It’s not incumbent upon you to finish the work, but neither are you free to evade it.
—THE MISHNAH
Tommy was my only son. A middle child and first-born boy born to a middle child and first-born boy, he was my greatest student, one who quickly became my greatest teacher, something like a best friend, too. He transformed me twice politically, once in his young life, when he helped me first run for office, and then again in death, when he filled my broken heart with purpose and strength.
When I first decided to go into electoral politics, it was 2006. I was forty-three, Sarah was forty-four. Hannah was thirteen, Tommy eleven, and Tabitha nine. At the time, all three of our kids were deeply engaged in political questions and all the neighboring puzzles of moral philosophy, but Tommy the most. When it came to politics of either the philosophical or practical kind, Tommy Raskin was a natural, a thoroughbred, bringing a piercing moral and global sensitivity to his interpretation of political problems. The curly-haired ragamuffin running up and down the aisle of the airplane giving everyone high-fives became a moral and political philosopher.
Even as a little boy, Tommy lived his life with a precocious integrity, and always identified with the underdog. He won an award in middle school for explaining to a group of older students why racist jokes were hurtful. He invited a large group of kids to go to the Blair High School senior prom together, regardless of whether they had dates, so that everyone would be included. He stood up in a high school class and objected to the fact that “people are cheating and no one seems to care that students are not learning the material but just copying it,” and then threw himself into a peer-to-peer tutoring program called Bliss, to help other kids learn course matter and prepare for their essays and homework. (“Tutoring is real helping,” he said. “Cheating helps nobody and just encourages the school bureaucrats to not educate us.”)
People think most seriously about morality when they are young and then when they have young children of their own. Having Tommy and two other kids who were serious about ethical action made me think a lot more concretely about my own future. I resolved that it was time for me to stop just writing law review articles, testifying and opining about stuff. I had been a constitutional law professor for sixteen years and had always had an essentially academic disposition. I am ardent for reading, writing, teaching, and being with young people, and for this reason, there is nothing in the world greater to me than a college or a university. But, when I was forty-two, I realized that the time had come for me to cross over from scholarship and punditry to fight for the things I believed in: to go into politics or resolve just to be a sideline critic.
I had always known that I had a strong political side in me, and politics runs deep in my blood. My maternal grandfather, Samuel Bellman, was the first Jew ever elected to the Minnesota state legislature way back in the 1940s; by the time I got to know him, he was a pillar of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and of the legal establishment of Minneapolis and the Jewish community. During summer visits, we used to watch him solve people’s problems all day long while working either as a lawyer in court or a politician on the phone or just as a friend in conversation. When people ask me where I get my tolerance—no, my love—for constituent services (such as getting people their Social Security checks, VA benefits, unemployment compensation, or fair treatment by Medicare or some other bureaucracy), I always invoke my Grandpa Sam, who could be curmudgeonly and tough sometimes, but who always took the side of the underdog and who never turned away a constituent or a client, no matter how poor—for which he sometimes got paid in chickens and eggs.
My father’s side of the family, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is also filled with political activists and leaders, like my famous great-uncle Max Raskin, the sainted Milwaukee judge and former city attorney. My paternal grandfather, Benjamin, whom I never met and after whom I was named—my parents turning the name around to make it “Jamin Ben Raskin”—was a plumber, first as a member of the plumbers’ union and then as the owner of his own small plumbing business. (Sarah will tell you I’m pretty helpless as a handyman anywhere else in the house, but that I can fix anything in the bathroom without even looking on the internet for help, because it’s in my genes.)
One day in 2005, I picked up the newspaper to learn that our state senator, Ida Ruben, who had been in office for thirty-two years and who was the president pro tempore of the Maryland senate, had introduced a pro–Iraq War resolution and a bill to dramatically expand the death penalty in our state. Further research revealed that, although she had definitely done some good things, Ruben had been helping block consideration of marriage equality, which she did not feel the state was ready for. This seemed scandalous to me, because I always took Silver Spring and Takoma to be the progressive heartland of Montgomery County, itself one of the two or three bluest jurisdictions in the state along with Baltimore and Prince George’s County. Maryland has a part-time legislature—just ninety days a year in session—and I decided I wanted to run for the state senate from District Twenty, Silver Spring and Takoma Park.
It was very weird going from just analyzing and criticizing things (the life of the law professor) to actually taking responsibility for changing and improving them (the life of the political representative). In the process of my becoming a candidate and political leader, Tommy became my key confidant and adviser—which may sound odd considering that he was eleven years old, but he was a natural-born political visionary and strategist, and he loved politics. His advice to me was soulful. A number of progressives were urging me to run for the state senate—like Mike Tabor, who wrote a column for the Silver Spring and Takoma Voice, then a major force in our community; and Marc Elrich, a Takoma Park city councilman and a Bernie-like 1960s radical who had been running unsuccessfully countywide and wanted to try again for the County Council with me on the ballot helping to galvanize a strong progressive network in the eastern county.
But the establishment Democratic politicians were skeptical and worked on me not to run. When Tommy and I would talk to delegates, senators, and power players, they discouraged us. At a countywide Democratic dinner that Tommy accompanied me to, a top official in Montgomery County said to us, “You can’t run because you can’t beat the Machine.”
Tommy asked him in an open and inquisitive way, “Who’s the machine?”
And this Democrat proceeded to name three or four people who would certainly be with the incumbent.
“Well, that’s four votes,” Tommy said. “What about the other one hundred and sixty thousand?”
