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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Co-Conspirator for Justice: The Revolutionary Life of Dr. Alan Berkman by Susan M. Reverby Emily K. Hobson Co-Conspirator for Justice: The Revolutionary Life of Dr. Alan Berkman. By Susan M. Reverby. Justice, Power, and Politics. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. xii, 393. $30.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-5625-0.) In Co-Conspirator for Justice: The Revolutionary Life of Dr. Alan Berkman, Susan M. Reverby offers an absorbing and deeply researched biography of Alan Berkman, a doctor, political prisoner, and global AIDS activist. Reverby, who is a well-known historian of public health, grew up with Berkman in Middletown, New York, attending college with him at Cornell University and remaining "distant friends" until his death (p. 2). Critical of Berkman's involvement in the armed underground yet empathetically drawn to her subject, Reverby engagingly animates the movements at the center of Berkman's life. Born on September 4, 1945, and raised in a Jewish family that moved from the working class into the middle class, Berkman was radicalized while in medical school at Columbia University, which, through the influence of the 1968 student strike, Black Panther Party health clinics, and efforts to democratize Lincoln Hospital, became a kind of laboratory for the health Left. Berkman's commitment to do no harm drew him toward supporting selfdefense against state violence. He provided care to prisoners injured at the Attica prison uprising and to Native activists in the Wounded Knee occupation and, starting in the mid-1970s, became a leader in three interrelated organizations of white anti-imperialists—the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, the May 19th Communist Organization (May 19th), and the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee. [End Page 367] In 1981 Berkman provided emergency medical care to activists in the aftermath of the attempted robbery of a Brink's armored truck, a disastrous action that was intended to fund the Black Liberation Army and that resulted in the deaths of a Brink's guard and two police officers. The robbery became the focal point of an array of grand jury investigations and conspiracy charges; Berkman was jailed for refusing to provide information and then indicted with others as an accessory after the fact. In 1983 he went underground with fellow members of May 19th, and for two years he helped carry out several bombings of government and industry buildings, all without harm to individuals. Long interested in prison health care, Berkman experienced its inadequacy firsthand after his capture in 1985. Diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma, he found his life at risk as a result of medical negligence in prison, and he survived due largely to his own knowledge and connections. During the time he was held in the Marion Control Unit, a severe isolation facility that later closed due to international protest, he was the only licensed doctor in the prison. Berkman was convicted and sentenced to ten years on charges related to the Brink's robbery, and in 1988 he was indicted with six others for conspiracy bombing. The group, known as the Resistance Conspiracy codefendants, argued double jeopardy and termed their case a "testing ground" for government surveillance and the criminalization of dissent (p. 194). When Berkman's cancer returned, however, his codefendants agreed to guilty pleas and lengthy sentences in exchange for his charges being dismissed and the provision of cancer care. From his release in 1992 until his death in 2009, Berkman devoted himself to fighting HIV/AIDS. He became the medical director of an HIV/AIDS residential program, and after obtaining a fellowship and later a tenured professorship at Columbia, he researched HIV risk and prevention for people who were homeless, used drugs, were mentally ill, or had been imprisoned. Most significantly, he cofounded Health GAP, which won greater global access to HIV drugs through tactics ranging from insider advocacy to direct-action protest at the United Nations. In tracing Berkman's life, Reverby examines a white man's investments in anti-imperialism and feminism, a doctor's relationship to violence, and the centrality of health and medicine to the Left from the 1960s through the 1990s. Reverby draws skillfully on Berkman's unpublished papers, her own interviews...