Marcus Raskin, prominent liberal, dead at 83

Marcus Raskin, an author and advocate who helped shape left-leaning thought for decades as a founder of one of Washington’s most prominent liberal think tanks, the Institute for Policy Studies — and who, as a college student, gave piano lessons to composer Philip Glass — died Dec. 24 at his home in Washington, D.C. He was 83.

The cause was a heart-related ailment, said his son Jamie Raskin, a Democratic member of the U.S. House from Maryland.

Raskin, a child prodigy on piano and a University of Chicago Law School graduate, joined President John F. Kennedy’s administration while still in his 20s. 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.

From civil rights marches to antiwar protests to the Pentagon Papers, Raskin was a persistent and ubiquitous intellectual provocateur of the left. He and his fellow founder of the Institute for Policy Studies, Richard Barnet, were on President Richard M. Nixon’s enemies list in the early 1970s.

“What we’re playing for,” Raskin told The Washington Post in 1986, “is the spirit of the time.”

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. 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.

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. Raskin was the only one found not guilty.