58 CORNELL ALUMNI MAGAZINE

MJ20_berkman_PROOF_4.indd 58 4/16/20 7:44 AM Complex Character

An aalumlum explores the life of Alan Berkman ’67, a physician who spent years behind bars for crimes committed in the name of revolution

BY BETH SAULNIER

WANTED MAN: BerkmBerkman’s an’s FBFBII poster from hisis tim e o n th e ru nn

lan Berkm an ’67 and Susan M okotoff R everby ’67 grew up together in M iddletow n, N ew York, and w ere classm ates at Cornell— but their lives on the H ill and afterw ard cou ld Ascarcely h ave been m ore differen t. In college, B erk m an — an Eagle Scout and National M erit Scholar— played football, was president of his fraternity, and m ajored in zoology with an eye tow ard m edical school. R everby, an ILR student, w as an ardent antiwar activist w ho joined the radical group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and organized a draft card burning. After graduation, her résumé became more establishment: she earned a Ph D in A m erican studies from Boston U n iversity, joined the facu lty at W ellesley C ollege, got tenu re, and becam e a prom inent historian of m edicine. Berkm an went to prison. It’s m ore com plicated than that, of course. Berkm an w as no ordinary inm ate, and his crim es were as idealistic as they were in fam ous. A m em ber and supporter of antigovernm ent revolu - tion ary groups in the Seventies and Eighties, Berkm an — by then a physician w ith an M D from C olum bia— w as charged w ith abetting one of the era’s m ost notorious robbery-hom icides. H e jum ped bail and w ent on the run for years, com m itted other felon ies w hile underground, w as apprehended, and eventually spen t nearly a decade in prison . ›

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MJ20_berkman_PROOF_4.indd 59 4/16/20 7:44 AM In June, the University of North Carolina Press is publishing Reverby’s book about Berkman. Entitled Co-conspirator for Justice, it’s her attempt to make sense of a life that started off with great prom- ise, took one startling detour after another, and ended all too soon. “I hope readers see that people can make political choices for the right reasons, but with the wrong strategies—and that they can overcome that and become different people at differ- ent moments in their life,” says Reverby, who retired from teaching at Wellesley in 2016 and is now a professor emerita. “People change over time and should be given another chance; not everybody is going to be who they were at twenty. Here’s a really brilliant, complex man—and here’s his story.” Reverby and Berkman were more acquaintances than friends; they both grew up Jewish in what was then the predominantly gentile, white, working-class city of Middletown, located about seventy miles northwest of New York City. Reverby attended Berkman’s bar mitzvah and was his lab partner in bio class; when she was editor of their high school newspa- per, she hired him as sports editor. Once they got to Cornell, they mostly lost touch after their first year, though they’d reconnect when Berkman—who had a car—would give her rides home for break. “I really knew him as a kid, then as an adolescent in college—I never knew him as a man,” she says. “I was completely fascinated by the fact that so many of us were politicized at Cornell in that time period, but he was not. How could he have been untouched, almost until the end, by everything that was going on?” THROUGH THE YEARS: Berkman (from top) in his bar mitzvah portrait; Berkman himself traced the dawn of his with Reverby in the yearbook photo political awakening to a lecture in Bailey for their high school honor society; Hall his senior spring in which black power with a guest at a Cornell fraternity activist Stokely Carmichael passionately party; and in his orientation photo denounced white supremacy, the draft, at Columbia medical school and the Vietnam War. As Reverby writes: “This straight-laced fraternity president, who started his college years amused by William F. Buckley and racist jokes, may not have left Cornell a convert to antiracist radicalism, but his views were changing.” It was during med school at Columbia that Berkman’s politics radically evolved, spurred not only by opposition to the war but by his experiences treating patients from poor, minority neighborhoods in the city. He eventually started providing medical care and training to members of the Weather Underground—the mili- ; MED SCHOOL, ARCHIVES & SPECIAL COLLECTIONS/ tant left-wing group (an offshoot of SDS) that espoused violent revolution—whose adherents committed arson, bombings, and other crimes in the name of opposing the war and overthrow- ing the government. In October 1981, with the aim of financing their revolu- PHOTOS: PARTY, 1967 CORNELLIAN tionary activities, members of the (by then dormant) Weather COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY HEALTH SCIENCES LIBRARY; OTHERS, PROVIDED

