20 Years of Decidedly Liberal Views

20 Years of Decidedly Liberal Views
Interview by Barbara Gamarekian
New York Times, 23 April 1983

WASHINGTON, April 21 - It is not your usual Washington think tank. There are no thick carpets, no three-piece suits, no color-coordinated offices.
Rather, it is the Institute for Policy Studies, a warren of offices reached by a creaky elevator, where the furniture doesn't match, the walls are plastered with posters and children's drawings, books and newspapers are piled high and the mode of dress is decidedly casual.
The Institute, an offspring of the New Left, is celebrating its 20th anniversary, and with it a growing degree of credibility. How has a research organization whose scholars have espoused such things as a Europe free of nuclear arms and minimum and maximum limits on personal wealth managed to survive two decades in Washington?

Pur grit, said Robert Borosage, the director. Decidedly pure grit, added Marcus G. Raskin, a founder and senior fellow. Some institute members say that as a result of their involvement with the antiwar and civil rights movements of the 1960s they have been subjected to surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation or audits by the Internal Revenue Service.

Wide Circulation of Ideas

Nevertheless, the institute's studies are circulated all over Washington. Its seminars are well attended. Its films are well received. It's authors are published by major book houses, magazines and newspapers.
I don't agree with everything they do by a long shot, said Representative Patricia Schroeder, a Colorado Democrat. But it's refreshing to have several points of view. The hardest thing to do in this town is to find time to think.
Richard J. Barnet and Mr. Raskin were young lawyers in the Kennedy Administration when they began to question Government policy and consider establishing a think tank.
The way in which Government was getting advice from outsiders reinforced all the assumptions, said Mr. Barnet, now a senior fellow. 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.
They set up the institute in 1963 with the help of $ 200,000 in grants. We also had an
extraordinary conceit, Mr. Raskin said with a smile. We were going to speak truth to power.

A Passionate Commitment

However, the institute was almost immediately perceived as being anti-Establishment because of its views on Vietnam and civil rights. We had a passionate commitment to the struggle that people were going through and felt that real scholarship had to be somehow involved with the events of our time, Mr. Raskin said.
The institute is a bit more buttoned down these days. But, as Mr. Barnet said, it is still in the business of offering radical solutions to fundamental questions.
With a staff of 80 and an anual budget of $ 2 million, the institute conducts studies in the areas of national security, social reconstruction and the international economic order. It co-sponsored a seminar last year in Moscow on disarmament with the Soviet Academy of Science.
The April 9 issue of The Nation, devoted solely to the new arms technology, includes several articles by institute fellows. The body of work that the institute has done in the field over the years makes possible this kind of a comprehensive examination of military technology, said the magazine's editor Victor Navasky.
Some on the right find all of this alarming. Representatives of the conservative weekly, Human Events, handed out an eight-page edition decrying 'The IPS and the Media: Unholy Alliance' at the National Building Museum recently as 800 guests arrived for an institute anniversary party. An article went on to say: When IPS fellows appear on television programs, or when they are mentioned in magazine articles, the liberal media never refer to them as Socialists, let alone pro-Marxists or Marxists.
Paul C. Warnke, a pillar of the foreign policy establishment, a former director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, who headed the evening's celebration, was more
sanguine. What the institute has been able to do, he said, is challenge some of the established wisdom and bring a new perspective on questions of foreign and domestic policy.
Another longtime Washington figure, Steve Schlossberg, a labor lawyer, surveyed the party scene and said, This little nucleus of nuts is very important. They are independently unafraid and creative in a way that no other part of our society is.