* Cockburn candidly identified himself as a Marxist, a socialist, and in later years, an anarchist.

* Cockburn supported the presidential campaigns of Ralph Nader in 2000 and 2004.

* During his years in America, Cockburn became close friends with such notables as Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, and Saul Landau.

* Cockburn routinely criticized the Democratic Party for failing to provide a sufficiently progressive alternative to the Republican Party; he also despised liberal public figures who were critical of those to their left politically.

* Cockburn authored or co-authored approximately 19 books.

* Cockburn was an early supporter of the environmental movement. In 1979 he collaborated with James Ridgeway to produce a reader on “political ecology.” Eleven years later, Cockburn and Susanna Hecht published the bestselling Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers, Defenders of the Amazon. Cockburn departed from leftist orthodoxy, however, by maintaining that human industrial activity was probably not the principal cause of global warming. He once derided environmental activists for having anointed a “hypocritical mountebank” named Al Gore as their “pied piper.”

* After Cockburn died in 2012, a  eulogy in Mother Jones magazine said that his writing “was informed by his own particular brew of Marxism, anarchism, and libertarianism, to which he would remain true throughout his life.” Years earlier, columnist George Will had written that Cockburn should be put into the Smithsonian Museum as “the last Stalinist.”