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MJ20_berkman_PROOF_5.indd 60 4/17/20 1:37 PM Underground and the Black Liberation Army stole $1.6 million from a Brink’s truck in Rockland County, killing one of the driv- ers and two police officers during the heist and ensuing getaway. One of the robbers was badly injured when she accidentally shot herself in the leg—and Berkman secretly tended to her wounds, cadging supplies from the hospital where he worked. After word of his involvement came out, he was subpoenaed by a federal grand jury as a witness in the case; he refused to comply and spent months in jail for contempt. He was later charged in the robbery as an accessory after the fact—making him (accord- ing to his lawyers) the first U.S. physician to face such charges since Samuel Mudd, who set John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg after the Lincoln assassination. Rather than stand trial, Berkman jumped bail in February 1983 and went underground. It meant leaving his family behind; for the next several years he’d have only sporadic and furtive contact with his wife (a Columbia classmate and fellow activist) and their young daughter. While on the run, he robbed a Connecticut supermarket at gunpoint, steal- ing more than $20,000 for the revolutionary cause. His time underground (see excerpt) lasted until May 1985, when he and a compatriot were captured in Pennsylvania. As the New York Times later noted: “In their car, agents found a pistol and a shotgun and keys to a garage with 100 pounds of dynamite, false identity cards for federal agents, and more than 275 counterfeit Social Security cards.” PARALLEL LIVES: Reverby (above), now a professor emerita at Wellesley. Left: erkman was tried in federal court on numerous Her senior portrait in the charges, including weapons possession—the abet- 1967 Cornellian. ting charge was eventually dropped—and convicted Bon all counts. He served eight years in prison, during which he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease, a form of lymphoma from which an uncle had died. Some of the most harrowing passages in Reverby’s book chronicle Berkman’s desperate attempts to get adequate care behind bars—including a poignant scene when he shows an inex- perienced and overwhelmed prison doctor how to palpate a cancerous lump in his armpit. In what Reverby calls a life or death moment, Berkman was passing out from septic shock when he had the presence of mind to bite down on his IV ‘So many of us were politicized at line, setting off an alarm that brought staff to his bedside. “I learned that like ‘military justice,’ ‘prison medicine’ is an Cornell in that time period, but he was oxymoron,” says Reverby, one of the many friends and acquain- tances who were tested as a potential bone marrow donor for not,’ says Reverby. ‘How could he have Berkman. “I was horrified, because it was clear that—as Alan himself said in an interview on ‘60 Minutes,’—if he hadn’t been been untouched, almost until the end, a physician, he would have died.” NAILELNORC While behind bars, Berkman provided medical advice to by everything that was going on?’ fellow inmates, work that earned him the moniker “Brother 7 69, 1MOTTO; BSAAA HDNI, LPO: TSOTOHP LPO: HDNI, BSAAA 1MOTTO; 69, 7 Doc” (also the title of his unpublished prison memoir, an invalu- able resource for Reverby). After his release in 1992, Berkman returned to New York City and the practice of medicine—he’d never lost his license—eventually joining the public health faculty at Columbia. He became not only a passionate advocate for poor, underserved patients but a driving force in providing treatment to people with HIV/AIDS, particularly those from ›

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MJ20_berkman_PROOF_7_JBOK_revised.indd 61 5/11/20 11:30 AM marginalized groups. After endur- ACTIVIST: B e rk m a n s p e a k in g in g m u ltiple cancer recurrences, he at a 1998 dem onstration in New York City. Below: His apprehension and died in 2009 at the age of sixty-three. im p ris o n m e n t m a d e n a tio n a l h e a d lin e s . “Ph ysician , fugitive, federal prison er, clinician to the hom eless, advocate for AIDS patients, epidemiologist,” the Times s a id in h is o b it u a r y . “ T h a t w a s th e arc of A lan B erk m a n ’s ca reer.” Reverby started researching Berkm an’s life eight years ago, when sh e w as invited to give th e m ajor annual lecture for the A m erican Association for the History of Medicine and realized he’d make a com pelling subject. She reached out to Berkm an’s w idow , w ho gave her access to his papers, and she soon realized sh e h ad th e m ak in gs of a book. (Reverby had previously published tw o books on the notori- ous Tuskegee study, in which African Am erican men were left with untreated syphilis for decades so doctors cou ld observe th e cou rse of th e disease; in 2010 sh e ‘There’s always a tension between what made global headlines for uncovering a case from the Forties in which Am erican researchers had purposely infected prisoners you owe history,’ Reverby says, ‘and in G uatem ala w ith venereal diseases to study their treatm ent.) She got in touch with old friends from Cornell and M iddletow n, what you owe the people you’re writing in cludin g B erkm an’s girlfriend from h is h igh school and college years, w ho’d kept all his letters. She ultim ately interview ed about, whose lives you’re exposing.’ nearly 100 people, including som e of Berkm an’s fellow revo- lutionaries— three of w hom she spoke to behind bars— and members of his family. “There’s an old joke that the difference betw een anthropology and history is that with history, your in form ants are usually dead— but in th is case, people w ere still alive,” R everby observes. “Som e w ou ldn ’t talk abou t th e u n d ergro u n d ; th e F B I is still lo o k in g fo r tw o p eo p le. You have to be really careful about how you write about th is period. T here’s alw ays a ten sion betw een w h atyou ow e history and what you owe the people you’re writing about, whose lives you’re exposing.” When Berkman was still in prison, Reverby penned an item about him for their class’s 25th Reunion history. The last time she saw him in person was at their 35th, when she asked him to speak at a session she had orga- nized on the effect of the Vietnam War on their class, and they drove together from M iddletow n to Ithaca and back. “W ith m y other books, I felt like som eone else m ight have writtenitten them—them— but but I’mI’m reallyreally thethe onlyonly personperson whowho couldcould havehave written this book,” she says. “It’s partly because I grew up with him and we’d been at Cornell together, so I had access to that. And I was politically close enough to w h at h e w as d o in g, b u t n o t in h is g ro u p . S o I h ad th e in sid er ex p erien ce b u t th e o u tsid er d ista n ce, a n d also the know ledge to deal with all of the m edical stuff. That’s why I thought, I really have to write this book— and I have to get it done before, G od forbid, som ething happens to me. W riting about Alan, you have this real