This precocious lesson in the practical meaning of one-person, one-vote democracy made me smile and made the top power broker wince at the temerity of the eleven-year-old son-of-a-political-upstart.
That amazing lesson became my go-to answer when people asked how we were going to beat the Machine: “By majority vote,” I would say, “one person at a time.”
On a freezing day in January 2006, Tommy introduced me at my campaign kickoff, as did Tabitha. She said, “Please give my dad money; he really needs it.” And then Tommy said, “Yeah, he really needs your money.” Later in the campaign, he would introduce me by saying, “My dad loves our family a lot, and he loves our community a lot, too.”
At my kickoff, he took the photo—of me with the American flag in the background—that we used on our campaign literature, and he was, significantly, at my side after my stem-winder opening speech when a woman came up to me and said, “Great speech, Jamie. Loved your speech. But one thing—take out all the stuff you have in there about gay marriage, because it’s not going to happen. It’s never going to happen. Even the gay candidates don’t talk about it, and it makes you sound like you’re really extreme, like you’re not in the political center.”
I had to swallow hard—I didn’t have that many attendees at our sub-Arctic kickoff event, and I didn’t want to offend her. But then I looked over at my brilliant eleven-year-old son, my son who was taking pictures of me during the kickoff rally. He was looking up at me so hopefully, like I was something far greater than I ever was, and I felt myself becoming a little greater at that moment, because I had this sense that I needed to answer her in a way that was befitting the confidence of this remarkable boy whom fortune and destiny had bestowed upon us.
And I said to her: “Thank you so much for saying that to me, because it makes me realize that it is not my ambition to be in the political center, which blows around with the wind. It is my ambition to be in the moral center and to bring the political center to us. That is why I’m a progressive; that is why I’m a Democrat.”
After we launched that campaign, there was an article in a local newspaper quoting a pundit who described my chances of victory as “impossible”; and nine months later, when we got 67 percent of the vote, there was another article, in the Washington Post, quoting a pundit who said my victory was “inevitable.” So we went from impossible to inevitable in nine months because the pundits are never wrong, but as I told Tommy, we showed that nothing in politics is impossible, and nothing in politics is inevitable. It is all just possible, through the democratic arts of education, organizing, and mobilizing people for change. Tommy must have heard me tell that story a thousand times, but I know he internalized its message from the moment it happened.
Tommy was central to my experience of that first campaign. He helped me create the model that has defined all my campaigns, both the tough campaigns and the easy ones. I have always believed in the grassroots, person-to-person model of campaigning and have veered away from pollsters, TV ads, radio ads, focus groups, high-priced consultants, and negative campaigning—the kind of wholesale boilerplate campaign tactics that give me a headache.
To me, politics is, at its best, about education: educating people about the process, about the issues, about strategies for political change and policy breakthrough. Education about state government was important in our race because so many people in the Maryland suburbs of Washington read the Washington Post, watched the national news, worked in federal government or public policy, and focused on federal issues, not state and local ones. So we had the opportunity to teach people about how so many of the problems they were focused on (climate change and air and water pollution; education; the death penalty and criminal justice reform; marriage equality and the rights of people in the LGBTQ community) were profoundly affected by what our state government did.
But how could we compete against a long-term incumbent backed by machine politics, big money, and major organizational endorsements? I knew we would need to create an exciting campaign to move young people and then get them to convince their parents and grandparents to get involved; I had this deep instinct because of a book written by my hero Bob Moses, the philosopher-activist who helped turn the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the early 1960s into an historic force for sweeping change in Mississippi and throughout the South. Moses later launched the Algebra Project, which has made math literacy a central priority for the civil rights movement in the twenty-first century.
In his book Radical Equations: Math Literacy and Civil Rights (coauthored with Charles Cobb), Moses asks the question “How do you organize?” His answer is: you bounce a ball.
You bounce a ball, and some little kids come by to play, and then some bigger kids arrive, and then some high school and college kids, and you begin to talk issues with their parents, and then you organize.
Bob’s bouncing ball and remarkable human-scale organizing led to Freedom Summer; the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the great challenge to Dixiecrat politics at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey; the Civil Rights Act of 1964; the Voting Rights Act of 1965; and the transformation of the Democratic Party. The racist backlash to SNCC and the changes it brought spilled a lot of blood, beginning with the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner and of Medgar Evers and countless others who were sacrificed on the altar of violent white supremacy.
In our campaign, I told Tommy, we already had lots of adult volunteers, but we needed to recruit young people, too.
We needed to bounce a ball.
So Tommy set about to do just that, beginning with his sisters and many cousins. We had to make it fun. We invited all the young people to come to our free events, which were definitely going way outside the Machine, starting with a “Poets and Writers for Raskin” event that drew more than three hundred people in a snowstorm to hear from George Pelecanos, Ethelbert Miller, Judith Viorst, and dozens of others; a rally against the death penalty, with an innocent man freed from death row; a Texas barbecue and square dance with Texas populist Jim Hightower; and a rock concert with our beloved friend Dar Williams.
The key moment for young people was going to be in the summertime, when school was out, right before the September 6 primary. Tommy reported to me that he was having a hard time recruiting older cousins, the generation of teens like Emily, Zachary, and Maggie, and even my younger sister, Eden, to spend the (brutally hot) summer knocking on doors, making phone calls, and organizing events. The problem was, he told me, that “they say ‘What are they going to put on their résumé, that they worked for their uncle’s losing state senate campaign’?”
I could see the problem he was describing, and said, “Tombo, tell them, first, we’re not losing, and second, that they’re not really working on my state senate campaign. Tell them they are a fellow in . . . Democracy Summer!”
