Susan M. Reverby - Co-conspirator for Justice: The Revolutionary Life of Dr. Alan Berkman

A very fewas heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and menserve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU, Resistance to Civil Government, 1849

I never thought I would know an American revolutionary. Yet my brilliant childhood friend Alan Berkman became one, and then a political prisoner of the United States as well as a global health activist. The man whose bar mitzvah I attended, and whom we voted the boy most likely to succeed in high school in 1963, found inspiration in John Brown, Vladimir Lenin, Che Guevara, and the poorest of the poor. He was an ally to Native American, African American, and Puerto Rican radicals and other revolutionaries around the world. Although never a killer, he believed for years that through armed propaganda he could change America. And later he would do more than that, much more, to transform policies and save lives across the globe.

Alan kept missing our high school reunions for none of the usual reasons. By the time of our tenth gathering, he had become a successful physician. He was absent because he had just crawled under the guns of law enforcement, illegally, to provide medical care to American Indian Movement stalwarts at the siege of Wounded Knee, or because he was busy caring for those the government labeled terrorists in New York City. It was only the beginning of efforts that brought him to attention of the police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In 1983, he missed our twentieth reunion, having skipped out on bail to go into the underground and become a bomber of political sites. Once he was caught and convicted, he survived nearly eight years in some of our countrys worst dungeons. By our thirtieth class get-together in 1993 he was a working physician again, in New York fighting acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) at the height of the epidemic; by the fortieth he was transforming how life-saving drugs were made available worldwide. And when our fiftieth came in 2013, he was already four years gone, felled by the treatment for his sixth round of cancer.

Growing up during the Cold War in Middletown, our upstate New York community, no one at our high school imagined being wanted by the FBI, or receiving an indictment for conspiracy to resist the policies of the U.S. government. Many of us only thought about becoming adults and leaving for somewhere, and something, bigger. Cornell University accepted both of us in 1963, but after orientation our college worlds drifted apart: his to the rigors of premed and mine to labor history and the antiwar and civil rights movements. He and I symbolized the many divides of the 1960s. Alan loved being a fraternity boy who played football. I organized men to burn their draft cards in protest against the Vietnam War and was almost thrown out of the university. As my friends and I considered the possibility of prison time for civil disobedience, Alan dreamed of a successful medical career.