sen se of, ‘Tom orrow , you m ay not be here.’ ” n NEW SPAPERS.COM CLIPPINGS, PROVIDED; PHOTO,

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MJ20_berkman_PROOF_4.indd 62 4/16/20 7:44 AM The Fugitive An excerpt from Co-conspirator for Justice describes life on the run

lan’s descent into the political underground camera and laminating machine could be either began on February 4, 1983, with a subway stolen or bought in the still-thriving hidden econ- A ride to New York’s Grand Central Station. In omy in fake driver’s licenses and other “official” the men’s room he changed his clothes. After he had documents. Silk-screening equipment could forge done several evasions (changing subway lines, duck- motor vehicle inspection stickers, blank social secu- ing into differing buildings) and before a comrade rity cards, and licenses of various kinds. Comrades went to meet him, he had to make sure that he was who worked in car rental offices or retail stores not followed. He used fake identification to regis- compiled names and information from licenses, ter at a hotel. He went to the Metropolitan Museum checks, and credit cards to reuse someone else’s of Art, then to a parking garage where a car was identity, and others whose jobs involved typeset- waiting. Scrunched down in the back seat, he was ting did the printing. Libraries held old newspapers replaced fairly routinely at government offices with a whisked away. A comrade greeted him on the other where the obituaries of dead babies of the “right” “new” one from the name and birth date on a newly end in Austin, Texas. age could be used to create the identity of some- obtained birth certificate. Then a road test could be Over the next two and a half years, Alan and his one who did not exist. Claims of a “lost” license were taken under a new name. comrades would work very hard to determine what Anyone who watched the hundreds of spy films it meant to be a clandestine revolutionary group in that came out during the Cold War years, or read 1980s America. Alan was clear on where he stood at the stories on the underground printed in multiple the time: “I believed violence was necessary. I was ‘ When I first went underground, alternative newspapers, or talked to other clandes- equally convinced that revolutionary change must tine comrades would know in general what to do be an assertion of life, optimism, and respect for I was more nervous,’ Berkman to disappear. Alan’s comrades passed around, or humanity and not primarily an act of destruction.” later told a reporter. ‘And then memorized, packets of information of how to “go There was a method to life underground. It began under.” While he never wrote about the details, he with the creation of a new identity. At a time before I understood there’s a science did later tell a hometown reporter, “When I first chips in credit cards and cross-checked electronic to being clandestine.’ went underground, I was more nervous. And then I lists, assuming a new identity took ingenuity, time, understood there’s a science to being clandestine. and paper. Friends who worked in hospitals obtained In some ways Big Brother was not everywhere, if I blank birth certificates, and a small special Polaroid was careful. I became less nervous.” Both his medi- cal school training and his experience in high school theater proved useful in lessening that anxiety. New to the life of a clandestine revolutionary, they all had to figure out how to live and survive undetected. This required a simple disguise, since the money for plastic surgery was not available. With dark hair and male-pattern balding Alan had two choices: dyes and wigs. Without a beautician comrade, the drugstore dyes took their toll. The first time Alan tried to make his dark hair lighter, his bald- ness contrasted with his bleached and brassy hair. Even his comrades “rolled on the floor laughing” at how ridiculous he appeared in hair covered in what was known, at least in their circles, as “underground orange.” Others in their group straightened their curls or wore makeup for the first time since they were teenagers, if they had ever worn it at all. After the disaster of the hair dye, Alan had to settle for cheap brown and black wigs that barely stayed on his head FELLOW TRAVELERS: Berkman (far right) and his co-defendants during their trial on federal conspiracy charges, but at least made him appear less bald. Gone too which followed his years underground and subsequent apprehension. Top right: Reverby’s book. were his characteristic mustache and short beard. › PHOTOS: PROVIDED