“What’s that?” he said, kind of smiling and bemused.
“We are going to recruit dozens of Democracy Summer fellows, who will get an intensive education from some of the greatest political thinkers, leaders, activists, and campaign managers in America, who live right here in our community and support our campaign. These student fellows are going to become experts on the issues of our times and learn state-of-the-art skills in how to win campaigns—and then we are going to unleash them throughout District Twenty. And I can write a college reference letter for anyone participating in Democracy Summer.”
Thus was Democracy Summer born. Our campaign knocked on more than 35,000 doors, and I knocked on 17,000 personally. I still meet people who tell me that I knocked on their door during that first campaign and that they gave me lemonade, or that we threw a football around with the kids.
We signed up more than sixty Democracy Summer fellows that first summer and derived a whole new model for how to run campaigns. Sixty in itself was a huge number of basically full-time volunteers, but the multiplier effect was unbelievable.
The fellows soon started showing up at canvasses, seminars, and picnics with brothers and sisters, friends, parents, teachers, and other kids who wanted to join. Tommy took twenty-five of my campaign T-shirts to Pine Crest Elementary School to give away, and when he ran out of those, he brought another twenty-five the next day. We were routinely welcoming hundreds of people to our events; one journalist asked me at a rally if I was running for state senate or president, because he had never seen crowds of that size in a state legislative campaign. One young supporter, Lucas Richie, son of my friends Cynthia Terrell and Rob Richie, refused to take off his “Jamie Raskin for Senate” T-shirt until primary Election Day (so we got him an extra one for the purposes of public hygiene). And Tommy learned how to organize: a brilliant young woman who went on to Howard University told me, after we lost Tommy, that he signed her up, two years after my campaign, to cochair the Obama campaign with him in school and changed the trajectory of her life.
The core of it all was constant learning and constant fun. Even the inevitable Machine backlash became a learning moment. When I won the endorsement of Blair High School’s Silver Chips, the great student paper at the largest high school in the state, the incumbent, Ida Ruben, reacted by calling the school’s principal and insisting that he threaten the student editors and reporters with suspension if they did not retract it and endorse her instead. But she picked on the wrong kids. She did not realize that they were endorsing me for my historic defense of student free-speech rights, a topic they knew something about. Pretty soon, the pages of the Washington Post were filled with detailed articles about the controversy and supportive editorials (“The Senator vs. Silver Chips”) deploring censorship of student political voices and praising the students for their activism. Voters saw TV specials and heard NPR stories about the incident, and the students successfully stood their ground. I still have a framed copy of the endorsement—the first newspaper endorsement I ever got—hanging on my wall.
In that first Democracy Summer, Tommy participated in other key campaign activities, too, including door-to-door canvassing and helping me get ready for the first big debate of my political career. He was like a boxing coach, but one helping me hone my strong arguments on marriage equality, the death penalty, the minimum wage increase, climate change, the state’s renewable energy portfolio, and decriminalizing marijuana. He also helped me get ready for what we thought the attacks would be.
Even as a young boy, Tommy was a gifted comedian, prankster, and mimic, and I hope the sadness of his death will never obscure the fact that he was just about the funniest person you could ever hope to meet. One of the first sayings I remember him coming up with, at age five—and repeating incessantly thereafter, pronouncing it like a wisecracking vaudeville comedian after he’d performed a trick or made you laugh at one of his jokes—was Gotcha on that one! Never to be too sure, which was invariably followed by a resonant and knowing tongue click against his cheek. Sarah and I had no idea where this comical stage banter came from, and we’d rack our brains trying to figure out how he had invented it. But he deployed it constantly, as nothing pleased him more than being a madcap little trickster who made people laugh hysterically.
During the campaign, he deployed his humor to aid my debate prep and to relax me. The incumbent had been spreading comically false rumors to the press and voters that I had never moved back home to Maryland after law school and was still living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which was a feeble attempt to make me seem too young. (I was forty-two and had been teaching law school for sixteen years!) Tommy offered me a number of funny rebuttal lines I never got to use, including, “I actually did move down here, but you’re confused because my identical twin brother stayed up in Cambridge.” He also worked out this retort, to be used if the incumbent claimed I was running because of her age, something our campaign assiduously never mentioned: “I’m not running because the incumbent is getting old. I’m running because I’m getting old.”
Tommy also took pains to prepare me for the near certainty that the incumbent would brag about the county executive’s downtown Silver Spring revitalization project. He showed me a clip of her holding a groundbreaking shovel and saying, “Now you can shop until you drop and you can eat until you’re full.” I will never forget Tommy saying, “Thank you, thank you very much, we really didn’t have the ability to eat until we were full before. Thank you for granting us that experience, Senator.” The humor of that line at age eleven—and at any age—is just overwhelming, although there was clearly nothing there I could appropriately use in the debate. In fact, Tommy modeled for me and Sarah and his sisters a refreshing generosity of spirit about my opponent; he made sure no one ever uttered a negative public word about her and that the only points of contrast were about issues, never personality.
In 2006, Tommy introduced me when I announced I was running, he campaigned with me on pretty much a daily basis, he helped me at every turn bring Democracy Summer into existence, he came to all my big events, and he was by my side on Election Day and Election Night. He inspired me and made everything funny.
