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. He was 83.

The cause was a heart-related ailment, said his son Jamie Raskin, a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Maryland’s 8th Congressional District.

Marcus 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 anti-war protests to the Pentagon Papers, Mr. 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.

Mr. Raskin was the co-editor of “The Vietnam Reader” (1965), an influential historical anthology that helped inspire “teach-ins” about the Vietnam 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 to two years in prison by a judge who likened their actions to treason. Mr. Raskin was the only one found not guilty.

Despite its intellectual heft, the Institute for Policy Studies was often run on a shoestring. As a matter of principle, it accepted no money from corporations or the government. It survived on grants from private foundations and individuals.

For years, the institute was housed in a shabby building near Dupont Circle that featured peeling paint and an elevator that didn’t work. Senior fellows sometimes took turns running the switchboard.

Nonetheless, it was a heady environment abuzz with many of the leading liberal thinkers, writers and political figures of the day. Mr. Raskin often contributed to the Nation and The New York Times, and Mr. Barnet, who died in 2004, frequently wrote for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. Both churned out books, often together.

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.

Mr. Raskin, who was born and raised in Milwaukee, began playing piano at 4 and by the time he was 12, he was featured on a weekly radio program. He left high school to study at the Juilliard School in New York under Rosina Lhevinne.

At 16, he decided to give up music as a career.

“One, there’s an enormous amount of nervous tension involved — even when you’re playing just for yourself,” he told the Dallas Morning News in 1999. “Anyone with the slightest anxiety complex ends up in trouble. The other reason is laziness.”

He transferred to the University of Chicago, where Mr. Glass, a student in the same dormitory, sought him out.

“I asked Marcus for help with the piano, and he became my piano teacher,” Mr. Glass wrote in his 2015 memoir “Words Without Music.” “With him I started on a real piano technique, and he was serious about my progress.”

Mr. Raskin graduated in 1954 and received a law degree, also from the University of Chicago, in 1957. He studied piano in Italy for a year before moving to Washington in 1958.

He worked on Capitol Hill before joining the Kennedy administration as a deputy to national security adviser McGeorge Bundy. After the failed U.S.-sponsored invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1962, Mr. Raskin’s relations with Bundy and other officials grew more strained. Mr. Barnet shared his disillusionment, and together they launched the Institute for Policy Studies in 1963.

—?The Washington Post