Dr. Alan Berkman's Case Revisited: Part 1

“…Sadly, the end of May and beginning of June were very hard times for me…Alan Berkman, not only a staunch anti-imperialist who worked and fought in solidarity with oppressed people and nations, but also one of my comrade codefendants and a very human, dedication man died from the cancers he had been battling and always winning, until June…And yet we continue to sing, remembering those who have come before and will come after…”— 1980's Resistance Conspiracy Case Co-Defendant and (now-deceased) U.S. Political Prisoner Marilyn Buck in 2009

On the Upper West Side and in other New York City neighborhoods during the 1980’s, some members or supporters of dissident political groups (like the Republic of New Afrika [RNA], committees involved in the struggle for Puerto Rican independence, and the May 19th Communist Organization) were especially targeted by the U.S. government for detention without trial and/or imprisonment; and, if convicted, were treated as “common criminals” or “terrorists,” rather than as political prisoners, while incarcerated—after receiving excessively long prison sentences.

One such target of U.S. government repression during the 1980’s was a physician and May 19th group member named Alan Berkman who, after attending Columbia University’s medical school in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, spent around 8 years in various U.S. prison cells between 1982 and 1992. So in her new University of North Carolina Press-published biography of Dr. Berkman (who died in 2009 at the age of 63), Co-Conspirator For Justice: The Revolutionary Life Of Dr. Alan Berkman, Wellesley College Professor Emerita Susan M. Reverby examines “Alan’s unique journey into differing forms of political action;” and observes that “the revolutionary movements of Native Americans, Puerto Ricans, and African Americans considered him a comrade who took personal risks, courted death, and repeatedly refused the FBI’s promise of freedom and witness protection if he gave information on his allies.”

Around three years after Dr. Berkman’s death, “his widow, the physician Barbara Zeller,” gave Professor Reverby “his unpublished memoir, hundreds of letters, pages of legal papers, and linked” Reverby “to friends—willing to talk.” According to Reverby, Dr. Berkman’s unpublished “memoir was built upon the letters” he “sent out during the years he was incarcerated as well as any journal notes” made in prison that “he was able to keep;” and “when he wrote” his memoir, “circa early in 2000, he asked his correspondents” during his period of incarceration “to return his letters to him.”

After parts of this unpublished memoir, titled “Brother Doc,” were given to two of his friends to provide some editing help, Dr. Berkman next “contacted a fraternity brother” (from his early 1960’s undergraduate days as a pre-med student at Cornell University) “who was now a renowned sports agent and entertainment lawyer,” who then “passed the book on to a literary agent who…pronounced Alan’s voice not dramatic enough,” according to Co-Conspirator For Justice. Reverby notes, however, that one of the friends who helped edit the manuscript “blamed the loss of the publishing opportunity on Alan’s taking the manuscript to the fraternity brother.”

Yet another reason the “Brother Doc” memoir was never finished between 2001 and 2009 by Dr. Berkman was, perhaps, because he worried that “he could not tell the whole truth about his comrades who were still in prison or could be tried on other charges” and “he had too much else to do,” according to Co-Conspirator For Justice.

Besides the unpublished “Brother Doc” manuscript and Dr. Berkman’s letters, other historical informational sources for Professor Reverby’s biography came from nearly 100 “interviews in person or by Skype, email, or telephone with Alan’s friends, lawyers, family, and comrades,” historical material contained in the San Francisco-based Freedom Archives and the material contained in the papers that Dr. Berkman’s 1980’s Resistance Conspiracy Case Co-Defendant and former U.S. political prisoner and May 19th group member, Susan Rosenberg, donated to the Archives at Smith College, “which provide an additional perspective on the legal issues and the Resistance Conspiracy Case, according to Co-Conspirator For Justice’s “Note On Sources.”

By means of a Freedom of Information Act request in 2013, the Co-Conspirator For Justice author was also able to obtain a de-classified copy of Dr. Berkman’s FBI file to utilize while writing his biography; and in 2019, “right before the book went into production,” Professor Reverby was able “to obtain all of the May 19th Communist Organizations FBI files,” that have been de-classified so far.

In addition to a prologue and coda (each of 5 pages) and 73 pages of end of book footnotes, the bulk of Professor Susan Reverby’s Co-Conspirator For Justice book consists of 16 chapters, divided into four parts (each containing a 2-page preview) that reflect the author’s political belief that Dr. Berkman’s “life embodied a form of solidarity that crossed all the usual lines as he continually negotiated the use, and negation, of the privileges his gender, class, sexuality, and race gave him;” and that there were “four parts of his journey: conventional upbringing, move toward political extremism, imprisonment of the worst kind, and recommitment to meaningful global political actions.”

