Adam Raskin, not long before his death.

It never was easy to be Adam Raskin, an uncommon radical, and the youngest of four brothers born to Mildred and Sam who left the Communist Party in ’48—two years before he arrived in the world, which was in Huntington, Long Island. In 1950, my parents were still communists and remained communists until they died. As a kid, Adam urged them to move into the basement of our house on Rogues Path and to invite a Black family to live in the space they vacated. He often asked for the impossible and didn’t stop until cancer laid him low.

As a teenager, he threw pot parties and did drugs and had sex before I did, though I was born eight-years before him. I was an orphan of the Cold War, while he was a child of the Sixties who attended McGill in Montreal where he supported the taxi drivers’ strike there by tossing Molotov Cocktails at designated targets. He was never a notable New Leftist, and was not written about in lefty publications, but he attained a certain notoriety in 1970 in the wake of an explosion at a townhouse in Manhattan. When Kathy Boudin and Cathy Wilkerson escaped from the ruins, Boudin said to Wilkerson, “Where’s Adam?”

She meant Terry Robbins, who had taken the code name Adam. Some in the crowd on 11th Street heard the question and repeated it to a police officer investigating the explosion, which led to........

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