IPS at 20 years

The night was April 5, 1983, the place the grand National Building Museum where Abraham Lincoln held his inaugural ball over a century before, and the occasion the 20th anniversary of the Institute for Policy Studies. It seemed as if the entire liberal activist community of Washington was there. By midnight, when the dancing stopped, more than 800 legislators, city officials, trade unionists, reporters, activists, and other friends of the Institute had come to eat, drink and celebrate.

District of Columbia Mayor Marion Barry welcomed the crowd and hailed the Institute for the vital contribution it makes to the political life of Washington. City Councilwoman Hilda Mason presented the DC City Council resolution declaring April 5, 1983, Institute for Policy Studies Day in Washington and saluting IPS as a powerful intellectual force in the United States. The evening's highlight was an affectionate 'roasting' of IPS co-founders Marcus Raskin and Richard J. Barnet by novelist Rita Mae Brown, Congressmen Ron Dellums and Robert Kastenmeier, Ralph Nader, George McGovern and activist Cora Weiss.

The master of ceremonies was Paul Warnke, negotiator of the Salt II agreement with the Soviet Union and a member of the IPS Board of Trustees. After chiding the others for 'going too easy' during their roasts of Raskin and Barnet, Warnke turned serious and paid tribute to the contribution of IPS: The Institute is a demonstration of the fundamental independence of American thought ... What it has been able to do is challenge some of the established wisdom and bring a new perspective on questions of foreign and domestic policy ... And despite a lot of evidence to the contrary, Washington is still a town that runs on ideas. That is why the Institute is so important.

After the evening was over, Newsweek, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal all reported on what was in National Public Radio correpondent Frank Browning's words, the biggest shindig thrown in anyone's memory.

The conviction that political change depends upon ideas as well as organization was what first led Raskin and Barnet to leave the Kennedy Administration to found the Institute for Policy Studies in 1963. What troubled the two young scholars was not that there were no ideas around - these were after all the years of the 'best and brightest' in Washington - but that most of the ideas that shaped government decisions were extremely limited.

The way in which government was getting advice from outsiders reinforced all the pre-existing assumptions, Barnet recalls. Most of the people who were dealing with nuclear war were either consultants from Harvard or MIT who were serving the bureaucracy that had hired them. The government had become, in the words of an early IPS report, unresponsive to public needs and a servant to institutional interests because fresh political ideas and moral truths were smothered in the bureaucratic process.

It became quite clear that the bureaucracy's natural tendency was to perpetuate itself and protect the interests of those wielding economic and political power, says Raskin. Government policies were said to be based on objective information and analysis, when in fact they were often based on unstated assumptions that were dangerous or unjust, such as the notion that the US had the right and responsibility as the world's policeman to intervene in foreign countries' affairs, or that there was nothing wrong with the unequal distribution of wealth and privilege in this country. Both Dick and I became convinced that what was urgently needed was an institution 'outside' the government that could identify and critique these underlying assumptions and the policies they produced, and offer alternative directions

Using seed grants from private philanthropists, Raskin and Barnet founded the Institute for Policy Studies in the fall of 1963, housing it in a small building near Dupont Circle in northwest Washington. We had an extraordinary conceit, Raskin smiles. We're going to speak truth to power. Nine like-minded intellectuals, all men, including Paul Goodman and Leo Szilard, became the Institute's first 'Fellows' - a collegial term for individuals who were to serve as 'public scholars' and devote their energies and talents not just to educating a small body of students but to serving communities and movements of people who were engaged in social action.

Throughout the turbulent 60s, Institute Fellows challenged conventional wisdom on issue after issue. And they went further, offering different ideas on what government should and should not do and how American society could be organized. Black activists came from the non-violent civil rights movement in the Deep South, enriching the Institute with their first-hand understanding of the desperation felt in parts of American society and with their passionate impatience to achieve racial and economic justice. The war in Vietnam became a major focus of attention, and Fellows Arthur Waskow and Marcus Raskin in particular came to play important roles in the anti-war movement through their writing, speaking and organizing. Raskin, for example, edited "The Vietnam Reader" with Bernard Fall, and the book became the main text for campus teach-ins against the war.

