Transcript of interview with Dr. William Bronston, 2007 August 19

Interview Date: August 19, 2007

Subject: Dr. William Bronston: Staff Physician, Willowbrook State School, trained at School of
Medicine, University of Southem Califomia, Pediatric Intemship, Children’s Hospital Los
Angeles, Resident, Menninger’s School Psychology and Ward Physician Topeka State Hospital,
Physician for the Black Panther Party in New Y ork.

On August 19, 2007, CSEA interviewed Dr. William Bronston, who formerly served as a
staff physician at the State operated Willowbrook State School for the Mentally Retarded,
located on Staten Island New Y ork, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The interview chronicles
his growing disillusionment with the treatment for the developmentally disabled, then referred to
as mentally retarded, in the State’s care. The interview exposes his growing agitation with the
situation at Willowbrook which culminated with a public expose’ of the situation and a battery of
lawsuits to force change. Bronston arrived at Willowbrook State School with a history of
activismin a multitude of areas including veterans, civil rights, antiwar, social, and professional
health care reform. Bronston was in large part responsible for organizing public health workers
in Kansas. Bronston’s unique recognition efforts in Kansas centered on patient care as well as
proper worker representation. Bronston discusses how he helped establish the American
Federation of State Municipal County Employees (AFSCME), District Council 50 in Kansas.

Bronston describes how he came to New Y ork State and was followed here by other
physicians involved in those union organizing efforts. Bronston discusses his tenure at
Willowbrook State School and explains that the lack of community based services and overall
disregard for genuine health services represent the era’s ignorance about the nature of
developmental disabilities. He offers perspective on the horrific, secret govemment testing on
the facility population and the state and administrative subterfuge. Bronston details human abuse
and political machinations at Willowbrook through his lens as a physician activist.

Bronston describes his efforts to organize and mobilize the provider and parent
community to change and establish more humane care for the developmentally disabled.
Bronston recalls how he recruited friend and ally Dr. Michael Wilkins to come to Willowbrook.
Bronston lashes out at New Y ork State for its lack of proper training of its employees, and the
era’s manipulation of employee organizations.

Bronston describes the climate created by NY S and their ability to silence dissent through
hostile retribution and the threat of job cuts and tennination. Bronston points out at that at the
time CSEA the employee union, was often either tied to management or manipulated by threats
and other measures from the State at Willowbrook. Bronston describes the events leading up to
the firing of Dr. Wilkins and its direct connection to the public expose and the conditions at
Willowbrook including a series of local television reports by WABC-TV reporter Geraldo
Rivera and the State’ s response.

Key Words:

ACLU

American Association of State, County and Municipal Employees (A FSCME)
American Medical Association
Benevolent Society

Black Panther Party

Civil Rights Movement

CSEA

Kansas Association of Public Employees
New Y ork State

Union

University of Southem Califomia
Willowbrook State School

Key People:

Bemard Carabello
Bob Felt

Bob Hayes

Burton Blatt

David Clanahan
Dick Cavett

Doug Bicklen

Dr. Michael Wilkins
Dr. Richard Coke

Gene Eisner
Geraldo Rivera

Harold Wolfe

Jack Hammond

Malachi McCourt

Nelson A. Rockefeller
Richard Levy

Senator George McGovem
Stan Hare

Tom Gilhoul

Wolf Wolfinsburger
CSEA INTERVIEW

of

DR. WILLIAM BRONSTON

August 19, 2007
THE INTERVIEWER: Today is Saturday,
ust the 18th, 2007. We're in New York City and
we're speaking with Dr. William Bronston and,
Bill, | wonder if you would tell us a little bit
about your personal background and how you came to
be employed by the Willowbrook State School on
Staten Island.

DR. BRONSTON: Well, I'm a physician
and | was raised in Los Angeles and trained at the
University of Southern California where | got my
medical degree ard then spent a year doing a
pediatric internship at Children's Hospital in Los

Angeles, and | was trained and actually mentored
by a wonderful fella by the name of Dr. Richard
Kach, who was the head of the Child Development
Clinic at Children's Hospital in LA and his

specialty was working with kids with developmental
delay and families with developmental delay for
the purpose, almost exclusively, of diverting

people from institutionalization in the state of

California. He was really the ideological and
professional father of the community-based
regional center system in California, which was
really the precursor of regional programming to
serve families as a whole in a holistic way who
had kids with developmental delay, regardless of
what the label ultimately turned out to be.

So he and I had known each other for
many years. | had come to him as a medical
student and he had hired me to be his preceptor,
and then supported me in getting into USC Medical
School and then supported me becoming an intern at
this very elite regional children's hospital in
Los Angeles where | spent a year in training.

After that | went to Menninger's
(phonetic) School of Psychiatry in order to do my
residency which was simultaneously a training
program in the private Menninger School and a
service program at Topeka State Hospital which was
a public mental hospital where | was a ward
physician. It was a rather stormy experience.
Those were very heady days and there was a lot

going on in the Civil Rights movement. The war in
Viet Nam was burbling and all of us were very
deeply involved.
| had come to Kansas really after a
ferociously complicated history of organizing
nationwide a thing called the Student Help
Organization. | was interested in putting
together all the medical, nursing and dental
students in the country interested in universal
rightful health care, opposing the war in Viet
Nam, changing the personnel patterns of health
care delivery and professionalism because there
were very few physicians of color, very few women
in the United States, and the commodification and
commercialization of medicine to me was absolutely
odious.

And so | was sort of the leader, the
principal national organizer of this group of
medical and nursing and dental students aimed at
social reform and professional reform and
education reform in health care, so when | arrived
at Menninger's | was really a veteran organizer

and had spent actually two years in Kansas doing
my psychiatric residency and had been fired for
Civil Rights activism, expelled from my residency
in the middle of the second year for openly and
publicly criticizing the American Medical
Association as a criminal organization, which |
believe is the case.

They essentially are complicit with
a situation which is properly defined unredeemable
in the United States in terms of health care and
then was very involved in the Civil Rights
movement and organized a union, American
Federation of State, County and Municipal Employee
Union, that organized the workers in eastern
Kansas in the mental hospitals, which was really
the third largest economic entity in the state of
Kansas at the time, and sort of went head-to-head
with the power structure and as, a result, we had a
very progressive and significant unique job action
in Kansas in 1968 where the workers voted, the
union voted.

This new union, in order to obtain

union recognition they voted to seize the
hospitals in eastern Kansas as a job action in
order to weld themselves to patient care as
opposed to walking off the job, which was unheard
of, and there was a huge news blackout. Everybody
was arrested at the end of the first day. We
called it a "Hospital Improvement Action." The
struggle went on for about 60 days, and, the object
was strategic to get a genuine union recognized in
lieu of the Kansas Association of Public
Employees, which was a state union, maybe similar
to CSEA in the old days, entirely run by the
Republican Administration, essentially operating a
"olantation" system of service delivery with mostly
black and poor white workers in Kansas who
had been there for generations with no Civil
Rights action since John Brown's day.

And so this whole mobilization of
health workers and hospital workers in Kansas
which | was responsible in part for putting
together was a real transformation and extremely
controversial and ihe antipathy of the state

leadership was ferocious. We forced the Governor

to change his position on recognizing public
service workers, you know, from "opposed" to saying
that it was the highest priority the state had to
deal with within six months.

| left Kansas kind of under a cloud
of struggle and went to New York. With me came
from all over the couniry a whole phalanx of young
physicians who were part of my national
organization and we became employed throughout the
the city of New York and all the major
hospitals, Harlem Hospital, Gouveneur Hospital,
Lincoln Hospital, Albert Einstein and all in
residency programs. | had already essentially
completed my residency although it was
interdicted. The struggle at Menninger's was
tremendously fierce and the organization in firing
me and expelling me withdrew the whole second year
of my training, forcing me to repeat my second
year in residency.

