Complex Character
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
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 FFBBII 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 . › MAY | JUNE 2020 59 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 CORNELLIAN 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 tionary activities, members of the (by then dormant) Weather COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY HEALTH SCIENCES LIBRARY; OTHERS, PROVIDED 60 CORNELL ALUMNI MAGAZINE 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 B on 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 › MAY | JUNE 2020 61 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 .