Part 1, titled “Eagle Scout, Fraternity President, Doctor,” consists of four chapters that provide readers with some information about Dr. Berkman’s family background and what he was into while growing up in Middletown, New York and attending Cornell University as an undergraduate; before he started to become more politically radicalized, after enrolling at Columbia University’s institutionally racist College of Physicians and Surgeons medical school (which then accepted only “two Black men, one of whom was Nigerian,” in Dr. Berkman’s class of 1971) in Washington Heights, in the fall of 1967. And in a chapter titled “Dr. Salk or Dr. Lenin,” readers are told that in 1971, Dr. Berkman “was asked by individuals in the political underground connected to his Columbia friends if he would be willing to help out people who were formally in Weatherman,” he “quietly said yes” and he would then “see people in clandestine circumstances,” during the 1970’s.

Chapter 4 in Part 1, titled “Political Medicine,” is the most important chapter of this part of the book because, in its “New York To Wounded Knee” section, it recalls how Dr. Berkman, Barbara Zeller and a “political friend nurse,” brought medical supplies to the American Indian Movement [AIM] activists occupying Wounded Knee, South Dakota in 1973 and spent around 8 days with the AIM protesters “providing rudimentary” medical care; and it also indicates how Dr. Berkman was further radicalized, personally and politically, by what he experienced at Wounded Knee.

Readers who were politically active in the anti-imperialist left U.S. movements of the 1970’s, 1980’s and 1990’s will probably find Part 2, titled “Into The Struggle” and Part 3, titled “Life And Near Death In The American Gulag” of Co-Conspirator For Justice to be the most interesting parts of the book. Part 2 includes (besides its preview) five chapters, with the following titles: “Revolutionary Road”; “The Left of the Left”; “Creating Life, Choosing Love”; “Violence, Death, and Their Consequences”; and “Clandestine Actions”. And Part 3 includes (besides its preview, that’s titled “The Government Strikes Back”) four chapters with the following titles: “Becoming Brother Doc”; “Isolation and Rethinking”; “Resistance Is Not A Crime”; and “A Conspiracy for Life”.

According to chapter 5 of Co-Conspirator For Justice, when the U.S. anti-imperialist leftist Weather Underground Organization [WUO] released its collectively-written book, Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism in July of 1974, Dr. Berkman “was critical of Prairie Fire’s final draft and its politics” and “did not plan to be part of what was being called the Prairie Fire Distribution Committee.”

Yet, according to the same chapter, after spending “several months over the summer of 1974 at the Lowndes County Community Health Clinic in Haynesville, Alabama,” Dr. Berkman was “recruited by what the Weather leadership now called the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee or PFOC” and “asked to take a leadership role in the Northeast.” And in the fall of 1975, “the Weather leadership asked" him and another PFOC organizer “to be two of the five national organizers for what would be called the `Hard Times Are Fighting Times’ Conference,” that was held in Chicago between Jan. 30 and Feb. 1, 1976, which attracted over 2,000 U.S. anti-imperialist Movement activists and supporters (and was reported on extensively by U.S. leftist journals and newspapers, like the now-defunct, then-Manhattan-based, independent radical U.S. left weekly Guardian newspaper).

Chapter 6 of Professor Susan Reverby’s Co-Conspirator For Justice book then describes how, following this conference, former PFOC group members in New York “formed the above-ground group they called the May 19th Communist Organization;” and that Dr. Berkman was “one of the few men who remained in May 19th” during the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. But Professor Reverby (who received a first batch of de-classified FBI “May 19th Communist Organization” surveillance files in April 2019 and a second batch of de-classified FBI “May 19th Communist Organization” files in October 2019) notes that “the FBI began to track the group” in the late 1970’s; although this group of politically dissident U.S. Movement activists included “probably fewer than 100 people.”

So after he became “the attending physician for imprisoned Puerto Rican militant William Guillermo Morales” and Morales later escaped from the prison ward at Bellevue Hospital in May 1979, for example, Dr. Berkman was, according to this chapter “brought under the watchful eyes of the FBI;” and “the FBI records on May 19th repeatedly reference Alan’s purported role in Morales’s escape.” (end of part 1, to be continued)