John R. Raser’s life makes for rich biography. From the Pentagon to anti-war writing/teaching; from New Zealand’s oldest university to Australia’s newest one; from academics to surfing the big waves of Western Australia into his 60s, John’s virile intellectual brilliance and colorful persona dazzled and inspired. I’ve long thought someone should undertake the task of telling his story, but until then I offer this small sketch, moved by the confluence of two events: the eighty-eighth anniversary of John’s birth on June 8, 1935 and my imminent exit from the U.S. to Mexico—a move in sync with John’s values.
John Rudolph Raser’s journey in a nutshell? Raised on an Iowa farm by a religiously conservative family, he attended Messiah Academy and Upland College (both of the Brethren in Christ Church). Declaring himself a (philosophical) conscientious objector, he did “alternate service” with UNESCO and Hungarian refugees in Europe. After attending Harvard and Stanford (PhD in Political Science, speciality in international affairs, 1964), he worked with the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute (WBSI)—then focused on international negotiation and deterrence strategies for defense, among other things—leading to consultations with the Pentagon, the Office of Naval Research, and the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.
While still with WBSI, teaching at Claremont Graduate School during the time of growing concerns about the Vietnam War changed the course of John’s life. He made a big jump across the Pacific Ocean to the University of Otago in New Zealand, then to Murdoch University in Western Australia, and finally to Gracetown—a small coastal community south of Perth where for the last decade and a half of his life John created homes and gardens, generously hosted family and friends, read widely, traveled around Australia, to the U.S. and elsewhere, wrote deliciously descriptive letters, and surfed…until lung cancer took his life on May 18, 2000, a few weeks shy of his sixty-fifth birthday.
Upon his death came many tributes; two succinctly capture something of his essence:
“The only brother—a toddler with golden curls adored by his six older sisters, the boy weeping bitterly over his dead dog, the college student feeling his rising powers, debating with golden tongue in various countries.” (Lois Raser, sister/subject of other posts here, d. 2021)
“John chose his life. He had the strength, the energy, the power to do anything he might have selected. He chose to teach. He chose to build. He chose to love.” (Luke Little, lifelong friend from childhood, d. 2020)
Pentagon Hello, Goodbye
As a teacher, John had the humility—a trait that tempered his imposing intelligence—to learn from his students, revealing in an interview with the official magazine of the Otago University Students’ Association (Critic Te Arohi, Vol. 48. No. 3, March 21, 1972) the role students played in the move from California to New Zealand:
“At Stanford I came under the influence of people…working with the U.S. government on how to design and deploy nuclear weapons systems (John became an expert in simulation and games theory; his book Simulation and Society: An Exploration of Scientific Gaming was published in 1969). I felt about my work with Polaris Submarine deployment, the Minuteman Missile System and others that it was the obligation of the thoughtful scholar…[and it was an] ego-building way to spend your late twenties…wined and dined by the White House and the Pentagon, flown around the world in military jets and delivering papers at conferences.”
How did an “Iowa farm boy cum pacifist,” as John described himself, end up thus? “It’s not as strange as it sounds,” John told the interviewer, “for at that time in the U.S. there was a real feeling of optimism about the world and most people then felt that the U.S., despite all her faults, was probably the best bet the world had for keeping some kind of peace and sensible world order.”
He continued: “For a long time I didn’t give much thought to what I was doing…then…Vietnam got crammed down our throats. I took a professorship at a graduate school in California and my students taught me that I was a fool. I came to believe that what I had been doing…was a part of the whole death machine that America has been so busily creating in the last couple decades. So I quit. I said no. I devoted myself to teaching and to writing anti-military essays. And soon I wasn’t invited to the Pentagon anymore.”
“I thought constantly about leaving the U.S. I know you can’t divorce yourself completely from sin. But you can decide how closely you are going to be associated with it. So I thought about going to Sweden or Denmark or Mexico or Canada. About a year ago a friend said, ‘Why don’t you try New Zealand?’ I wrote to universities here and soon had a job.”