So when | came to New York | was hot
property and had a couple of jobs for a couple of

years in two different very interesting

community-based programs: One in a program to
support all the kids of color that had been
admitted into the City College System in New York
because it was a new policy there. The other was
to man the National Nutrition Survey as it took
its shape in the city of New York under the aegis
of Senator McGovern's Agricultural Commitiee,
Federal Agricultural Committee, and when those two
years had passed | went to go get a job at
Willowbrook because | had been living in Harlem.
| found living in Harlem untenable
because of the politics of what was going on at
the time. The Black Panther party had been
decimated. At the time | was the physician for
the Black Panther Party in New York with my
cohorts that | had organized and it just became
unsafe to be in Harlem.
| moved to Staten Island and met my
two colleagues, Mike Wilkins and his colleague, a
surgeon by the name of David McClanahan,
and we created a kind of a communal living

arrangement with our families. There were like
seven families living together in a very beautiful
square block old Victorian home. Mike actually
lived a little bit away in a small village part of
Staten Island, and we began kind of throwing in
together and supporting each other with common
values, common politics.

We were very progressive and were
tooking for justice and decency and compassion
everywhere.

THE INTERVIEWER: I'm interested
that given this kind of this interesting and
stormy history when you were hired at Willowbrook
was there any issue about your background?

DR. BRONSTON: Not at all. It was
interesting. | mean, you know, | knew how to
present myself properly and when | came in as a
clean, highly-educated, highly-technically
competent, well put together guy, and what I knew
about Willowbrook -- first of all, | had been
trained by the best in the country in terms of
developmental disabilities. | mean | knew as much

about mental retardation and developmental
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disability as any young kid on the block, you
know?

And the place was a backwater
isolated island that | equated with a facility by
the name of Pacific State Hospital in Los Angeles
where | had been raised to really revile
institutional options as a legitimate way of
serving anybody, especially people with mental
retardation. I'd been raised in a -- in the most
progressive cross-professional culture of service
and support for families in the United States by
the cutting edge professionals in the field in the
United States. | knew all the top leadership in the
National Association for Retarded Citizens, all
the people from Scandinavia, because our clinic at
Children's Hospital, Dick's clinic, Dick Koch's
clinic at Children's Hospital, was an absolute
showplace for progressive services to families.

So when | was looking for work in a
place where nobody would check my references,
which was crucial, Willowbrook was perfect. |

mean that was what I knew how to do. | knew that
11

| would have to hold my nose about the
institutional model but I figured | needed a job,
| knew my stuff, and | would be able to bring my
powers for healing and caring there and | went
there also because | had been a union organizer,
you know, kind of a rump union organizer, not
within the normal framework of unions, but | had
been responsible for establishing District Council
50 AFSCME in Kansas, which was a brand new structure,
and | fought through that struggle to get them
recognized as a representative structure in
Kansas, which turned that state around within a
period of less than six months.

So | had friends, | had knowledge, |
needed a job and | had to find a place where they
wouldn't check my background because then |
wouldn't get hired and Willowbrook was perfect and
Hammond, you know, in his whole Plantation "Massa"
kind of mentality --

THE INTERVIEWER: (Inaudible)
Director?

DR. BRONSTON: That's right, Jack
12

Hammond. He just thought | was just the best
thing since sliced bread. | was. | was. And |
came there ready to serve and to bring my
knowledge and then it began.

THE INTERVIEWER: What's your
initial reaction when you get there?

DR. BRONSTON: Willowbrook was a
unique trauma. | was first assigned to what was
called the Children's Buildings. Now understand,
Willowbrook's -- this place has been around for
about 20, 30 years. Used to be an Italian
prisoner of war camp. It's been used for a lot of
different things. It was created in the forties.

In the fifties it became a full-blown mental
retardation, developmental disability kind of a
warehouse. It never was anything but.

It's population of incarcerated
people exploded within a matter of ten years
because there was no community-based services, no
alternative. It was either be at home with
nothing, you know, where life's hard enough as it

is or go to this place and every doctor in the

13
world would have said, "Go to this place," and to
the family, "Have another kid; forget this one.”

1 mean that's just the way it was, and New York

was almost the epitome of that kind of paradigm.
So when | arrived | was struck by

the magnitude of the place. | had gone in there

to see if | could begin to organize a union and

see if | could find friends there, possibly from

the Panther Party or whatever, and what happened

was that | was confronted with this enormously

balkanized physical plant where there was no

interconnection between any two of the 60 buildings.
| was put into a building

responsible for 200 of the most enormously

disabled people | had ever seen in my life in one

place, you know, and | had been around. | was the

only physician! | had two nurses on the day

shift, two workers per ward, maybe three, to

handle fifty massively involved people with no

media and the records, despite the fact that in

some cases the charts were, you know, three, four,

five inches thick and maybe had six or seven
14
volumes since the origination of the entry of that
individual, the chart said nothing.

There was no orientation when | came
into the building, no doctor told me what had been
happening. | didn't know one person from another.
| had been in a hospital that had 400 physicians
for 150 beds at L. A. Children’s Hospital. The
greatest, most phenomenal program for servicing
children in the world, and then | suddenly am
parachuted in to being the only physician for 200
people that were so gravely stricken with
something or other that | was just overwhelmed and
| thought to myself: How in the world am | ever
going to figure out who these people are? I've
got to read their charts. They're massive and
nobody knows anything and nobody can tell me
anything, and the job immediately is: Here, sign
this medication order. Sign these tranquilizers,
you know?

And then daily things would happen.
Lacerations, fractures, incredible diseases. |

began to realize this place was absolutely a
public health disaster. | mean it was literally

laden endemically and epidemically with the most
exotic horrible diseases as a result of | didn't
know what.

I mean sort of the going theory was

mental retardation, you know, but that -- and it

took me a year before | began to see what was
there and learning to see what was there was one
of the most moving and dramatic experiences of my
life. | mean | really began to understand and be
humbled by the difference between what you think
and what's real, what other people think and

what's true.

So | began adjusting sort of

innocently in there, trying to figure out what was
what, what my responsibilities were. | mean I'm a
new employee, you know, and | came there in good
faith to serve. Granted | had an ulterior motive,

to promote justice and racial quality and
democracy and empowerment of the people but, you
know, my first responsibility was taking care of

this mass of people who were not presented as

14
15

people at all.

The nurses siayed in their nursing
room, the workers worked on the outside. There
wasn't enough clothing. There wasn't enough soap.
There wasn't enough food. There was an
overabundance of tranquilizing medication and the
place was horrendous, the noise and the smell, and
this was one of the better buildings. This is
what was called the Baby Complex. | was assigned
initially to a Building No. 16 when | first came
there, and so | worked in Building 16 for six
months and what began to happen was -- and | had a
very personal relationship with Hammond, very
personal relationship. | talked with him all the
time because that was part of my act. | had to
make sure that | was trusted and that my word was
respected, that my judgment was valued and that my
work was supported, and it was clear that we had a
problem.

And | also had to meet with the
other docs. There was about 20, 25 docs assigned

throughout the place and | began to realize that
16

this was not my peer group. These guys were a
different breed of cat. Many of them were
immigrants. Many of them were docs that couldn't
get a job anywhere else. All of them had been
there a long time. None of them mingled with the
people on the wards, none of them.

| began wearing a white coat to come
to work and | was on the ward all the time in the
midst of the folks all the time, which was unheard
of. The normal procedure of interaction between
the physician who was in charge of everything,
wrote orders for everything and was ostensibly,
you know, in loco parentis, father of the ward,
the paternalistic father on the ward, was
essentially to come every day, in their sport coats,
look at what was happening, get the report from
the nurses about what had to be done; have
the workers bring the individual in question to be
seen, be held, moved around. Never touch them,
never get close to them, because they were a
diseased, infectious source of hepatitis, of

giardia, of every conceivable kind of intestinal
parasite.

