Larry Brilliant Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Larry, welcome to Berkeley
Harry, thank you.
Where were you born and raised?
Detroit.
Looking back, how do you think your parents shaped your thinking about the world?
Good question to start. I was a first-and-a-half generation American. My dad was born in Russia, what we used to call Russia. It was actually Byelorussia. My mom was born in the U.S. I was the first person from either side of my family to graduate high school. It was very important to them that I go to school, and I think they decided long before I did that I would be a doctor. It's a pretty common story, where I grew up anyway.
You went to the University of Michigan but you were a philosophy major, right?
I was, yes.
Did you switch because of this high bar that they had set for you in your career, or did other things influence you to move from philosophy to medicine?
Well, I never graduated. My children remind me of that. I have two doctorates and a master's degree but I don't have a bachelor's degree, and if anybody from the University of Michigan is listening, I'd still like to have one, even though I was a professor there for ten years. I pleaded with them to give me a bachelor's degree but they wouldn't. So, I went right from philosophy to medical school.
My dad died when I was a junior. I had planned to go to law school, so I'd applied to law school on the east coast, [but] when my dad died there was no time for me to change easily, and Wayne State University Medical School in Detroit, Michigan, where my mother lived, was the only place I could get into. She had asked me to stay with her after her husband and her father both died in a period of a week. So, I agreed, [as] I should have, to stay with my mom in Detroit. I was very happy to go there and it was a wonderful experience, but I never went back and finished my undergraduate degree, which my daughter reminds me of all the time.
I think it's fair to say you didn't need it, actually.
Well, you don't know that! I didn't know that at the time. If I'd been a bust as a doctor, I might have needed it.
You came out here for your internship, out to the Bay Area, and we're talking about the sixties. How did the sixties affect you?
Oh, not at all!!
Well, it wasn't fair. I took a summer job when I was in medical school to make some money, and that was the Johnson administration, that was the Great Society, and I took a job with the Office of Equal Health Opportunity. I was a "civil rights specialist." I had a card that said "Civil Rights Specialist," and for some reason most of my friends were sent to Mississippi or Louisiana but they sent me to San Francisco. So, I arrived in San Francisco with a Civil Rights Specialist ID card, right in the middle of the Summer of Love. That's not fair, to take a boy from Detroit, Michigan, and send him to San Francisco in the middle of the Summer of Love. That's just not fair, and I don't think I've ever quite recovered from that.
What was it that gave you this strong sense of social justice that you carried throughout your career? Was that something that came from your family, was it something that came out of the sixties, or all of the above?
I think all of the above. The high school that I went to, which was Mumford High School, has produced a large number of kids who were social activists. I joined the NAACP when I was fifteen, I think. It was a time in which there was a Movement, there were "we" and "they"; you knew that you were part of the movement, you knew when you met someone they were part of the movement, you knew the movement was about freedom and democracy for poor people and Black people, and later against the war.
There's another Movement today, but it's a right-wing movement, and I'm sure that the people who are in that movement recognize each other when they see each other on the street. It's not a movement that I'm part of, but I recognize the power of that movement.
The University of Michigan when I was going to college was a place where the first teach-ins were. The Port Huron Statement was being drafted while I was a junior in college. The idea of revolutionary change for the better -- not guns, not that kind of revolution, but a change for the better -- was in the air. I think that most of my generation felt it, many of my generation, certainly in Ann Arbor.
When you were here you were called upon and chose to go to Alcatraz to deliver a baby for a woman who wanted to have her child on Indian soil. This was at the time that the Indians had reclaimed Alcatraz. That was a turning point that led you away from being a traditional doctor. Talk a little about that. It's a lot to cover but it's important to mention.
Well, nobody else would go. This woman wanted to have a baby. She was a Lakota Sioux. Her name was Lou Trudell, her husband was John Trudell. It was very important to her to give birth to this Lakota Sioux baby on Indian held land. There was no water, no electricity, no doctors; it was dangerous. Day after day, Herb Caen, the columnist, would write, "Is there no doctor willing to go? Is there no doctor willing to go?" After three or four of those columns, I said, "Of course there's a doctor willing to go. I'll go." It just seemed like: how could I not go, really?
As a result of that -- I'm going to summarize here a little -- you wound up being offered a role in a movie, what became a very bad movie.
It was a bad movie then. It hasn't "become" a bad movie!
Okay. And you wound up going on a tour with Wavy Gravy and others through the United States. You were to be the doctor attending them in this movie. So, this was another step which ultimately led you to go East, and we're not talking here about the east coast. You went to South Asia. Talk a little about the evolution -- here you were, the traveler, I guess.
The first thing I learned is how little the media can be trusted to know what they're talking about. As soon as I delivered this baby, or Lou Trudell delivered the baby, I just was there to assist, and then I got back off of Alcatraz. The moment I hit dry land there were television cameras put in my face, and all of a sudden, I was answering the question: "What do the Indians want?"
I was an "expert on Indian affairs," having spent three weeks on the island! I didn't know anything about Native Americans. I was embarrassed at how little I knew. But suddenly I was on all the talk shows as an expert on Indian affairs, which I think is a lesson for all of us. I don't think that part of the media's changed very much.
I did get this invitation to play a young doctor in this movie. They offered to pay for a clinic on Alcatraz if I did it, so it seemed like the right thing to do. We lived on a bunch of psychedelic painted hippie buses.
The old expression was, "You're either on the bus or you're off the bus." I was most decidedly on the bus. We got on the bus in San Francisco and we got off the bus in Kathmandu. We had to change buses at the Big Pond, but it took us two years. We spent a lot of time getting a water pump repair in Turkey and going through the Khyber Pass, and Iran and Iraq, and I can tell you lots of stories.
It's a very sad moment for me, though, because my kids can never make that trip. When I did that as a young American, I would go into the smallest, most remote villages and there might be a picture of Buddha or Mecca, or in a Hindu village a picture of Ram or Shiva. More often than not, on that holy, sacred place, there'd be a picture of John F. Kennedy. It's going to be a long time before there's a picture of another American president, certainly not this president, in those places.
I was treated wonderfully every place that I went. "American" meant something noble and wonderful. It was like in all those countries we were a species apart. Like having a rich uncle whom you sort of knew felt benevolently towards you. That's the way they looked at us, even though we were the weirdest kids in the world. We were dressed funny, and I'm sure our living arrangements of forty people living on two buses offended many different religious sensibilities, but we were treated so wonderfully well.
You had become ill while you were at medical school. Was this journey taking you to the East an effort to discover your own soul and the means by which you would live your life? Did that experience of being ill inform your desire to answer some of these big questions?
Maybe. I was certainly too stupid at the time to put it in such a noble context as you just did. But it certainly allowed me, or forced me, to change where I was going. I was going to be a surgeon, and I developed a parathyroid adenoma, which is either a cancer or a non-cancerous lesion of the parathyroid. In those days the line was pretty blurred. I had my parathyroid surgically removed, and then I was told that I should take some time off, so I couldn't go on to the residency program. So certainly, the illness was the precipitating factor in my not going on to my residency.
It is interesting. Certainly, the journey to the East is a journey of self-discovery, and certainly, along the way I sought out holy men of Muslims and Jews and Christians and Buddhists and Hindus, and almost as every mile we went closer to India another veil of the mystery dropped off. I don't think it was because I was sick, but it certainly was the precipitant cause for my being able to take that trip.
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