Editor’s note: This page was originally published on October 16, 2015 and was substantially rewritten on June 21, 2026 to reflect the 2017 dissolution of Rasky Baerlein, the renaming of the firm to Rasky Partners, and the death of Larry Rasky in 2020. The original publication date is preserved.
Rasky Baerlein no longer exists. The firm split in February 2017. Its founder, Larry Rasky, died on March 22, 2020. The PR shop that once anchored Boston Democratic politics now operates under a new name, with a new structure, and without the man whose voice defined it for thirty years.
This is a retrospective — the arc of one of the most influential independent communications firms in the Northeast, the people who built it, and the events that reshaped it.
The founder
Lawrence B. Rasky was born February 9, 1951, in Teaneck, New Jersey. He graduated from Emerson College in Boston and entered politics through the side door — working as a security guard at a campaign event in the late 1970s and talking his way into a role. He landed in Iowa as part of President Jimmy Carter’s primary operation, then served as deputy press secretary for the Carter-Mondale national campaign.
From there the resume reads like a who’s-who of Northeast Democratic politics: communications director for John Kerry’s first Senate campaign. Special assistant to Congressman Ed Markey. Top campaign aide for John Glenn’s 1984 primary bid. Press secretary for Joe Biden’s 1988 presidential campaign — the relationship that would define the rest of his career.
The firm
Rasky launched his communications shop in 1989 as the Rasky Group, after Biden’s first presidential bid ended. In 1997 he merged with Joe Baerlein’s public-affairs unit — spun out of the Boston law firm Choate Hall & Stewart — and brought in Ann Carter as a third principal. The firm took the name Rasky Baerlein Strategic Communications and grew through two decades into one of Boston’s most powerful independent agencies.
The client roster ran across the most consequential business and political events of the era. Rasky Baerlein advised John Henry, Larry Lucchino, and Tom Werner on the winning bid for the Boston Red Sox. The firm guided the Archdiocese of Boston through the Catholic Church clergy abuse crisis. It represented Arthur T. Demoulas in the Market Basket family war that played out across Massachusetts in 2014. It worked for the Suffolk University Board of Trustees, FEMA, Catholic Charities, Boston Medical Center, Petroleos de Venezuela, Engie, Massachusetts General Hospital, BJ’s Wholesale Club, Citizens Financial Group, and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care.
In early 2014, Rasky Baerlein merged with Prism Public Affairs, a Washington DC firm — the move that gave it a true bi-city footprint.
The 2015 episode
Everything-PR’s coverage of the firm intersected briefly with Larry Rasky in October 2015, when this site published a profile of Rasky Baerlein. Rasky sent a letter threatening litigation. No suit was ever filed. Everything-PR ran a follow-up at the time. With ten years of distance, the episode reads as a footnote in a much larger career — the kind of friction that happens between a PR principal and an industry trade outlet from time to time, and that almost never goes anywhere.
The substantive story of Rasky Baerlein was never that exchange. It was the firm itself.
The 2017 split
In February 2017, after twenty years of partnership, the founders separated. Larry Rasky bought out Joe Baerlein and Ann Carter. The firm — retaining roughly 50 employees across Boston and Washington — was renamed Rasky Partners, Inc., under Larry Rasky’s sole leadership. Joe Baerlein launched Baerlein & Partners. Ann Carter exited to start her own venture. All three principals described the split as amicable. Existing clients largely stayed with the renamed firm.
The reshaping was significant for the Boston PR market. Rasky Baerlein had been a category-defining independent. Its dissolution — even into a successor firm with continuity of staff and clients — marked a generational transition for the city’s communications industry.
The Biden chapter
Larry Rasky’s relationship with Joe Biden spanned more than three decades. Press secretary for the 1988 campaign. Communications director for the 2008 campaign. Adviser through Biden’s two terms as Vice President. In the fall of 2019 he co-launched Unite the Country, a super PAC supporting Biden’s 2020 presidential bid, and served as its treasurer. He was actively working on the campaign up to the week he died.
The death
Larry Rasky died at his home in Quincy, Massachusetts on the morning of March 22, 2020. He was 69. The family disclosed that he posthumously tested positive for COVID-19, and noted underlying health conditions. He was survived by his wife and children, including his son Will Rasky, who worked at the firm.
The Rasky Partners statement read in part: “Larry was a giant in so many ways, not just professionally but personally. He loved and was loved by so many. He always treated the company like a family.” Biden, reached by phone the night of his death, called him “a real friend.” Senator Ed Markey, for whom Rasky had worked decades earlier, used a baseball metaphor: “When your team is in desperate straits, Larry Rasky would be the relief pitcher you would bring in to strike out the other side and win the game.”
The firm today
Rasky Partners continues to operate from Boston and Washington as an independent public relations, lobbying, and public affairs firm. Its specialties remain the disciplines Larry Rasky built it around: crisis communications, reputation management, government relations, public affairs, lobbying, financial services, healthcare, energy, and grassroots organizing.
Baerlein & Partners operates separately under Joe Baerlein. Ann Carter pursued her own ventures after the split.
The legacy
Larry Rasky belonged to a generation of communications principals who built independent firms on relationships, judgment, and time-in-the-room. The model he represented — the politically-connected, regionally-rooted, boutique advisory shop — is now being reshaped again by AI, by consolidation, and by the rise of the answer engines as the new venue for reputation. The firms that survive the next chapter will look different from the ones Rasky and Baerlein built in 1997. The fundamentals — loyalty, discretion, judgment in a crisis — will not.
About the Author
Everything-PR is the intelligence platform for communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era. Thirty-plus publications. Publishing since 2009. Original reporting, research, and analysis — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question.
