A. H. Raskin

As a reporter and editorial writer for four decades at The New York Times, Abe Raskin covered labor at its mightiest and lived to see union power reduced to a whisper of its former self.

All the great labor negotiations after World War II in steel, coal and autos carried either his byline or his editorial viewpoint, graced with his clear economic analysis.

Mr. Raskin covered the emergence of labor leaders who had the strength and sophistication to make the American labor movement a formidable, countervailing force to corporate power.

He did more than observe. During World War II, when he was in the U.S. Army, two soldiers under his command gently removed Montgomery Ward CEO Sewell Avery, still sitting in his chair, from his office after he refused to comply with an order from President Franklin Roosevelt to settle peacefully with a union.

In 1952, Mr. Raskin's articles about wrongdoers encouraged the American Federation of Labor to set up a special antiracketeering committee. For his work in this period he won the George Polk Memorial Award, a Page One Award from the Newspaper Guild and an award from the Society of Silurians, a group of professional journalists.

Stanley Levey, a colleague who also wrote about labor for the Times, called Mr. Raskin "one of the most amazing telephone manipulators since Alexander Graham Bell."

James R. Hoffa, the head of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, told him: "Abe, you're going to scratch yourself on your typewriter one day and die of blood poisoning."

It was cancer, though, that got him, in 1993, at 82.