And what we began to find out --
well | began to find out little by little -- was
this place was a gigantic experimental hideout for
the top virologists in the United States, who were
using this population as a way of testing out and
developing vaccines for hepatitis and German
measles that nobody knew what was going on about,
and they were just infecting different cohorts of
kids. There was all this research going on sub
rosa behind the scene funded by the Defense
Department.

1 mean the truth of the politics,
economics and organization of Willowbrook was, |
mean, a great story. | mean one of the great
stories, | think, one could tell about subterfuge
and secrecy and human abuse and greed and
power-mongering and mediocrity. It was
incredible.

THE INTERVIEWER: There was a
certain unwillingness on the part of the public to

even want to understand this --

17
18

DR. BRONSTON: Absolutely. | mean
the public -- this was out of sight, out of mind,
and this was, you know, an 80-year agenda that
esseniially was really engaged with the whole
eugenics movement at the beginning of the century.
This was a population whose very being was
infective to the normal population. There was no
alternative to warehousing for anybody with a
label and the range of people in the institution
ranged from the most profoundly, multiply-involved
individual to people absolutely normal who might
have been deaf, might have had cerebral palsy and
not be able to communicate clearly, you know, and
be essentially confined to support their moving and
eating and whatever.

It was the only model, it was the
only model, and as the need to eliminate deviants
from the society increased, and as the scientific
capacity increased, and as psychological testing
became more and more an industry it became
absolutely _ you know, the table was slid like

this (indicating down wards), and people just slid into
19

Willowbrook to the point where when we came, when
I came first, they had already closed admissions.
The only way to get into Willowbrook was to agree
to be a subject in this undefinable viral research
that required you to be infected by a potentially
lethal disease and then see what would happen.
And talk about informed consent?
Zero! Parents didn't understand it; kids didn't
understand it. tt was pure blackmail. The only
way a desperate parent could get their kid into
any kind of help was to sign off into this viral
research program and then, of course, you're in a
situation that is already overcrowded by
triplicate in terms of the amount of people that
are there and a situation that is pandemonium. It
was total pandemonium. Nobody was in control
although there was this facade of control.
And the workers were a half a siep
above the incarcerated people there. They were
also incarcerated. They came in, they were
injected into the most inhumane context which had

been completely rubber-stamped as legitimate by
20
the medical model dociors, by the State of New
York, by the black Cadillacs of the Commissioner,
you know, by the whole Academy. The University
structure supported this alternative. All the
Chairs of special education in the State of New
York absolutely recognized the validity and the
purposefulness of the thing and anybody who spoke
out against the model was instantly, instantly
marginalized from the profession or their career
in the Academy or their work in the field and
nobody, no real doctor, would ever want to work in
a place like this because there was no future for
you.
There was no status in this kind of

work. This had to be work that was only done, you
know, by people who were, you know, who were
"angels", you know, who could tolerate this kind of
suffering and who were seen like the director, you
know, as "a saint", you know, because of his
association. And these people became drunk on
that egotistical role, the Samer role that they

held, and they believed in their heart of hearts
21

they were doing their best. They really thought
they were doing it right.

THE INTERVIEWER: Let me ask you
about the staff and even the medical staff there.
Was there any diversity? Were there men, women --

DR. BRONSTON: No women doctors.
Men, mostly white men, mostly European
white men, you know, Slavic: Germans, Poles.

There was about half a dozen
American docs. Myself, | was the youngest.
| was like the kid in there in my early thirties.
Everybody else was in their sixties and later.

You know, when | first got there
about 3000 workers. Within a year we had
2000 workers because of the need for Rockefeller
to pull money out of every place he possibly could
to build his marble and gold Albany Mall, so we
lost a billion dollars in our program in Health
and Human Services in the State. That money went
straight into brick and mortar in Albany to create
his imperial, Capital!

My entry into that place
22
was like getting onto an airplane that was just
about to crash. We were in free fall with two
engines knocked out. No jobs were filled and we
are talking about having a context of like, 5-1/2
thousand, 6 thousand human beings, you know,
concentrated in this terrible environment and
workers who had to be -- these 2000 workers that
were finally left, remember, are split amongst
three shifts so you -- so why don't we divide by
three and then you divide by something in the
vicinity of, | don't know, 200 or 300 independent
wards where they're sitting. Add absenteeism
because the job was incredibly stressful, add
sickness, you know, because the job -- because of
the whatever, so the people there, the people
there were really stressed to the max. They were
all poor working-class people, mostly people of
color: African- American, Puerto Rican, poor
white. There was no way to be able to
discriminate who was safe to be with and who was a
predator, and you're dealing in a context where

nobody cared about predaiors.
23

Nighttime programs with no supervision,
no monitoring, where human abuse was
the norm. Exploitation the norm. Theft a -- an
adaptation to poverty and a compensaiory way of
dealing in a situation where there were many
justifications for “it's okay to steal sheets, it's
okay to steal clothes, it's okay to steal
medicines, it's okay to do anything because I'm
not getting compensated for what they're puttin’
me through."

That may not have been systematized
but it was universal, and so people lived in a
city that had walls around it in every conceivable
real and metaphorical way, trying to survive in a
job that was heinous in its very core, essentially
tyrannized by the tasks they were expected to do,
the desperation of the people in charge of them
and the corruption of the people in charge of
them, and it had been goin’ on a long time.

THE INTERVIEWER: M-m h-m-m.

DR. BRONSTON: And what was behind

it was that this whole apparatus was completely
24

and totally isolated from public policy, and I'll
explain that maybe as we go along a little bit
further because understanding that is one of the
most dramatic and important things in
understanding the model and the role that people
have to fundamentally change... the human service
delivery system in America. It was clear then,
clear as a bell.

Every single thing we understood
then and everything we talked about then in terms
of the role that Willowbrook played as a -- as an
example, as an exemplar of the way human services
are now multiplied a thousandfold today, because
you and | are headed for Willowbrook now in our
future. Every one of us, given the way the system
is set up now, are headed for a congregate,
segregated end-of-life program in an institution
for the elderly, every one of us.

We knew that, totally, clearly, made
that explicit when we were struggling with the
Willowbrook situation, if we didn't break the back

of that model created by public policy at the
25
federal level through Title XIX of Medicare which
requires out-of-home placement in order to get
subsidies for services, no in-home support existed
in federal law. You had to be made a "domestic
refugee" in order to get any kind of support and
that support then came in this gigantic river of
money that gave birth to the entire nursing home
industry which did not exist prior to Medicare and
Medicaid.

Willowbrook was a nursing home par
excellence and every single body in Willowbrook
was a source of tax money subsidy like "average
daily attendance" in the school system, like ADA
money. So all those public workers in there were
beneficiaries of a tax "ransom" system predicated on
an obligatory hostage situation to keep people in
that place drawing federal money. That federal
money was a new phenomenon because it had just
recently been established in the Nixon
Administration. The State of New York was looking
to multiply their resources and had to create a system

that would essentially bring in as much federal
26

money as possible in order to subsidize the State
program so they could pull their State dollars out
somewhere else.

And so this federal money from
Medicare became the keystone to the whole strategy
of institutional model legitimization and
expansion in the state of New York which had no
community-based services. Once
they created the capital benefits of creating this
monstrosity in the state, they had to somehow deal
with the consequences of it.

The consequences of it were actually
the reason why it should have been done in the
first place, taking care of the people,.

They had to hire workers to go in

and take care of this population of flotsam and
jetsam over whom they had no interest whatsoever,
no interest whatsoever. Once the buildings were
built and the system established and the economic
and commodity-based profits clarified and
structured into the situation: massive commerce

grew with drugs, sheets and pillowcases, food,
transportation, and all the stuff that kept these
isolated citadels of human suffering intact.
Willowbrook was an island like all
of the other State institutions in the state of
New York that had been created with an internal
culture with no access, no windows. No windows to
look in, no windows to look out, only steel doors
and terrazzo floors and human suffering at a level
that is incalculable and a prostitution of every
human being that came in there to accept and
become complicit in crimes against humanity which
were the normal MO. This was framed in the rule books and
in the duty statements and in the records which are
totally transparent which, of course, only really
became properly revealed and translated, under the hand of
Federal Court when we finally filed suit against
the State for constitutional abrogation in New
York.
THE INTERVIEWER: You mentioned
earlier that it took you about a year to fully
grasp what was happening there. How did you then

begin to move iowards your efforts for

27
28

improvement?