The Institute's activities alarmed certain parts of the government, especially during the target of considerable official surveillance and harassment. The Institute gained national media prominence with the disclosure of documents showing IPS listed at the very top of the Nixon White House's 'enemies list'. Court findings later revealed that at least 62 agents from the FBI and other federal intelligence agencies infiltrated or informed on IPS between 1968 and 1972.

We had a passionate commitment to the struggles people were going through and felt that real scholarship had to be somehow involved with the events of our time, explains Raskin. It was not enough to analyze problems and propose neat theoretical solutions. The Fellows felt they themselves had to be actively engaged in creating change. They merged theory and practice by developing experimental 'social inventions' such as community food co-ops and health collectives. They helped start sister institutions, including Mother Jones and Working Papers magazines and the institute for Southern Studies. They explored new areas of research - workplace democracy, the politics of sexuality and the family, the structure of knowledge, and the power of multi-national corporations.

But community based politics, they realized, were insufficient. The creation in 1973 of the Transnational Institute (TNI), the Institute's international program, reflected a growing awareness that the fundamental problems facing humanity - war, poverty and hunger, and denial of human freedom and dignity - could only be understood and addressed within a global context. The Institute established a center in Amsterdam, its first overseas office. New Fellows were recruited from throughout Europe and the Third World to join the TNI and carry out its mandate to investigate the growing disparity between rich and poor in the world, and to seek democratic paths for its remedy.

Orlando Letelier, Foreign Minister in the Allende government of Chile which had been overthrown in a 1973 military coup, came to Washington in 1975 to direct the Transnational Institute. He had spent barely a year on the job when he was assassinated while driving to work on the morning of September 21, 1976. Agents working for the Chilean secret police exploded a bomb fastened beneath Letelier's car, killing him and his Institute colleague, Ronni Karpen Moffitt.

The Letelier-Moffitt murders marked the beginning of the darkest period in Institute history. Soon after, a dispute within the Washington-based Fellowship over questions of political direction and internal democracy proved irreconcilable and nine Fellows left to form their own Public Resource Center.

The Institute gradually did regain its sense of direction and energy. Robert Borosage was named IPS Director in 1978. Borosage, who had first come to the Institute as a student in 1969 and later served as the Director of the Center for National Security Studies on Capitol Hill, accepted the challenge of bringing administrative order and direction to what had become a sprawling & 1 million a year operation.

In the last five years, the Institute has followed a steady course of financial and programmatic expansion. The domestic public policy program has slowly been rebuilt. The Institute has initiated a publications program, a 'Washington School' featuring evening classes and public lectures, and an active Visiting Scholars program. Internally, the introduction of a planning board has encouraged a more considered and democratic planning process.

Women's issues have attained a new prominence with the creation of a 'Third World Women' project in 1981, headed by Isabel Letelier and Jill Gay, and a 'Women and the Economy' project directed by Barbara Ehrenreich in 1982. The Institute purchased another building - 'The Anchorage', located directly across Q Street from 'The Moorings' building which it has occupied since 1974. By its 20th anniversary, the Institute had grown to twenty full-time Fellows and one hundred Associates operating on a & 1.7 million annual budget.

Today, as it celebrates its 20th anniversary, the Institute for Policy Studies is acknowledged by political observers from all points on the political spectrum as the premier center of progressive scholarship in the United States. As a source of research, education and social invention, IPS has related its work to the civilizing movements of our time, drawing inspiration and scholars from the civil rights, anti-war, women's, human rights, environmental and disarmament movements. It is a community of public scholars, women and men helping their fellow citizens understand the institutions and dynamics which govern their lives.

Peace, justice and human dignity is our message, says Senior Fellow Isabel Letelier. And our analysis of why we don't have it is quite simple. It is because there are great inequalities in our systems of politics and economics.

The Institute's diverse activities are difficult to summarize. With a program that includes work on national security and foreign policy, international economics and human rights and domestic reconstruction, IPS is clearly not a single-issue public interest group. Nor is it a lobby group, so there is no legislation it can claim credit for passing or defeating.