Not just a job, but joy in new discoveries: “The train I take into Dunedin when I go to teach passes the Port Chalmers docks with their complement of half a dozen ships—Japanese, British, Russian, American, Dutch, and the N.Z. ‘coasters’ which are everywhere. The ferries…which handle the traffic between North and South islands, are romantic…with songs, waved goodbyes, strips of confetti…and with the tipsily sung Maori farewell song. Something in those trips releases a reservoir of joy in me, so that I want to shout with the delight of being alive, young, healthy, and at home in the world.” (letter, March 1972)
More delight…in the unexpected cosmopolitan milieu: “Any [small] gathering is almost certain to include Americans, English, Dutch. Tens of thousands Chinese and Indians have made their homes here too.” And comments on socioeconomics: “The Maoris are much like the American blacks in social standing; the island immigrants: Cook Islanders mostly, are at the bottom of the economic totem pole.” (The three generations photo from New Zealand labeled by my mother, Esther Raser Engle; from her collection)
While appreciating the “philosophy and atmosphere” at Otago, John, well into his first year there, was already considering a move. As a recent southern California transplant (with wife and two children), weather was a factor: “There is too much wind and not enough hot sun here.” He was also struggling with a professional decision: “Seems like a choice between doing what I know I can do well—teach, help build groovy organizations, be an institutional man—and what I don’t know whether I’m really capable of doing or not—that is, being a serious writer.” He was looking at opportunities around Australia, feeling drawn to Western Australia—to Perth, which he’d heard was “sunswept and beautiful.”
Murdoch Years
Teaching in Perth it would be. Geoffrey Bolton*, John’s colleague at Murdoch University (the two were among ten foundation professors of the school birthed in 1973), shed more light on John’s growing interests (John Raser: a Memoir, In Touch, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2000):
“He looked to a role as a university teacher who might integrate the exploration of emotional consciousness with the more traditional concerns of the social scientists. He also wanted to work in a society with power structures less entrenched than those in the United States…He was attracted partly by the knowledge that Murdoch was under sustained pressure to develop a program in peace and conflict studies…it also helped that Western Australia has fine beaches, and he was already a dedicated surfer” (yes, but new to the sport; John started surfing at 35, noting in a letter to his father that most people are giving it up by that age).
As for the “golden tongue” John’s sister referenced, Bolton continued: “I have never known an interviewee to give a more brilliant performance…charming, eloquent and persuasive, he sketched a vision of…the university’s role as a place for social healing. John even admitted—with a candor refreshing after the relentless self-advertisement of most short-listed applicants—that he had made mistakes in the past and would make more at Murdoch.” Shortly after his appointment John “became dean of what he insisted should be called the School of Social Inquiry, suggesting open-ended pluralism rather than the conventional ‘Social Sciences’.”
John Raser was anything but conventional. Bolton again: “The people of Perth hardly knew what to make of this Murdoch phenomenon with his sparkling blue eyes, ear-ring, kaftan, boots, and ambience of genial testosterone.”
Testosterone indeed. John’s sexuality (“a bit like a blowtorch,” he wrote) was frank and freely expressed. My first exposure to it came as a teen riding with him from Colorado Springs to a camp in the Rockies for a Raser family reunion. He turned from the driver’s seat to his wife and said: “Let’s stop and have a quickie…we only need five minutes.” That didn’t happen; instead he belted out “We are climbing Jacob’s ladder” as we made our way up a mountain pass.
Biomedical tidbit: Research indicates a strong heritability for serum testosterone—genetic factors account for 40-70% of the variation in testosterone levels in men and 65% in women. John’s father Rudolph Raser was, per his daughter Evelyn, “highly sexed, no doubt about it.” While visiting Grandpa Rudy (b. 1899) and his second wife in the early 80s, Rudy said to me, “You’re a nurse; is there any reason why a woman in her 80s should not enjoy afternoon sex?”
Rudy’s religious conversion soon after marriage shaped and guided the rest of his long life. “Daddy’s faith ruled his intellect,” wrote John. But it did little to dampen Rudy’s tendency to racy commentary. Sharing a meal with him at a restaurant when I was fifteen, he said, “That girl has a beautiful ass,” eyeing a table across the way where sat a young woman in short shorts. “He just liked to talk, partly to provoke a reaction,” said Aunt Evelyn when I shared this anecdote with her years later.
John’s robust sexuality—likely influenced by both nature (genetics) and nurture (I imagine comments he heard from his father over the years!)—was given free rein per his views on intimate relationships (expressed in a 1983 letter): “My fundamental life metaphors are open-ness and exploration [so] I have always itched under the closure and emotional immobility which seems the inevitable (?) consequence of coupling on a long term basis.”
Those “life metaphors” were no doubt shaped by the Human Potential Movement of the 1960s—a movement largely promoted by California’s Esalen Institute—espousing the ethic that the inner-self should be freely expressed in order to reach one’s true potential. An early letter from New Zealand (John’s wife Charleen writing) notes the possibility of several new friends forming an “Esalen East type of thing…with the usual bag of encounter, gestalt, bio-energetics, rolfing, yoga and potting, etc.” As to sexual freedom, John and Charleen were among numerous couples interviewed by Carl Rogers for his book Becoming Partners: Marriage and Its Alternatives (1972). An interesting read. Rogers—considered by many to be the most influential psychologist in American history—and John were colleagues at WBSI.