DR. BRONSTON: Well, first of all,
what happened was that | was very enamored by the
teachers on the ground. | mean they were the only
folks that were professional level peers.
a very attractive group of about 20, 30 young
people who were providing token special education
programming on the grounds. They were really
upset about the fact that the work that they were
doing in order to provide education was completely
sabotaged once the individual person, the kid,
would go back to the ward because then there was
no snmiuunicstion between the teachers and the ward
workers in order to keep the behaviors and the
learning alive.

And, you know, people need
repetition, repetition, repetition, you know,
when, you have cognitive or physical problems.
So, the teachers in a fit of
appropriate indignation submitted a
petition to Hammond, to the director, demanding

that he insist upon accountability on the part of
29
the ward workers to follow up and support and
become privy to the training that was going on for
the students, for the incarcerated, for the
residents.

You know, Hammond had seen it all.

He was responsible for it all for years. He knew
where the bread was buttered on. It was buttered
at the ward level and the teachers' operation was
strictly a decal, strictly a patch-on. They
threatened to quit if he didn't fix things because
they said: You know, we've been doing this now
for a year, two years, and it's just not working,
and they had gotten their act together.

1 warned them. | said, do not, do not drive a wedge
between yourself and the ward workers. They are
the only protection you have! But, you know,
they're middle class, upper middle class kids, you
know, wet behind the ears still, think that
they're hot siuff, and they just went ahead, and
Hammond said to them, "you're all fired," and that was
the end of that.

And | thought to myself, "you know,
30

I'm gonna break this place". This place is
inhumane, and | knew it didn't matter how long it
took but | was gonna bring them down because the
arrogance and the inhumanity was suffocating. It
was suffocating, so suffocating that it made the
place vulnerable like a huge dinosaur. You know, they
were so primitive and so sure of themselves and so
flagrant about their abuses that, ! mean, | knew
from past experience, you build a network of
friends, you help people understand what's in
their interest, you help show them how they're
being abused, and in a situation like this where
even the demand for putting soap on the ward was
subversive gave me every card | needed to make it
happen, except that it was a big damn place and |
didn't have a union to work with.

The union situation, which we ought
to talk about —

THE INTERVIEWER: M-m h-m-m.

DR. BRONSTON: -- was very, very
primitive, and the State had done a brilliant job

in warding off any working class organization, any
31
progressive voice from any source, through fear,
intimidation, tyranny, high-handedness and lack of
any kind of meaningful conscious training in
support for the people that they brought in — in
order to handle, you know, the vulgarity of the
daily tasks, you know, which were vulgar.

THE INTERVIEWER: Well, let me ask
you: Were you aware of CSEA and --

DR. BRONSTON: Sure.

THE INTERVIEWER: -- you're saying
that they had --

DR. BRONSTON: You bet.

THE INTERVIEWER: -- no real
presence in the workplace?

DR. BRONSTON: Absolutely. | mean,
you know, | knew whai | was lookin' for.
| was lookin’ for a free union. | was lookin’ for
a.union that had independence. | had come out
of Kansas where | had had experience with a public
service union and the fact that the leadership of
the union are the administrators. | mean there's

no separation between being in charge --
THE INTERVIEWER: M-m h -m-m.

DR. BRONSTON: -- and being in
charge of the union and if you've got, you know,
job abuses and lack of clear duty statements and
lack of clear duty assignments and no efforts at
all to oppose speedup, to oppose working out of
class. | mean none of that stuff existed. People
wouldn't dare even define what was going on. |
mean, there was no way to define it in rational
terms because the job was insane, what you had to
do every minute, every day.

So you had these white, you know,
kind of "old boy", “old girl" supervisors. You had a
"big nurse" kind of personality who was this -- |
mean the chief nurses in the place were really --
one was this very attractive, kind of very refined
pacification agent. The other was a dangerous,
physically dangerous, dame. And | mean they would
come on and it was like something out of Alice in
Wonderland. You didn't go against those
women. They -- they had absolute power to

terminate you in a half a second or throw yau into

32
33

a pit of work that was inconceivable and
intolerable, and so everybody made their peace
because there was a secret filled society in a hundred
percent of the place. Everybody had to make an
adjustment to just survive: To survive disease,
to survive low income, to survive the tyranny of
irrational requirements, to survive the physical
madness, the pandemonium of the place where at any
minute, you know, a plastic chair would come
flying from nowhere. Shoes would come flying from
nowhere. Benches would be thrown over. A person
would come flying from nowhere and crash into you,
or somebody would come clawing at you or bring
feces and slam it into your chest or -- | mean
this was -- this was the definition of inhumanity.

So when | came, | saw right
away -- | mean it took me a couple of months and
get my bearings in this big damn place, a lot of
buildings and -- and so the good news was that
even though | was just assigned to one building,
every week | had to be on duty 24 hours, and so |

would be there sleeping at night and, of course,
34

because the place was totally violent, | would be
called, you know, every ten minutes to go deal
with a soaring fever of 105, a laceration which
| had to suture and deal with the situation,
fractures that | had to deal with, somebody found
dead on the floor, you know, which usually didn't
happen till the morning because if somebody was
dead they'd leave ‘em there and not report it
until the morning shift came on.

I mean the culture of the place was
so predictable, little by little |! began to
understand how it really worked, how an impossible
place worked and how nothing was what it looked
like, nothing was what it looked like, nothing was
what it was called. Everything -- the truth of
the matter was something entirely else and it just
took time to see it, hear it, figure it out, but
the one thing that was fundamental was that | was
gonna break the place by being a perfect doctor.

| was gonna be a letter perfect
physician. | was not gonna suture without

analgesics. | was not gonna suture with

35

upholstery thread. | wanted plastic surgery fine
needles. | was not gonna allow the lack of soap
to exist on my ward. | was not gonna allow the
lack of sheets in my building. | was not gonna
allow rotten food to be served to the people that
] was responsible for.

| was gonna respond every single
time a worker called me to come. | was gonna be
there and | was gonna take care of not only the
person, but the workers were as sick as the people
living in the place and so they needed taking care
of too, and friendships have to be built.
Connections have to be built. Trust has to be
built. Day after day, week after week, month
after month, we became -- and | finally -- after |
was there for about six or eight months | knew I
needed help.

Mike Wilkins, my colleague, you
know, who was part of my group in Staten Island
where we were doing union organizing and community
organizing work. Our wives were involved.

We were really very active, both in Manhattan and
36
New York proper with the larger political areas
and in our own community. | desperately needed
help and | begged Mike to please come and work with
me there. He had just finished his three-year stint
at the U.S. Public Health Hospital, you know, and
my God, he came! | just thought, you know, like
heaven. | had somebody that | could talk with and
work with.

The problem with -- Mike was he was way
across the property in another building, locked in
his own building, like | was locked in my building.

Let me just go back a minute and
just fill in some stories here. What happened was
that | had become such an anathema to the
Administration by being a ‘perfect’ doctor in my
Building 16, | kept demanding all the basics in
order to make sure that my workers were okay and
that the people, the children on the ward had some
rational identity, that the other doctors... ‘cause |
would be covering their buildings when they
weren't on duty... the doctors were so upset about

my relentless practice of medicine that they
37
insisted that Hammond move me. And, after six
months, | was moved from my building and it was a
shock. | mean | didn't see it coming.