The Institute's work concerns intellectual inquiry and public dialogue. IPS is dedicated to the production of thought and ideas, an endeavor that has never been fully understood or appreciated in this country. Ingenuity, after all, is said to be what made America great, not reflection.

Intellectuals have long offered a tempting target to critics. The practical effect of ideas, presented in books, films, magazine articles, and lectures, is often neither immediate nor easily measurable. But it is vital.

Andrew Young, former associate of Dr. Martin Luther KIng, Jr, and now Mayor of Atlanta, says, The Institute for Policy Studies has been in the forefront of the struggle for social justice in the United States for twenty years. It has been a constant source of new ideas and intellectual challenges to the status quo.

The other side has all kinds of think tanks producing the intellectual justifications for their positions and their proposals for action, argues Jorge Sol, a former Executive Director of the International Monetary Fund who now heads the Institute's 'International Economic Order' project. But very few people are doing it for our side. Right-wing ideology has become the ruling ideology. And while many popular sectors have reacted this ideology, they have done so mainly through activism. They don't have the opportunity or training to do much thinking. I consider it the role of IPS to do that thinking - to prove the invalidity of the ruling ideology and to provide popular movements with the information and analysis needed to justify their opposition and give content to their struggle.

At a fundraising dinner at Boston's Harvard Club in June, 1983, Senior Fellow Roger Wilkins explained why he, at the age of 50, decided to join the Institute, after serving as an Assistant Attorney General of the US in the Johnson administration, sharing a Pulitzer Prize at The Washington Post for his editorials on Watergate, administering grants as a vice-president at the Ford Foundation, and serving on the editorial board of The New York Times.

I cut my eye teeth as a political activist implementing the conventional ideas of my day, says Wilkins. Most of the significant things I did in government were instances of bringing New Deal principles to bear on the problems of the 1960s. But by the 80s it was clear that the ideas of fifty years ago had lost their power to excite people and to solve problems. It seemed to me there was an enormous need for new ideas and fresh ways of looking at things. A new set of questions had to be hurled at reality in order to figure out new approaches and programs. And that's what IPS does. The role of IPS is to develop the new ideas that will become the conventional programs people will be working to implement twenty years from now

The Institute's contribution to the public dialogue cannot be accurately measured within the short-term boundaries of legislative calenders and presidential terms. IPS is engaged in a longer and deeper struggle, a struggle over the underlying principles and future direction of the political culture itself. The women and men of the Institute are committed not to specific politicians or party lines, but to enduring human values. They see themselves as part of the centuries-long battle to advance the causes of decency, peace and freedom. They understand the significance of IPS Board of Trustees member Grace Paley's phrase that all is connectedness. And they know that sudden bursts of energy, although essential, are not enough, that transforming society is a long-term and gradual process requiring patience, stamina and continual rededication to a vision of a better world.

Look, says Marcus Raskin, We know you can't make a perfect world. Power is the fundamental problematic of history. But politics is not just about power. We see politics as people acting in service of their civilization. The intellectual battles between Fellows of the Institute and the American Enterprise Institute and RAND Corporation, think tanks who see their role as servicing the dominant powers in society, are really about the future of civilization and whether we'll survive or not. Today's ruling notions of domination - of man over nature, white over black - have to be transformed into more egalitarian relationships. With Ronald Reagan in power, mean-spiritedness has become the accepted standard of how people should act in the public space. We reject that as destructive and wrong. Empathy and caring, principles that are so central to perpetuating society, are what we have to develop in the public space if we are to survive. In my view, it is the task of the Institute to help develop those sensibilities as the central spirit of the coming age.

The major institutions of our society are increasingly limited in the questions they can ask, Robert Borosage remarks. At the Institute we do fundamental inquiry into the key problems of the age. We ask basic questions and we aren't afraid of reaching conclusions that at this moment in history sound radical, simply because they challenge the power of this or that established interest. Given the current reaction, it is all the more important that we continue this work. Our job is to expose the moral and political bakruptcy of the ideas and assumptions now governing America, to offer a feasible alternative vision, and to work with citizen groups and popular movements to make that vision a reality.