filmmaker Saul Landau, writer Barbara Ehrenreich and poet Ethelbert Miller. Raskin often contributed to the Nation and the New York Times, and Barnet, who died in 2004, frequently wrote for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. Nonetheless, it was a heady environment abuzz with many of the leading liberal thinkers, writers and political figures of the day. Senior fellows sometimes took turns running the switchboard. It survived on grants from private foundations and individuals.įor years, the institute was housed in a shabby building near Dupont Circle, in which paint was peeling and the elevator didn’t work. As a matter of principle, it accepted no money from corporations or the government. (The other defendants were acquitted on appeal.)ĭespite its intellectual heft, the Institute for Policy Studies was often run on a shoestring. “I suppose I could demand a retrial,” he said afterward. Raskin was the only one found not guilty. His four co-defendants – pediatrician Benjamin Spock, Yale University chaplain William Sloane Coffin, writer Mitchell Goodman and graduate student Michael Ferber – were sentenced two years in prison by a judge who likened their actions to treason. In 1968, he went on trial as part of the Boston Five for conspiracy to help young men avoid the military draft during the Vietnam War. Raskin was the co-editor of “The Viet-Nam Reader” (1965), an influential historical anthology about Vietnam that helped inspire “teach-ins” about the war at colleges throughout the country. “What we’re playing for,” Raskin told The Washington Post in 1986, “is the spirit of the time.” He and his fellow founder of the Institute for Policy Studies, Richard Barnet, were on President Richard M. He went on to become the author or co-author of more than 20 books on foreign policy, civil rights, political philosophy and the “national security state,” a term he originated in the early 1970s to describe a military, intelligence and security network that exists with little legal supervision.įrom civil rights marches to antiwar protests to the Pentagon Papers, Raskin was a persistent and ubiquitous intellectual provocateur of the left. Kennedy’s administration while still in his 20s. Raskin, a child prodigy on piano and a University of Chicago Law School graduate, joined President John F. The cause was a heart-related ailment, said his son Jamie Raskin, a Democratic member of the U.S.
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