Perhaps John’s itch abated. But during that circa 1983 interval, between relationships, he wrote: “It’s the first time I’ve lived alone in 27 years and I’m utterly astonished at how much I like it. I also like me as company in my house, which I didn’t even know. My main problem seems to be fending off eager ladies from 19 to 50. I occasionally get the feeling that the empty house is the irresistible bait—the male who goes with it is incidental! Or conversely, that it is my public image which is attractive—the person behind it reshaped in perception to fit the image.”
I’ll not write more about John’s personal life (“private” life doesn’t seem to fit one who was so open about his thoughts, feelings, and activities!) except to note that over the course of his years he engaged in three significant partnerships (with beautiful, intelligent women)—unions that produced and/or nurtured six bright, gifted children. As with all families, however defined, there were joys and sorrows, ruptures and repairs.
What was John’s “public image” in the 1970s, early 80s? Bolton explained that soon after settling in at Murdoch John was “in demand as a commentator in the media, challenging the accepted and encouraging the permissive. Identifying with the local community, he was…a leading figure in the ‘Fremantle renaissance’ of the 1970s. On campus he was at times an exasperating colleague, but he was never dull and never mean, and to many he proved uniquely stimulating.”
Golden Tongue
John gave radio talks on the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s “Notes on the News” program. Edited versions of the talks plus other essays (some co-authored by Frances Rowland) on various aspects of Australian society—urbanization, education, medicine, violence, drinking, drugs, militarism, politics, and foreign policy—were published in Cabbages & Kings: Essays on Australian Society (1977). Here two excerpts from the talk/essay “Global Chess,” in response to the revelation that the U.S. (Nixon/Kissinger) played a role in the 1973 Chilean coup that ousted Allende and ushered in the brutal Pinochet era:
“I’m not surprised—he (Kissinger) was a professor of mine at Harvard in the early 1960s, and even then he made his morality quite clear. For the diplomat, taught Kissinger, there is only one rule—and that is for his country to win. The world is seen as a kind of global chess game, in which nations make moves and counter-moves. The great powers are the players, while lesser counties, revolutionary movements, military hardware, populations, and other resources are the pieces to be defended and taken. There is no compassion, no concern for human joy or sorrow, no moral code limiting what can and cannot be done. There is only strategy.”
“Sometimes I think it’s about time for the pawns—the people of the world—to stop being so easily pushed around and to demand something better. Why don’t we? The evidence of duplicity, self-seeking and manipulation on the part of politicians is overwhelming. What keeps us from rising up in rage and stopping it? I suppose the answer is two-fold. On the one hand is a kind of weary cynicism which expects nothing better. On the other hand is a simple naïveté which permits us to be gulled over and over again. But both these attitudes produce apathy and thus are luxuries purchased at the expense of democracy. America is learning the bitter lesson of how expensive those luxuries are.”
John was prescient in predicting societal trends as revealed in those essays and in some of his multiple publications from the WBSI. He was able to synthesize knowledge from many fields and create new paradigms for understanding the world. His writings on peacemaking in a militant world won him the United Nations Association of Australia Media Peace Prize** four consecutive years.
The “golden tongue” of John’s Harvard debating days was diminished (his perception, at least) when he moved to Australia, per these poignant lines to a sister: “As someone who’s spent most of my life as a word-smith, my loss of voice in immigrating to Australia has probably been the most severe price I’ve had to pay—especially in the years of my professional life here. May have been good for me though, over all. My native eloquence was always a two edged sword in many ways. Here it cuts little ice. Australians are pretty scornful of eloquence in general and certainly not inclined to credit American forms of it. They clearly find it rather embarrassing. The quick retort, the clever put-down, and the cynical barb are more admired forms of presentation here.” (letter, 1998)
Culture-related communication issues aside, did John have professional weaknesses? Bolton noted: “His lecturing style generated widespread appeal, although critics alleged he was better at challenging orthodoxy than in offering students systematic alternatives. If he rejected the capitalist work ethic he was certainly no ally of the Marxists. He saw himself as enabling individuals to live life more abundantly.”
“John became easily bored with bureaucratic practices,” wrote Bolton, “nor could he find the taste for the infighting on committees and lobbying necessary to protect the innovative. Having been viewed by many as encapsulating the Murdoch ethos in its first years, he seemed in danger of becoming a more peripheral figure as the seventies gave way to the pragmatic eighties. Tenured impotence on a professional salary did not suit John. He took the honorable course of resigning and moved to Gracetown.”
* Geoffrey Bolton went on to become Chancellor at Murdoch and was named Western Australia's 2006 Australian of the Year.
** John's letter to a sister offered this information. My query to the UN Association of Australia for details did not receive a reply.
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