The doctors organized against me in
there. This was before Mike came and Hammond
decided | was still salvageable and so he assigned
me to a "model" building -- (laughter) -- model
building, Building No. 76 which was a preteen and
adolescent building in a temporary facility.

The building was part of a federal

grant called the Hospital Improvement Program and
the institution got a half a million dollars or a
million dollars to create these programs for the
youngest children where they would super-staff and
provide a whole different environment than these
big old, stone buildings that were part of
Hallhoran, you know, Italian war
prisoner camp or whatever they used the old
buildings for originally.

And so my building was a star-shaped
prefab, you know, kind of like trailers set

together with linoleum floors, low ceilings, good
light, lot of windows, and there were five
separate units in there and | only had about 125
or 130 kids in the building. | had just come out
of a building with 200, you know. Those were a
bunch of stone squares that was so regimented
that, it was like a Mondrian (phonetic)
painting, you know, except there was human
death and misery in the middle of all of it.

So this new building, 76, was set up.
I began working in this building with much more
intimacy and spent a year there. Again, | was
very insistent on being able to provide the
best medical care possible.

There was a system in Willowbrook
where when a doctor would come to
work, the only way you would know what was
happening was for the worker, the supervisor or
the nurse, to give you a report. So the very
first thing we did when we walked in in the
morning was sit down and get a report of how many
people had fallen dead, how many people had fallen

ill, how many people had fallen bloody, how many

38

people... you know, what was the status of
everything?

And the only way that ! could manage
the situation, because there was no adequate
recordkeeping, which | began to implement wherever
| went, I would tell the truth. If 1 went someplace
and | saw what was happening, | would write in the
record the truth about what was happening. |
began to build a record day by day of the irue
situation with no euphemisms, no covering up. You
know, | would lay in legal language saying: This
place is killing people. This is where this is
coming from. This is what | saw. This is what's
happening, as a doctor.

Now, nobody every looked at that,
but | just knew it was gonna ultimately become an
avalanche, a tsunami, that was gonna be in every
building, in every place. Everywhere | went |
wrote the truth and what my understanding
of the situation was, and then, in order
to follow the problem? There was no rational

way of following any problem, so if a kid got
40
sick, you know, | had 120, 200 people, how do |
track that person?

If | can't rely upon the nurse, and
the nurse is overwhelmed, too, and she's only one
shift, then | have to find another way to handle
it and so what we were able to do, which was sort
of an interesting benefit, was that they had a
series of outside consultants that had been coming
into the institution in ali the medical
specialties and | could make referrals. You
know... look at this person because of the skin
problem. Look at this person because of their
heart problem.

Also, | needed to have legitimate
diagnostic help because | was dealing in a
completely opaque situation where the chart said
nothing. The charts were set up -- | mean the
charts -- that's a whole other story. So | would
call for consultants in every medical specialty
which would guarantee me getting a report back
from the consultant which would remind me that |

had someone that | had to watch.

41

Then | decided that |] was gonna

keep absolutely duplicate records. | kept a
notebook by ward and by day of who was in
treatment, what the diagnosis was, what the status
of the problem was and, within one year, | had
eradicated all disease, all disease, in my
building and | had begun to slide the
tranquilizing medication down to probably less
than half of what the residents had been put on
when | first came here. | had such an
intimate point -- | knew every kid.

They were like my children.
1 had 120 -- 1 had a family of 120. | would go
home, you know, | had my baby twins at home, but
my real family was my 120 children in Building 76
that | Knew intimately. | began to know their
parents. | began encouraging them to
come and talk with me. We began to have building
meetings because | knew by then that the union
situation was impossible. | knew that already
very early on, you know, because of the way in

which the workers were organized.
42
CSEA, | mean your original question
* which | somehow lost here in the transaction. CSEA
played no role in anything clinical, no role in
terms of meaningful demands and duties and
responsibilities for the workers, no protection
for the workers other than the most
self-interested and narrow marginal kinds of
agendas that would benefit some people who knew
how to manipulate the system for their own
interests.
The level of corruption was never
documented. | never fully documented it but it
was so massive, you know, as to sort of be the
backdrop and everybody would take what they

needed, do what they did, with no documentation,

no supervision. Everything just ran, you know,

like an automatic motion machine, and what it did

was not an issue because the administration only
depended upon it being an automatic motion
machine. All they needed was to have the money
keep coming in and no scandal.

And to have a scandal happen, you
know, you have to walk a whole bunch of blocks to
get to the front door to call for help, a whole
bunch of blocks metaphorically.

THE INTERVIEWER: In your own way,
as you're taking this individual action and, as
you say, trying to be a mode! doctor, you're
making a significant improvement, at least in the
lives of the clients that you're touching --

DR. BRONSTON: No question about
that, but the improvement was a spiritual one.
Granted there was some physical aspect to it,
but what was clear to me was every day I had to
organize. Every day | had to pull people
together. Nothing mattered more than building
friendships. We had to find a way to empower
people to be their best in the face of the
opportunity to transform the people in the
institution back to real life.

THE INTERVIEWER: | think you
mentioned that you brought Michael Wilkins in.
Did you find other allies? Did your efforts grow?

DR. BRONSTON: No. It was really
44
quite remarkable -- well, other allies, yes. Not
other doctors. | mean to find a doctor like
Michael, you know, there's one in a million, but
nobody wanted to come to work at this place.
lt was a hell hole. It was like asking
people to go to work at Attica or something
like that. But it was worse than Attica, at
a certain level, at a certain level. | mean the
death rate was ten times the death rate of New
York City, so even though people didn't come in
with shotguns and helicopters dropping
in the yard during the uprising there, people
in Willow Brook were dying just passively because
of neglect.

| began building relationships.
First of all, you understand, | had a significant
network in the country in terms of the disability field.
| can pick up the phone and call anybody and they'll
come to help me, to be there with me. The
top professionals in the field are sort of my
friends, so at a certain point in the equation as

we began to build a credible parent base of
interest in their children, we began opening the
doors and insisting that they see what's going on
with their kids, explaining to them. |

can't tell you how many times | sat in my office
with a parent just talking to the parent,

just being available, the other doctors made
themselves totally unavailable.

Parents had never talked with the

building doctors. | would sit with parents and
they would begin to cry and | would begin to cry
because the situation was untenable. It was so
moving. The dramas and the tragedies that these
families had experienced with their kids and their
lives and the way in which they somehow blamed
themselves. Everybody was atone, alone,

alone in their suffering, in their stories about

what they had experienced and watching their child
be gradually, you know, kind of reduced to a
hamburger because of the physical trauma on the
ward.

It was absolutely incredible, and

each day | knew that we were gonna win. We were

45
gonna beat this thing because the feeling was so
deep, the parents were so true, and | began to
realize that it wasn't the ward workers that were
going to be the solution. It was gonna be -- the
general public was gonna be, the families, and |
began to become very close with the heads of the
Benevolent Society and, you know, | was
relentless, relentless. | took no prisoners.
| saw myself clearly as a guerilla leader in there
io put together whatever needed to be done
to humanize that place.
And what | really knew, and | knew
from California, we had to shut the place down.
We had to shut 'em all down. These places were
absolutely unscientific, unéconomical, inhumane,
socially unredeemable. They were unfixable.
They were monstrous, monstrous structures with
huge multi-zillion dollar budgets and
organizational apparatuses and everybody, you
know, sucking blood to survive like this gigantic
vampire system from Rockefeller down.

So i began making friends with

46

47
parent organizations that had kids
in the community that were little. They would
never put their kids in the institution if they
could help it. We explained to them how the
institution was sucking all the resources in the
county away from community-based services, away
from the school system.