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MJ20_berkman_PROOF_6.indd 63 4/23/20 2:51 PM What was not written down was transmitted verbally and individually, since conference calls were not an option. The key to much of their connect- ing was public pay phones, since these were much more anonymous than landlines, and less likely to be subject to what the police and FBI called “trap and trace,” a system of listening devices that told the authorities who was being called and from where. To avoid the possibility of the pay phones being caught in this web, they had to be found on safe corners, and hours were spent driving to phone locations far from where cadre members lived or worked. Calls had to be made to set up calls, and often they failed. Alan sometimes got angry when no one picked up at the other end. It never seemed to cross his mind that maybe he had gotten the times or numbers wrong. For Alan, paid work as any kind of health worker was impossible. The FBI had sent out what they labeled a “fugitive circular letter” to over 60,000 “convalescent, nursing, and rest homes, telephone answering services, ambulance services, medical laboratories, hospitals, and medical clinics nation- wide” to make sure they could find him if he tried For those underground, finding a place to live and to work. It was one thing to fake a driver’s license, paying for it was essential. If they had not all come but doing this for a medical license and an easily from the financially precarious working class, they ‘ Everything that is taken for checked work history would have been impossible. were certainly part of it now. “Every resource, every- granted in daily life under Instead Alan spent much time trying to keep up thing that is taken for granted in daily life under with his medicine, reading every medical journal he normal conditions had to be painstakingly acquired, normal conditions had to be could obtain from his friends or in libraries. He had often at considerable risk,” Alan would relate. Clothes painstakingly acquired,’ Berkman become his comrades’ doctor, able to diagnose and were mainly found in thrift shops and Salvation treat small ills. Army stores. The grocery chain Stop and Shop was said, ‘often at considerable risk.’ Sustaining the group’s spirits and lives in the jokingly referred to as “Stop and Grab” or “Stop and underground required new kinds of family life. Steal.” Cars were shared, often in need of repair, Everything was shared, and individuals were given and the bane of their existence when they broke where transience was more common and households “allowances” from collective monies. Eating out down repeatedly. Apartments in working-class and more fluid, fewer questions were asked. was too obvious and expensive. Alan, who had poor neighborhoods could be paid for monthly or To draw less attention to themselves, they often never cooked much, learned to be a chef. Practice weekly, with money orders or cash. In such areas, lived alone or in pairs, but they met up frequently improved his skills, but his comrades recalled disas- for meals. They invented kin and became cousins trous early efforts, such as his infamous clams, to one another. After a short time in Texas, Alan spaghetti sauce, and cream cheese. spent most of his next few years in the working- There were rules to invent and learn, as they class Connecticut town of Bridgeport, in the poorer lived in what [one comrade] described as a sections of nearby New Haven and Hamden, and “hyperaroused state” of constant carefulness and other places in parts of Pennsylvania, Baltimore, commitment. As Alan put it, “Every movement [was] and the Washington, D.C., area. filled with paranoia and [a] heightened sense of Alan and his comrades knew they were primarily alertness.” Simple mistakes, leaving a photo in a on their own, or would have to make contact with print-shop camera at work, or touching a newly other small groups of revolutionaries in their hidden made license without gloves and thereby leaving settings. It became paramount to develop ways to fingerprints, could easily bring disaster. keep themselves together, yet separate enough so that not everyone could be picked off after a single arrest. Communication had to happen without cell Edited and condensed from CO-CONSPIRATOR FOR phones, internet, thumb drives, or cloud computing, JUSTICE: THE REVOLUTIONARY LIFE OF DR. ALAN BERKMAN by Susan M. Reverby. Copyright © 2020 CAUSE AND EFFECT: Berkman (center) was among the none of which yet existed. Instructions, surveillance prisoners depicted in a 1990 mural. Top: Reunited with notes, and position papers had to be written by hand by Susan M. Reverby. Used by permission of the his wife and daughter after his release. or typed, then filed. University of North Carolina Press. PHOTOS: PROVIDED

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