The lessons we learned through Democracy Summer in 2006 became the basis for my public service and the building blocks for my state senate reelection campaigns in 2010 and 2014. Democracy Summer was the center of gravity in my first campaign for Congress in 2016, a nine-way primary fight against a billionaire CEO, a local television celebrity, and six other well-qualified candidates, a race that became the most expensive congressional primary in the history of the United States. We were outspent 9–1, but we had Democracy Summer roaring ahead like a freight train and, by that time, a real legislative record to run on, because we had gotten done in Annapolis everything I had said we were going to do: We abolished the death penalty after centuries. We became the first state south of the Mason-Dixon line to pass marriage equality and then defended it at the polls. We banned the sale of military-style assault weapons and imposed a universal violent criminal background check on all gun purchases. We increased the minimum wage. And we decriminalized marijuana and passed a medical cannabis program. My campaign slogan was “Jamie Raskin, the Effective Progressive.”
Once, when I was in the state senate and Tommy wanted to get Chinese food for dinner and I made spaghetti instead, he said I was always making spaghetti, but I held my ground. In response, he told me to give him the phone number of David Moon, my campaign manager, or Marlana Valdez, my campaign chair, because he needed to get in touch with a manufacturer of campaign stuff.
Why? I said.
“Because I want to make a bumper sticker that says, ‘Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for Ida.’”
I don’t know precisely when Tommy came to identify as antiwar, but it was very young. Once it dawned on him that violence was the essence of war, it overthrew his early naïve fascination with military history. I associate this change with his learning the basic facts of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and then about the horrors of the Holocaust. These historical events shook him and kept him up at night, sometimes giving him dreadful nightmares, and when he learned about genocidal violence against Native Americans, he stopped playing war and battle games altogether. After he learned what war actually was, and how it destroyed people’s lives and communities, his fascination with it ended—or, to be more precise, the character of his fascination changed. What he cared about was stopping wars and blocking militarism as a cultural and political obsession.
The key problem in Tommy’s mind was official state violence, a constant danger to peace and human rights. When George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq in 2003, I was going back and forth over whether to march against the war—it was a question of pure laziness and not wanting to march alone that made me hesitate. But then, a smiling, irrepressible Tommy volunteered to go with me—and that clinched it, because Tommy, of course, for as long as anyone could remember, made everything he did magical. We marched together, my eight-year-old boy and I, down Constitution Avenue, taking turns carrying a sign with a nice Orwellian touch: “Bush’s Lies: Weapons of Mass Distraction.” Tommy wondered aloud whether President George W. Bush was going to take pictures of us and give them to the police, but I assured him that nothing like that could happen in America after the government got caught spying on the civil rights movement and the antiwar movement in the COINTELPRO scandal. (My boy was obviously already wiser and better grounded in the reality of things than I was.)
When Tommy was at Eastern Middle School, in the magnet program, he became concerned that the magnet students were being set apart from the other students, and this was causing a lot of social tension. He resolved to break out of these arrangements. He’d wander the cafeteria and have lunch with different groups of kids each day. One day, he befriended a boy from El Salvador, and they began to hang out, but when the vice principal in charge of discipline noticed this across-the-tracks relationship, he suspected that something untoward or even criminal (perhaps narcotics dealing) was taking place. We got a call telling us that Tommy had been seen hanging around with a boy whose cousin was reputedly a member of MS-13, and the boy’s friends were, too. The school was not disciplining Tommy, we were told, just “warning” him. Among Tommy’s numerous run-ins with “illegitimate authority,” as my father might have put it, this one frustrated and upset him the most. He experienced in a middle school disciplinarian’s reaction to an innocent friendship all the injuries and injustices of race, class, ethnicity, state power, and adult tyranny that he felt in his bones.
That episode reinforced Tommy’s powerful libertarian impulses. When he was just in third grade, a kid Tommy knew whom we used to see walking to school was suspended for a week. On the following Monday we were walking to school and I spotted the boy across the street and said, “Look, there’s Jimmy, they let him out of jail.” To which Tommy replied: “You mean they let him back into jail.”
In seventh grade, there was an arduous independent research paper requirement for kids in Tommy’s magnet program. They had been studying the history of segregation and desegregation, so Tommy, who was at the time slightly obsessed with college fraternities, chose to write an original paper about the response of fraternities and sororities at the University of Maryland to the desegregation of the college and the campus in the 1950s. His research involved interviews with graduates from the period and a scrupulous review of old issues of the Diamondback, the college’s student newspaper, and Terrapin, its yearbook.
Pretty much every Sunday for two months, I would drive him out to the McKeldin Library, on the College Park campus, and he would wade through old newspaper articles on microfiche and hard copies of the yearbook, taking scrupulous notes on oversize note cards. He turned up astounding things, like coed “blackface” parties in dorms, Confederate battle flags flown outside frat houses and brandished inside, portrayals of mock violence perpetrated against frats’ African American female cooks in yearbook photos, and sizzling excitement over segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace’s visit to campus.
Before Tommy finished working on his paper, there was one more person he wanted to interview, Thomas V. Michael “Mike” Miller, the president of the Maryland State Senate and the longest-serving state senate president both in Maryland and in American history. Tommy kept coming across Miller’s name and photograph in his research because Miller was president of the College Park student body during the period in question and also head of one of the lead Greek fraternities on campus at the time of desegregation.