Remember that we now preceded the
federal law for Right to Education for Ail
Handicapped Children Act. It wasn't until
we had built a base through friendships
with the Federal Civil Rights Office, who
was always amicus to our suits. We hadn't
gotten to the real suit base yet. There were
three or four suits in the country that had been
filed on an experimental basis to begin to look at
right to treatment, right to rehabilitation out
there, so what was happening, you know,
Willowbrook was all this experiment. | was
learning about what | was seeing on the wards and
what was going on which was, in itself, one of the

most dramatic and moving possible experiences of
48
recognition of how evil works.
| began to organize parents to begin to

educate them and to have major very glamorous
events out in the community, essentially with
spokespeople from leadership of the special needs
community, professional community. Then |
found a tremendous ally in an academic by

the name of Burt Blatt who was the chairman

of the Education Department at Syracuse
University.

Burton was a pioneer of the first

order in terms of looking at the evils of
institutionalization and had issued a photographic
book called Christmas in Purgatory which was the
first really major visual exposé of the evils of
institutional existence. For that he was

literally marginalized and expelled and sanctioned
by the special education community.

He broke ranks. He told the truth and he told

it in a very compelling and beautiful way and

he was an extraordinary guy.

Under him he had created an
institute at Syracuse University in the Special Ed
Department of the Education Department, called The
Center for Human Policy. There was this young,
wonderful activist by the name of Doug Biklen
who contacted me. We set out and got to know
each other.

Burton was doing cutting-edge
teaching about the need for change,
individualization and deinstitutionalization in
the academic community, unique in the country.
Doug was a fighter and an organizer and was using
academic studies and grad students as a way of
looking at the abuses going on in institutions.

And then the greatest genius in the
field, | mean the leader in the world field, kind
of popped up on my radar, a guy by the name of
Wolf Wolfensberger, who had come in and
was a major professor and teacher in Canada at the
National Institutes of Mental Retardation and also
had organized the most progressive community-based
program in the entire United States in eastern

Nebraska, which had been set up entirely on his

49

50

model! of what needed to happen to create a
perfectly progressive and individualized service
system serving the most severely involved people
with mental retardation and developmental
disabilities.

Wolfie was based at Syracuse because
Burt had hired him and he set up his own institute
parallel to Doug's on "Leadership Training and
Change Agentry." | went to go hear Wolf and Burt
at a professional conference in Pennsylvania and
was floored at hearing these magnificent grown-ups
talk about in the most articulate way what | had
been experiencing but had not really been able to
find vocabulary to describe as a system issue.

I then went to a Canadian seminar, a
14-day seminar, two 7-day training
sessions in this new approach to human services
which really was just using common sense to look
at and deal with people with special needs called
"Normalization in Human Services", that Wolf
invented, really invented, and articulated, and

his whole strategy of how to do a qualitative
51
evaluation of any human service, give it a
quantitative score, and be able fo see, step by
step -- | mean | developed x-ray vision in Wolf's
hands to look at what was going on and have a
vocabulary to break down, to deconstruct every
little aspect of what | was seeing into an
understanding of all of the perversions that had
become this coral reef, this dead coral reef, of
the New York institutional system.
So all of that was going on at the
same time.
Just to pick up a piece of the story
here, when | was expelled from Building 76.
I had parent meetings there and when Hammond came
to the parent meetings, the parents began to
really press, but what really broke the camel's
back was that after I cleaned up the building,
after a year of keeping parallel records and being
able to track every single kid, every single
problem that they were having, and get them to a
certain place, it became totally clear to me that

the kids were completely organized wrong in the
52

building and that we couldn't put together a
developmental program, an educational program, at
the building level 24/7 without regrouping the
kids and regrouping the workers in my building,
because different workers had different aptitudes
and different tolerances and different strengths
and it became essential to regroup them. Certain
workers had to be with certain kinds of kids for
certain kinds of programs.

The other idea was to bring in lots
of furniture and media into their living
arrangement by going to the city dump and getting
stuff, you know, to bring in couches and soft
chairs and to begin to humanize the environment
and | managed -- I worked assiduously, slowly,
with my workers and my nurses to develop a plan
and laid out this plan. The charge nurse, my nurse,
panicked and the corrupt workers in there who had
been really at the core of the worst abuses went
to the administration.

Hammond was no longer benevolent and

I was removed from Building 76 after working there
a year. | thought I would die. | mean | was so
in love with the children. I was so excited and
proud about what | had demonstrated, you know?
And, of course, | had been laying track all over
the institution. Every time | went into any
building | would take photographs, | would make
records, and the doctors really hated that. They
really hated me coming in and contradicting their
orders.
| would cut tranquilizers. | would stop
things that they were doing that were abusing
people. | was adding medicines where they weren't
giving enough antibiotics because the level of
infectious disease, the level of parasites, the
level of bacterial disease in there, | mean -- and
then the viral diseases was epidemic, I'm telling you
it was a dangerous place to be. It was dangerous.
Almost everybody got hepatitis there.
Somehow I didn't. | mean | was in
the middle of it. | touched everything; | was
everywhere. You know, | was -- I just -- | mean |

loved it. You know, | loved going to

53
54
work and | loved being in the middle of people. |
mean the people were beautiful. (Laughter.) The
people in the institution were extraordinary, once
you could get them out of the posture of defense
that the institution had squeezed them into.

People don't talk. 1 began to find out
what people could do. | mean every shift people
would do something different depending upon who
was in charge. A kid who would sit and rock or
have all these terribly autistic stereotypic
behaviors in the day shift would turn out to be
the kid that handled all the laundry and served
all the food in the afternoon shift and the day
shift didn't know it. | mean there was no
consistency.

The people in the institution turned

out to be the most powerful, the most heroic, the
most adaptive, the most capable people in the
whole place. The very people that were supposed
to be the problem were the solution to the whole
institution. They were the fundamental work force

in the whole institution. They did all the

55

cleaning. They did all the food service. They
did every...they did all the punishing and
policing because what would happen would be if
there was somebody acting up that a worker
couldn't handle, he or she would get one of the
more capable people on the ward to go and kill
‘em, | mean, if necessary beat ‘em up, destroy
‘em, so little by little | began to realize — |
mean there were all sorts of reasons why injuries
were happening there.

Injuries were epidemic.
Every day | did four or five major suturing
jobs to kinda clean something up and it was a
result of the way in which -- a completely
understaffed environment was managed adaptively
underground by the use of these indentured slaves,
slaves. They didn't get any money.

And then, of course, nobody got to
go outside ever. Nobody got to go outside. Why?
Because if you only had one worker on a ward you
couldn't take the people that could go outside

outside. You had to have the worker there all the
time, so people were taken care of at the lowest
possible common denominator. The most needy
person defined the way in which services were
provided to all the people on that ward, 50 people
at atime.

THE INTERVIEWER: M-m-m.

DR. BRONSTON: When they moved me
out of 76 | was moved from an adolescent ward --
remember, my training is in pediatrics -- to an
adult womens ward, Building 23, which was a total
shit hole, you should excuse the expression, of
such squalor you can't imagine. And in addition
to that | was responsible for another building,

22, and on three days a week | was responsible for
five buildings because of the doctors being off

that was the women's

block: | was responsible for every adult women
that was ambulatory in the institution, a thousand
women.

And, you know, they thought -- they
thought that they were pitching me into the

darkest hole and that | would quit, and | thought

56

to myself -- (laughter) -- God, did they give me
ammunition. They gave me so much ammunition.
First of all, it strengihened me hugely to be in

the worst working situation. | mean if | could
survive that, you know, it still wasn't clear how

the struggle was gonna come out. | knew how it
was gonna come out, but that's just because I'm,
eternally optimistic and every time they

drove me deeper and deeper into the bowels of the
beast, | learned more and more. | saw more and
more and then all these things were going on sort

of at the same time.

I guess we need to talk about at some
point what happened when Hammond went berserk
and fired Mike.
THE INTERVIEWER:
Let me ask you about the firing of
Dr. Michael Wilkins, what you remember about that
and what were the results of that action.
DR. BRONSTON: That's a great siory,
Steve, it's a great story what happened with

Michael.

