Richard Barnet

Richard Barnet

Richard J. Barnet was a founder of the Institute for Policy Studies. He died in Washington DC in 2004, age 75.

Beginnings

Richard Jackson Barnet was born in Boston and received his undergraduate degree from Harvard University in 1951 and his law degree, also from Harvard, in 1954. After two years in the U.S. Army, he practiced law in Boston. In 1959, he became a fellow at Harvard's Russian Research Center. He joined the State Department in 1961.

Birth of IPS

Richard Barnet was 33 when he and Marcus Raskin, then 30, founded the institute for policy Studies in 1963. Both had recently departed from the Kennedy administration.

According to Raskin, they met when they were in a State Department meeting chaired by John J. McCloy, an assistant secretary of war during World War II. Also at the meeting were an assortment of generals and prominent representatives of the military-industrial complex. The topic was disarmament.

"If this group cannot bring about disarmament, then no one can," McCloy said.

The two young men both laughed, spontaneously, at the incongruity of the remark, and a friendship was struck.

Deciding that they preferred "speaking truth to power" from outside the citadels of authority, they left the government and founded the think tank at a time when such institutions were relatively rare.

"We both believed that the major questions of government are not administrative but moral questions," Raskin said.

IPS service

Barnet was co-director of the Institute for Policy Studies from 1963 to 1978, then a senior fellow and a distinguished fellow from 1978 until his retirement in 1998. The Institute's director, John Cavanagh, said that during that time, Barnet produced 15 books -- about one every four years.

Religious belief

Richard Barnet was associated for many years with the Church of the Savior and its affiliate, Church of the Servant Jesus.

Mr. Barnet said his faith informed his views on war and peace, civil rights, national security and other issues.

Citizens Party

In 1979 Stanley Weiss, an Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) Trustee was a founding memberof the IPS connected Citizens Party. Other founders included IPS co-founder and senior fellow Richard Barnet, Adam Hochschild of Mother Jones magazine, Archibald Gillies, director of the John Hay Whitney Foundation, Julian Bond, a trustee of the IPS spin-off Institute for Southern Studies, Chicago activist organizer Don Rose, campaign manager and adviser to Chicago Mayor Jane Byrne, and Quentin Young, the Director of Medicine at Cook County Hospital, Chicago.

Writing

Barnet's books include "Global Reach" (1974); "The Giants" (1977), an assessment of Soviet-American relations; a book on the environmental movement called "Lean Years" (1980); and, with Cavanagh, "Global Dreams" (1994), a portrait of five "imperial corporations" and their influence over world affairs.

In addition to his frequent contributions to the New Yorker, he wrote for Harper's Magazine, The Nation, Sojourners and numerous other publications.