I knew Miller well and had an interesting relationship with this charming old-school politician. A conservative Democrat and consummate inside-moves politician with great personal magnetism, he had strongly backed the incumbent against me when I ran for Senate in District Twenty, putting huge amounts of money into her race while refusing to meet with me. When I defeated her, he was courtly and accommodating, but he fundamentally distrusted my insurgent progressive politics. Yet the Maryland State Senate is an intimate body, with only forty-seven senators, at that time, thirty-three of them Democrats; we used to meet around a single table in our caucus room, and everyone got to know everyone else well. As I saw it, the fundamental bargain was that the progressives would not try to topple Miller’s impressive, decades-long reign of power in the senate and, in return, he would allow us to put on the floor all the progressive legislation he disfavored, like marriage equality, abolition of the death penalty, the ban on the sale of assault rifles, and my National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (which he actually ended up enthusiastically supporting). Mike’s creative and liberal chief of staff, Vicki Gruber, with whom I was close, helped him pull off this amazing balancing act.
Mike and I shared a common love of American and Maryland history, and we bonded over that. I asked him if he would be willing to do a quick interview with Tommy, and he said sure. I brought Tommy to the senate with me one day, and we went to Mike’s office right off the senate floor. I could tell Tommy was pretty awed by it. The office wasn’t big, but like Mike, it exuded Maryland: maps of the Chesapeake Bay, hundreds of books about our state, paintings, photos with governors and presidents at Miller’s home in Southern Maryland. At this point, Tommy had been toying with the idea of running for governor of Maryland one day, and I could see he was moved by the immense charm of Mike’s abundant collection of Maryland artifacts.
Then the interview began. The fourteen-year-old boy on a mission to find out what life on campus was like after Brown v. Board of Education was no match for the political mastermind Miller, who answered any tough question with generalities like “It was just a very, very tough time.” I’m not sure Tommy had any desire to pose aggressive follow-up questions, but he was unable to anyway, because he could not write fast enough to capture everything Miller was saying. Tommy did not find out whether the white fraternities had ever discussed admitting African Americans, or whether there were any disagreements over civil rights within the leadership of these Greek organizations. He never got to ask a lot of the probing excellent questions he had prepared.
On our way home on Route 50 that evening, Tommy was subdued, until he started asking questions about Mike Miller. I explained that Mike’s family went back hundreds of years in Southern Maryland, with one side sticking with the Union and the other with the Confederacy, as Mike told it. Part of Miller’s father’s side was reputedly involved in Confederate espionage operations against the Union, keeping close track of movements in and out of the federal city, just fifteen or twenty miles away. One day, I had lunch with Mike at his office in Clinton, Maryland, and he showed me down the street the “Suratt house,” where Mary Surratt lived before she became the first woman ever hanged by the U.S. government—in her case, for participating in the conspiracy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. On the three occasions I visited the Miller estate in Southern Maryland, I always felt the weight of William Faulkner’s observation “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.”
Tommy said, “I don’t think I could do what you do.”
I asked him what he meant.
“Not being a law professor,” he said; “maybe I could do that, but I mean being a state senator. I’m not sure I could work with people who I don’t agree with on, like, basic values, even if I like them as people. It would be too weird for me.”
He wasn’t saying it to judge me or even to judge Mike Miller. In fact, he hurried to quote back to me something I had told him I learned from my then-colleague Sen. Jim Rosapepe, who had said to me on the Senate floor my first day of holding public office, “Remember, in politics no one is ever as good as they look or as bad as they look.”
Tommy was discovering something fundamental about himself. His epiphany made me feel a lot like a politician, which is something I rarely feel like—I usually feel more like a professor, which is what my colleagues in the House tend to call me. But his perception of things was piercingly accurate and, compared to him, I may as well have been Mayor Richard Daley. My son and I shared all the most fundamental and essential values, but he was on a different path from his father’s; he was on a path of engagement much closer to that of his grandfather, my dad, Marcus Goodman Raskin, not a politician but a public intellectual.
Tommy’s bond with my father grew over the years into an intimate channel of political thought and emotion between lively kindred spirits, two ebullient humanitarians who had profound libertarian questions about society and radical moral answers for the world. Each was, in some deep ways, the other’s alter ego. After we lost my father on Christmas Eve 2017, I am certain that Tommy also became to me the closest continuing philosophical voice of my father. My dad, whom the grandchildren called Baba, lived during Tommy’s childhood nearby, in Washington, DC, right off Sixteenth Street, with my stepmother, Lynn, another loving force of nature whom Tommy adored.
In the late 1950s, when my dad, a Juilliard-trained piano prodigy, chose a life in politics and philosophy over a life in concert piano, my parents moved to Washington, DC, where my dad went to work on Capitol Hill. After John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960, my dad went to the White House to work at the National Security Council as McGeorge Bundy’s special assistant on national security and disarmament. On my dad’s first day of work in the Old Executive Office Building, the Bay of Pigs Invasion took place, and he quickly proclaimed his antiwar position, writing a memo to President Kennedy urging that the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay be closed, turned into a health clinic, and gifted to the Cuban people as a goodwill gesture in the wake of the failed and bloody invasion.
With his intensifying opposition to a nuclear arms race—as a White House staff member, he, remarkably, joined a picket line outside it during the Cuban Missile Crisis to address protesters from the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, or SANE—and his aggressive skepticism about the brewing intervention in Vietnam, Dad’s days were numbered in the ranks of “the Best and the Brightest,” as David Halberstam labeled, with a tinge of sarcasm, the coterie of Cold War intellectuals who brought us the nightmare of the Vietnam War. The iconoclast whom Bundy called a “young menace” in conversations with President Kennedy, Marcus Raskin soon experienced a demotion and “political excommunication” to the Bureau of the Budget as the “education advisor.”
