Government service

Raskin moved to Washington, D.C. in 1958, where he became a legislative counsel to a group of liberal congressmen, including Democrats Robert Kastenmeier from Wisconsin and James Roosevelt from California, the oldest son of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Raskin soon became the secretary for the Liberal Project, a group of House liberals, organized by Kastenmeier and Roosevelt into a liberal leadership group. As the secretary, Raskin linked the House members with notable intellectuals, including sociologist David Riesman, historian H. Stuart Hughes, and former finance advisor to Franklin D. Roosevelt, James Warburg.

In 1961, Raskin became McGeorge Bundy's assistant on national security affairs and disarmament as a member of the Special Staff of the National Security Council. In 1962, he was a member of the U.S. delegation to an 18-nation disarmament conference in Geneva.

Tensions with Bundy led to Raskin’s reassignment in the Bureau of the Budget (now the Office of Management and Budget), where he continued his service on the Presidential Panel on Education. On the panel, Raskin wrote papers on the consequences of technology and the need for democratic education and scientific research.^[1]

The Institute for Policy Studies

In 1963, Raskin left government service, and with Richard Barnet, a State Department official in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, created an independent institution, outside of government, to critique official policy.

Much of Raskin’s initial work with IPS focused on opposing the Vietnam War. He co-authored the Vietnam Reader with Bernard Fall in 1965, which was used in teach-ins across the country. In 1967, he co-authored with Arthur Waskow, a colleague at the Institute, "A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority," which urged support for those who resisted the draft and the Vietnam War. The "Call to Resist" was signed by thousands of people, and because of it Raskin and Waskow took part in turning in a thousand draft cards to the Department of Justice.^[2] In 1968, Raskin was indicted -— along with William Sloane Coffin, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Michael Ferber, and Mitchell Goodman—for conspiracy to aid resistance to the draft. The group became known as the "Boston Five". In the case, Telford Taylor, prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, served as the defense attorney for Raskin. Not long after his acquittal, Raskin published the book Washington Plans an Aggressive War with Barnet and Ralph Stavins. These two books would begin Raskin’s critique of the "national security state", a term he coined, which he would continue to assess critically in future works.

With the publication of his book Being & Doing in 1971, Raskin advocated the theory of "social reconstruction."^[3] Raskin's thinking was largely influenced by the work of American pragmatist John Dewey, French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, and the politics of the New Left. According to Library Journal, Raskin “foresees a peaceful process of non-Marxist reconstruction that will replace authoritarianism and the status quo with politics of the people and a redefined social ethic.”

In 1971, Raskin received from Daniel Ellsberg, documents that became known as the Pentagon Papers.^[4][5] Raskin put Ellsberg in touch with New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan, whom Ellsberg had first met in Vietnam.^[6][5]

In 1977, after conducting a first study of budget and its spending priorities, 56 members of Congress, led by Congressional Black Caucus Dean John Conyers, requested that IPS undertake a deeper analysis of the federal budget. Raskin directed the project, which led to the publication of the 1978 book The Federal Budget and Social Reconstruction. In the 1980s, Raskin became a leader in the anti-nuclear movement as the Chair of the SANE / Freeze campaign.^[7] He also worked with labor leaders to organize the Progressive Alliance, a coalition of 16 labor unions and 100 public interest groups that laid out a progressive alternative political agenda.

Raskin served as a Distinguished Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies, in addition to teaching at George Washington University’s School of Public Policy and Public Administration and serving on the editorial board of The Nation magazine. He also advised the Congressional Progressive Caucus and conceptualized the network of local elected officials that evolved into the Institute for Policy Studies’ Cities for Peace project, which has coordinated hundreds of city council resolutions against the Iraq War.

Raskin’s most recent scholarship included serving as the editor of a series of books laying out how to achieve peace and justice for the think tank's Paths for the 21st Century. The goal of this project was to generate ideas and proposals, across disciplinary lines and founded upon Raskin's notion of "reconstructive knowledge", which catalyze citizen action and help other scholars and activists pursue a progressive basis for a new society.