57
First of all, you know, Michael had
come in and had been there for about a year and a
half, but the problem was that Rockefeller had
created a freeze in the budget so nobody could be
promoted, nobody could be hired, and even though
he had worked there for a long period of time,
technically he was still on "probation". When the

newspaper articles from the Staten Island

Advance began to deal with Willow Brook on the front page,

you know, the "good news" from the head of the National

Association of Retarded Citizens, the "good news"
from Children's Hospital of Los Angeles, | mean the
good news from all these visiting experts about what
the possible future is and how bad the institution
was, because | walked them through it before they
had their public meetings. | brought them all
clearly, intentionally, to build a base of support
in the citizen movement, in the citizen community.
Hammond needed to stop these exposés
and he fired Mike because of the articles in the
newspaper. He thought Mike was leakin' this stuff

to the newspapers and he couldn't get me because |

58
was already a "permanent" employee. He'd have to
bring charges against me. Let me just back
up some pieces here.

What happened was when they moved me
out of 76, when they moved me out of that
children's building, | got the best labor lawyer
in town, who was a friend of mine. His firm
represented me and filed grievances against the
institution for punitive harassing, excessive
workload and punishing sanctions against me.

THE INTERVIEWER: Who was the --
what was his name?

DR: BRONSTON: Gene Eisner

was my lawyer and Richard Levy his pariner. The
firm was called Eisner and Levy. Subsequenily the
lawyers have kinda split up, since then.

Richard is now a major labor lawyer and
represents 1199 and Gene also is just doing
progressive law. They're magnificent lawyers. |
mean magnificent lawyers. | mean we went against
the best that the State could throw at us,

and these guys were always with a

59

smile on iheir face. They could take apart the
Attorney General, time after time, and certainly

take apart Hammond.

We had grievance hearings and the

hearings were appealed to the State Commissioner, who
finally sided with the institution in terms of my

being transferred, but the process of the hearings led
to my understanding of the fact that there was

no protection for any worker in terms of

workload. The institution could ask anybody to do
anything and if they didn't do it, fire them.

There was no safe work, no definition of what
constituted one's duty; the situation developed,

as | was moved from 76 with this hearing going
on to cover a thousand people, we filed more grievances
because | knew that | had to file grievances on

the areas where the administration was gonna
attack me and try and fire me before they came

with their trumped-up charges that | wasn't

handling the work, and so | filed grievances

saying that the work was excessive, essentially

neutralizing their ability to come after me.

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61
That they were harassing me, that they
weren't responding to me, and that everything
they were doing was as a result of my genuine,
truthful critique of the place. So, any attack on
me | had my shields up and | had the two best labor
lawyers to protect me and they had to do this
in public. They couldn't get me like they got Mike.
So this was -- a war, a war going
on day in and day out; working on the
wards, taking care of stuff. And | said to them:
I'm not even gonna give you reports anymore. ['m
not gonna give "straightjacket" orders anymore
because | can't do it safely. | can't -- unless
you give me a rational workload, | will only do
what's necessary to protect the life and safety
and basic health of the people I'm responsible for
and it was out in the open and it was no quarter,
no quarter!
| mean | was as confrontative and
sharp with them as possible. | would just say to their
face, you know, you are grossly in malpractice. You are

absolutely a human abuser, you know? | would push
them as hard as | could to get angrier and angrier,

and, protect the circle of safety in my work in

order to role model for the other workers. They had to
see somebody fight back and not get taken out and
they had to understand that they could only do so
much and one worker on a ward, two workers on a
ward, three workers on a ward, was impossible,
impossible given what they had to do; let alone

getting to develop rehab &, let alone just

maintain life.

All this was was just turning the screw by being

the best doctor | could possibly be in order to

deal with them and then begin to build allies.

One of the sets of allies was the organized

parent movement, another was the progressive
university movement, another one was the international
professional leadership of the mental retardation world
out there. | found these great allies who understood
without any question the institutions awfulness, the crimes
against humanity, and then, because | was meeting
with parents, | bumped into the fact that there had

been a lot of efforts to try and handle things legally.

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63
I met Bob Felt who was the

lawyer for the Staten Island Legal Aid Society, |
met Bruce Ennis from the ACLU who had

just finished filing and winning an incredible
right-to-treatment suit for a mental patient in
Florida, one of the first ever. | met Stan

Herr who had filed a right-to-education suit in
Washington, D.C. | met Tom Gilhoo! who

had filed the incredible anti-institutional

lawsuit, the Partlow (phonetic) lawsuit, in Alabama.
I mean these incredible, creative, pioneering
lawyers were filing public lawsuits for

constitutional abrogation, constitutional

violation of iife, limb, safety, cruelty, due

process, right to treatmeni, right to

habilitation. These were breakthrough ideas

that were going on.

So, when Michael got fired, Michael had the

presence to call Geraldo Rivera up, you know,
and that exposé was atomic. It was atomic.

When Hammond fired Mike, the Parent Benevolent Society

suddenly rose out of its lethargy, rose out of its

64
role of having to accept, you know, the dregs of
benefits for this leader or that leader in order
to keep them cooled out, and filed a nonsupport
statement against Hammond and went straight to the
Commissioner and said: If you don't rehire Mike
and Liz, you know, this is what's gonna happen and
this is what we want to have happen and they were
successful in extracting from the Commissioner,
Alan Miller, a commitment to rehire Mike and Liz.

But the same day, the same night
that ihe parents had gone en masse to rehire Mike
and Liz, to meet with the top DMH leadership
in Albany, Hammond was cooking a
conspiracy with all of his allies and supporters,
including the FBI, including the local
Congressmen, including the State
Assemblyman who's the head of the State
Banking Committee. When the news
came that night from the Commissioner's instructing
Hammond to rehire Michael, Hammond and his
Strategists -- who was a stupid and

arrogant man, it was the people around him that

65

knew what had to done.

They cooked this incredible piece of
theater the following morning so that when Mike
and head of the Benevolent came in order to
deliver the instruction to Hammond to be
reinstate Mike and Liz, the secretaries of the administration
had called every building and called all the
workers out of the buildings in order to protect
Hammond on the assumption that Hammond was being
held "hostage" and that he was gonna be fired that
day and that all the supervisors were gonna be
fired the next day and all the workers were gonna
be fired the next day. That's what they told --
the administration told. The workers believed CSEA
because CSEA was at that meeting in Hammond's
house, as was the head of a rump “black nationalist”
organization that was part of the whole conspiracy
to keep the labor lid on the institution ‘cause,
you know, if one breaks open, they all break open.

THE INTERVIEWER: So the idea here
is that continue the agitation, continue the

exposé, and the place will shut down and you'll

all be put out of work.

DR. BRONSTON: Right. And who is it
that they target as the source of the problem? The parents,
but more importanily it's Mike and me ‘cause we're
the ones who are the "troublemakers". But, the
parents had been framed as the ultimate threat to
the worker jobs because the parents had finally,
finally got that it didn't have to be this way,
between the exposé from Geraldo and -- | mean it
just -- the news was out, the word was out, and
ihere were some parents who were real organizers. |
mean they were really good.

Malachi McCourt, you know,
| mean Malachi was nobody's monkey. | mean he
went up against the administration with all of his
Irish, flair and flame, and his wife Diana had
a little girl in one of the buildings for
kids with physical disabilities. They called 'em
the "Spastic Buildings" in those days, the back
buildings, one-story buildings where the kids just
lay around in what they called "cripple

carts," you know. | mean it was incredible. I'd

66
67
like to show you pictures of them.
So that next day -- | was off duty.

{ had -- | was off duty that -- for two or

three days, you know, because I'd been on duty the
previous night, whatever, and this whole piece of
theater happened. Then they called a whole
caravan of state buses that morning --

CSEA announced that all the workers

were going to Albany to protest Hammond's firing
and to block Mike and Liz's rehiring. Now who can
get a whole bunch of buses to come to the
Administration Building if the administration

didn't allow that to happen? So they all went and
did that.