Shortly after I was born (on December 13, 1962) and not long after the Cuban Missile Crisis, my dad—and my mom, Barbara Raskin, a journalist and novelist whom we lost in 1999, when Tommy was only four—threw caution to the wind. Dad quit the White House in 1963 and founded, with his friend Richard Barnet, what became not only the first liberal think tank in Washington but, in many ways, the first Washington policy think tank of any kind at all, the Institute for Policy Studies, which continues to thrive today and where Tommy interned in his proud summer of 2012.
Tommy was powerfully drawn not only to my dad’s loving nature and absurdist sense of humor, but also to the remarkable odyssey he had traveled through music, academia, and government to take a sweeping stand against militarism and state violence. From an early age, Tommy was fascinated by my dad’s passionate leadership in the movement to stop U.S. intervention in Vietnam. Tommy studied that period carefully, reading numerous books on it and taking Amherst professor Vanessa Walker’s course on America and Vietnam and whatever other courses he could find on American foreign policy and Indochina.
My dad had gone to law school at Chicago for the express purpose of working out ways to dismantle what he called “the war system.” In 1968, when I was five years old, he was indicted, along with Dr. Benjamin Spock, Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Mitchell Goodman, and Michael Ferber, in the famous “Boston Five” antiwar conspiracy case for allegedly conspiring to aid and abet draft evasion. Amazingly for a conspiracy case, most of the defendants did not know one another before the trial, but had been carefully selected by prosecutors and by then Attorney General Ramsey Clark from different domains of life (including medicine, academia, the policy universe, and students) to send a chilling political message to American society about the costs of antiwar activism. The defendants faced many years in prison, a threat that became a seminal and formative memory in my life.
My dad’s alleged acts were all free political speech, much like the charged misconduct of his colleagues, but he was the only one of the defendants actually acquitted by the jury in the case, a result that stunned him and led to his celebrated statement, quoted on the front page of the New York Times, that he felt like “demanding a retrial.” The convictions of the other defendants were reversed on appeal, and none of them was ever retried by the government or by Attorney General Clark, who never quite lived down the shame of having brought this prosecution in the first place. My dad intensified his activism against the Vietnam War, publishing more books and working in conjunction with Daniel Ellsberg to secure publication of the Pentagon Papers. All of this led to President Richard Nixon’s placing him and Richard Barnet on his infamous Enemies List.
Tommy could not get enough of the Boston Five trial (or the “Spock case”). My dad’s effort to mobilize both law and public sentiment against violence and war, the idea that criminal defendants would stand together in the face of unjust prosecution (instead of rushing out to get their own lawyers and pointing fingers at one another, like the right-wingers do), and the collision between freedom of political expression and the criminal law would enthrall Tommy from high school through law school.
Tommy saw in his Baba the promise of a public intellectual’s career defined by old-fashioned integrity and courage, a model for acting justly in an unjust world. He was drawn at a young age to Oxfam and Amnesty International and sent them large chunks of whatever money he earned. In college, he wrote blistering essays for antiwar.com on the folly and lies of America’s warmakers. He did college summer internships and jobs at the Cato Institute, where he worked with Doug Bandow researching American military entanglements with authoritarian regimes; at J Street, where he worked under Hadar Susskind for peace, human rights, and security for all the people of the Middle East; and the Institute for Policy Studies, where he worked with writer and activist Phyllis Bennis on stopping the Saudi war in Yemen. This last assignment was a special joy for him, as my dad was still alive then, and grandfather and grandson got to see each other at work. My dad constantly bragged to colleagues at the institute about Tommy’s impassioned writing and activism.
Tommy felt at home in the world of think tanks, and he experimented with the idea of straightaway becoming a writer and critic; indeed, he became obsessed with the academic pedigree of public intellectuals and writers, wondering just how early one could get off the meritocracy escalator, stop one’s advanced schooling, and still be taken seriously as an essayist and intellectual. Before we lost him, we were convinced that he would add a philosophy degree to his JD studies and then spend his career as a professor of law and/or philosophy. But he also could just as well have graduated from law school and become an activist public intellectual, following in my dad’s post–law school footsteps and never practicing law. Tommy was born to be a provocative public thinker and a humanitarian activist. As our relative Bob Bergen, who lost his own son, Ben, at a tragically young age, put it, “That young man Tommy Raskin was a game changer.”
Tommy’s compassion for other people became strikingly visible in high school. He spent many hours a week tutoring fellow students in math and English, using his explanatory and comedic powers to help them understand the material. One day he decided to start mobilizing his fellow magnet students to do the same through his beloved Bliss Project. The hard feelings generated by having divergent and unequal academic pathways in the same building—magnet and non-magnet—were always difficult for Tommy to accept. Tutoring his peers, and befriending them in the process, were the best ways he came up with to resolve some of the tensions created when an advanced magnet program exists at the center of a large public high school, where many students speak English as a second language, others have learning disabilities, and many have not yet connected with an academic purpose.
But issues of class inequality were never far from Tommy’s mind. One time, we dropped off one of Tommy’s friends at home after school but his friend did not want us to drive up to his apartment building, instructing us to leave him at the corner a block away. This was the second time it had happened, and Tommy spent the rest of the ride home talking about how he was convinced his friend did not want us to see his building and that the “weight of poverty” was crushing for many of his classmates.
As a world-class empath, Tommy felt other people’s pain in a visceral and physical way, which led to his decision at the beginning of his senior year at Amherst to become a vegan. He came to identify the callous indifference to human life and suffering practiced in warfare with our callous indifference to animal life and suffering. For him, as he told me one night, the ruthless “slaughter bench” of history in war, as Hegel called it, was made possible by the shady animal slaughterhouse on the outskirts of town. He was convinced that by numbing ourselves to the agony and suffering of animals, we conditioned ourselves to accept the brutalization of human beings by means of war, torture, political oppression, labor exploitation, and ordinary social cruelty. We became part of a thoroughgoing societal killing machine.
He wrote a remarkable poem, “Where War Begins,” to explain to friends and family about his decision to go vegan, and he took it on the road. Deploying his photographic recall to recite his poem flawlessly, he performed it widely whenever asked, astonishing his large audiences with his breadth of historical knowledge, versatility of expression, and intensity of emotion about faraway places and events.
With this poem, Tommy converted dozens of family members and friends, maybe hundreds, during his life. He was never a sanctimonious, guilt-tripping vegan; he admitted he loved a lot of meat dishes that he had to give up. If he ever saw other vegans lecturing meat eaters, he would gently intervene to point out that he, like most other vegans, had eaten meat most of his life and that it was best to avoid vegan sectarianism and one-upmanship. “I’m not interested in a vegan club,” he would say. “I want a vegan world.”
His gentle solicitude for other beings in the world around him also expressed itself in his unusual refusal to drive or even get his driver’s license. Both Hannah and Tabitha could not wait to get their learner’s permits and their licenses. When Tommy passed his learner’s permit test right away in his junior year of high school, both Sarah and I expected that he, too, would soon become a good, responsible driver. He had a year within which to take the road test, and I drove with him several times and found him to be solid and conscientious behind the wheel—perhaps a bit overscrupulous, but that’s a common and not undesirable trait among new drivers. Yet, in his senior year of high school, he never seemed ready to take his road test. And then, one day, we were out driving and I asked him if he wanted to take the wheel, and so he did. (Under state law, young people with a learner’s permit can drive when a parent or another licensed family member is present.) But he seemed stiff and uncomfortable. We switched back after only five minutes or so, and then, on the side of the road, he told me he didn’t really want to get his license. I asked him why not.
“I just don’t want to hurt anybody,” he said.
I assured him he would not do that and that he was a fine driver and would never drive recklessly.
He sort of tilted his head and lightly shrugged. Something about the gesture struck me hard.
“It’s definitely a lot of responsibility,” I told him, rubbing his shoulder. “But you are a very responsible guy, and you’re a good driver.”
“People get into accidents,” he said. “I just don’t want to do that.”
He looked stoical and a touch melancholy. Something about his tone indicated that he had given this a lot of thought. I did not know what to say, and we drove home in silence.
I felt increasingly responsible and guilty about it. In Annapolis, I was on the Maryland Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee, which oversaw all things motor vehicle, and I had often brought home debates relating to driver’s licenses and learner’s permits, and horror stories about teen drunk driving and tragic prom nights. I remember once telling the kids about a bad accident caused by an octogenarian driver and subsequent proposals to require senior motorists in Maryland to have periodic road tests starting at age seventy-five, provoking a lively dispute that lasted way past dinner. I was also leading the fight in the state senate to pass “Noah’s Law,” which would compel the installation of ignition interlock devices in the cars of convicted drunk drivers. The law was named after Noah Leotta, a public-spirited young Montgomery County police officer whose life was taken by a speeding drunk driver in Rockville. The issue of driving and road safety was much on the minds of adolescents in our house, and I feared that I had somehow scared Tommy too much as I tried to implant a conviction in our kids never to drink and drive.
Tommy never did get a driver’s license. He became a great walker, public transit rider, and early Lyft user. But it seemed as if the existential weight of his decision grew over time, as if a powerful desire not to risk hurting other people required a categorical refusal to enjoy any of the benefits of driving oneself around in our auto-shaped society. There would be no middle path for Tommy. But this refusal, like his extraordinary kindness toward other people and animals in general, struck us as a carefully considered, rational decision—perhaps idiosyncratic but far from unique these days—of a charming and incandescently good boy. Hannah has recently tried to convince me that not driving can be a symptom of OCD as a lot of people who suffer the disorder are freaked out about the possibility of hitting a person or animal and sometimes even imagine that they did so if there is any strange sound on the road. In any event, because Tommy was Tommy, there was never a shortage of friends or girlfriends ready to pick him up when he had somewhere to go.
When I decided to run for Congress in 2016, the “kids” were no longer kids. Hannah was twenty-four and in San Francisco in a training program at Silicon Valley Bank. Tommy was twenty-one, in his junior year at Amherst College, and developing a thesis on the intellectual history of the animal rights movement. Tabitha was nineteen and in her freshman year at Amherst, zeroing in on psychology as a field of interest and about to take her sophomore year abroad in Amsterdam.
As someone who had organized his early political career and campaigns around his children, I found it hard to have them far from home while I was actively campaigning. Democracy Summer at least gave me a way to maintain my interaction with young people and also to keep the Raskin kids engaged with what was happening. But, for me, it was just not the same as having them there, and I told the Democracy Summer fellows stories about them incessantly.
Having some distance from home meant that our children were more focused on the presidential campaign than they were on my congressional ambitions, and at least Tommy and Tabitha were feeling scared and anxious about Donald Trump and the plans he had for America. Tabitha, who had a baseball-playing boyfriend in this period and spent a lot of time with young white males, was warning everyone that Trump was definitely going to win. Tommy saw Trump’s stereotyping and scapegoating of immigrants and African Americans as a precursor to fascist policies. From the west coast, Hannah and Hank did not see things as so dire, and in fact Hank had bet someone that Hillary was going to win.
Although I was overwhelmingly focused on my own race, and therefore not as attuned as they were to the dynamics of the presidential contest, I thought, in my foggy rose-colored-glasses way, that most Americans would recognize Trump as a fraud and a con man, an unstable narcissist, and someone completely unsuited for the most important office in the world. Of course, a majority did recognize that—Hillary beat him by more than three million votes nationally—but his minority of votes were distributed in just the right way for him to eke out a win in the Electoral College.
On November 3, Election Night, the whole family had come with me to the old George Meany Center for Labor Studies, at the National Labor College in Silver Spring, where hundreds of fired-up Democrats joined me, Anthony Brown, and Chris Van Hollen, to celebrate what we hoped was going to be a clean sweep across America. But just minutes after my race was called with a projected 60 percent win (over a Trumpified Republican), and I took the stage to talk about all the important things we were going to do in Congress (such as confront climate change and economic inequality), the networks began to project a Trump victory. It turned into a long, troubled night that ended with a Republican-led House, a Republican-led Senate, and Donald Trump headed for the White House.
On January 20, 2017, the day Trump was sworn in, a few weeks after members of Congress, I could not bring myself to attend his inaugural address. I joined the boycott that was initiated by my late colleague John Lewis and backed by nearly seventy House Democrats. Instead, I invited up to one hundred constituents to join me for a hike from Maryland to DC, through our beloved Rock Creek Park, beginning at the famous Boundary Bridge, in the Eighth District, connecting Maryland to DC. My special guest was Melanie Choukas-Bradley, my friend and constituent and the exquisite biographer of Rock Creek Park. Melanie enchanted us with her lush and microscopic description of the flora and fauna in the park, but also with her rendering of the park as a triumph both for nineteenth-century environmentalism and twentieth-century New Deal democracy.
Our family enjoyed a special feeling on that long hike. Washington now had a strange, quasi-militarized, and occupied quality to it, but we were among friends. As Donald Trump denounced “American carnage” and fantasized that there were millions of people in his inaugural crowd who were never present, we Free Staters walked together as pro-democracy activists hanging tough for the people and the land. When Melanie told us the story of a favorite towering oak tree more than 350 years old, I asked her how trees could survive centuries through hurricanes and thunderstorms, erosion and heat, and every manner of insect and predator, and she said, “It’s the part you don’t see. It’s the roots, which are intertwined so deeply with the roots of the other trees, that make them strong and resilient.” When I spoke to the group, I told them we would have to be like those trees and have our roots in the community so strong and intertwined that none of us could be blown over no matter what storms were headed our way.
Tommy’s response to Trump’s ascent to power was fascinating. Donald Trump was clearly as close to fascism as Tommy ever wanted America to get, and he found it hard to look at him on the screen or even to hear about the things he was doing, certainly not without chanting “He’s not the legitimate leader” à la Sacha Baron Cohen in the 2012 film The Dictator. Tommy was appalled and crushed by the separation of migrant parents and children at the border, which he immediately declared a human rights violation, and he railed against Trump’s racist Muslim ban executive order.
At the same time, though, I heard him patiently but aggressively challenge anyone who called Trump the “worst president in history” in his first few months in office, reminding people of George W. Bush and the lies that led to the Iraq War, which destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives; and of Richard Nixon and his expansion of the Vietnam War and bombing of Cambodia, which also cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Tommy brought up the racism of Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson. He took Truman to task for his decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and he never let me forget that the revered FDR turned away ships of Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. Tommy wanted everyone to remember that Donald Trump’s amorality and indifference to other people’s suffering were not close to unique or unsurpassed in presidential history—and Tommy knew his history cold.
Tommy saw violent authoritarianism early on in the Trump movement, but he saw it also in war and other routine exercises of state power. Indeed, he often told me that to a battered wife or an abused child, a man’s reign of violent terror in the home was fascism. The dropping of an atomic bomb on civilians, the smashing of a nonviolent labor strike, and the subjection of women and girls to genital mutilation were all forms of violent cruelty that should be intolerable to movements that prize freedom.
Tommy was proud of me, I think, in those early years of Trump, for standing as strong as I could, while on the House floor, for political democracy, human rights, and the environment. Still, we had some lively exchanges about the progressive focus on revelations about Vladimir Putin’s political and social media interventions to bolster Trump’s candidacy. Tommy was skeptical of MSNBC’s focus on Donald Trump and the Russian connection. We clashed multiple times on this point. He did not doubt the reality of any of Putin’s cyber-machinations to aid Trump, but he wondered how effective they were and, more specifically, whether the growing anti-Putin political rhetoric on the left was setting America up for another Cold War and dangerous nuclear arms race. I tried to convince him that the strongest anti-Putin voices in Congress (including mine) were also the antiwar voices, and that Putin and Trump now constituted a dangerous axis of repressive politics and kleptocratic rule across the globe. For his part, Tommy argued, quite reasonably, that the anti-Putin rhetoric of Democrats risked everyone’s losing sight of how organic and homegrown the Trump movement was and that the old habits of Cold War foreign policy died hard. I would say we both moved each other a little bit on the question.
Both of us knew that Donald Trump and his autocratic allies at home and abroad were bringing an authoritarian darkness down across America and all over the world. These traitors to democracy reduced the quality of life—and, indeed, the quantity of life, too—for millions and millions of people driven into poverty, disease, and depression. Life expectancy in America dropped by two years during the Trump presidency, and deaths “of despair” related to opioids, alcohol, and suicide increased substantially across the population, especially among white men.
The darkness of the era would soon come to envelop us all.