So what happens? Nobody's left in

the institution and the parents are there

because the parenis were all part of what was
happening to support Mike and Liz's rehiring
because they saw that as a key victory. They still
didn't get that it was the institution that had to
come down. So far it was step by step, step by

step.
THE INTERVIEWER: But it almost
sounds like from what you're describing that they
were starting to grasp this out of the
Commissioner's office, but Hammond was --

DR. BRONSTON: Absolutely.

THE INTERVIEWER: -- was working to
protect his own --

DR. BRONSTON: Absolutely. But
remember that that played right into the higher
level agenda, because the higher level agenda here
is to not allow this economic gain to be disrupted
because the economic gain is what's really behind
this whole thing, which we really haven't fully
talked about yet. But the institution is there as
an orphan. It floats on its own, but remember
that it's a "cash cow". i's real function is to
bring in federal dollars, and so it has to be a
hostage situation at a legitimate level; that is,
people have to be there and held there against
their will with no legitimately exit, and that's
not such an easy job to convince people 'cause you

you gotta knock the parents out of their

68

"parenting role" in order to convince them that (a) it's
okay and if they don't do it they're bad parents.

THE INTERVIEWER: So what's some of
the aftermath to this? What happens as a result
of this protest? Does anything change on the --

DR. BRONSTON: Fast forward, huh?

Well -
THE INTERVIEWER:
] mean even in the immediate term.

DR. BRONSTON: Yeah, yeah. First of
all, there's a huge period of about 60 days to
90 days, where -- | mean there's so many irons in
the fire. | had gradually built up and
moved 10 or 15 different agendas that were all
moving out of my control. I'm notin
control; all I'm doing is, you know, showing the
light and then people in self-interest rise up.

So there was this enormous press
coverage. Geraldo and many others came to look at
the carnage. Everybody in the world, Federal
Congressmen, Senator Javits came.

Everybody came because it was the place to be.

69
It was a place where they could get press
coverage to talk about how terrible this
situation was and "we're gonna fix it".
What had happened was that since they
couldn't get us on the ground
at the institution because we had lawyers all
around us and everything, they pulled the most
amazing conspiracy.
They issued this incredible three-
page unsigned allegation of, Mike
Wilkins and I, as being Communist conspirators who
were plotting to fundamentally poison the water of
the county and create an impossible public health
crisis by deinstitutionalizing all these people
with all these catastrophic tropical diseases in the
county and, that we were dyed-in-the-wool Maoists
and Communist agitators and, you know, they
dropped this thing out into every church in the
county through their chaplains, the Catholic
priests and the Jewish rabbis who were the
institution's clergy.

It was an amazing, brilliant kind of

70

an effort to try and hit us and we lived in this
large wood-frame three-story house and that night
| had all the children, all the women, we all
slept in the living room because we were ina
county with the largest number of Mafia families
in the United States. We were in a county, you
know, in Staten Island that fundamentally never
went with the revolution, during the American
Revolution remained a Tory stronghold. It had
Nazi organizing offices during the Second World
War. This was not a normal piece of America.
This was a place that was highly organized around
very, very conservative political interests and
people and we were in a wood frame big house being
called Communists. This was no amateur job.
This was a real counter-insurgency hit.
So we called up Malachi McCourt and |
said, "Malachi, what can we do about
this?" He said I'll get you on the Dick Cavett
Show. Within a week we were on the Dick Cavett
Show and so Geraldo and Mike and | and one of the

people at Willowbrook, a guy with C.P., named Bernard

71

Carabello and his mom -- Bernard had
been in Willow Brook 20 years. He had severe CP but was
totally a normal guy. He had been pushed into
this incredible place because of his CP
and because his family was poor and
they couldn't deal with it and he went down the
table slide like ail the rest of the people went
down the table slide. And Diana McCourt, Malachi's
wife, was there.
Albany sent down Bob Hayes and

their PR guy, a guy named Harold Wolfe, and we
were, you know, like -- we were furry, | mean full
beard and big hair and Geraldo had a big mustache
and we were in soft sweaters and cord coats and
Levis and, you know, we were ordinary folk.

The folk they sent down from
Albany were in spats, literally spats, black
three-piece suits. They looked like undertakers.
And, | mean, it was such a remarkable experience
because Cavett was hip to the agenda. It was
a great piece of theater.

He got what had to be done.
He asked us what the problem was and we told
him this place was hell on earth and the
things that were going on were absolutely
intolerable. Then he went to the bureaucrats,
and these men began doing their
bureaucratese, their talk about how they were on
top of it, they were gonna fix it. You know that
things weren't as bad as we said they were, that
we were... "look at us", and so forth, and
this went on for 20 minutes.
| kept watching my watch to see, my
God, we only have a few minutes left of the one hour
for this show.

Finally, | just exploded and | cut 'em off
and | said, you know, you guys are lying. You're just
lying in your teeth to protect yourself. You know
how bad the situation is. Look at you. You guys
are "undertakers". Look at you. You're
"undertakers!" You've been sent here in order to
protect death which we document every day ‘cause
we're the doctors. We're on the inside!

Well, the whoie thing

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74
just exploded. We were so credible.
We are so credible. Everything we did was real,
genuine, heartfelt. | mean driven by all of our
best training, all of our best caring, you know?
It was an amazing show. It really
was --
THE INTERVIEWER: And did this turn
the tide for you?
DR. BRONSTON: Turned the tide.
(Snap of fingers.) Turned the tide. | mean
everything changed. So many people saw that show,
it was just astounding.

First, Hammond was removed. What became clear to
me was that the more we made Willowbrook wrong,
the more we would lose this fight because there
would have been this enormous commitment to fix
what was wrong. If there were earthquake problems
they had to fix the buildings. If there were
staffing problems they had to hire a million more
workers. If there was food problems they had to
bring in better food. They had to make

Willowbrook okay.
75

There was no way to make Willowbrook
okay. Willowbrook was a concentration camp! It
was like trying to make Dachau okay, make Belsen
okay, make Auschwitz okay. Let's fix it. Let's
put curtains on the wall. Let's put better
furniture in there. Nothing changes in the
conditions and with no training and with no
leadership. | mean you have business as usual
except with a facade. So, it became critical to
develop a strategic commitment to an affirmative
alternative in the community ‘cause that's what
was missing altogether in New York.

So | organized a meeting at a local
monastery in Staten Island where | invited all the
top lawyers on the eastern seaboard that had been
involved in class action lawsuits, all the top
professionals in the country that | could get to
come to develop a professional strategy and a
plan on conversion from institution to community,
and all the organized parent leaders from
all across the state of New York to meet to talk about

the consumer agenda.

The three cohorts met separately
in separate spaces for two days and generated a
report which became the action plan of what was to
happen. Most importantly, the lawyers that |
brought in were the lawyers that were handling
every major class action human rights
lawsuit, most of which had bogged down
in all sorts of opposition and technical legal
blocks and barriers created by the State to
somehow defuse and deflect the attacks on what
they were doing. There were big organization,
including the unions, behind maintaining state
institutions because that's where the jobs are, right?
And so what | charged the lawyers
with, and | asked Gene to chair the lawyer caucus
of the two-day meeting, was to come out of the
room with a model federal class action lawsuit against
the State of New York that took into consideration
all of the setbacks, barriers and problems that
had been encountered by Ennis in Florida, by
Gilhool and Partlow, by the people in

Massachuseits, all of ‘em. Burton Blatt was

76
there, Wolfie was there, Doug Biklen -- | mean it
was a full house. There must have been 80, 90
people there. There was at least 25 people in the
lawyer group.

And two weeks after the meeting,
the federal class action lawsuit was
filed against the State of New York. It was a
brilliant filing, you know, by this joined effort
[had
a magnificent kind of inventory and a roster of
what needed to be put into place, what
professionally had to happen in terms of totally
upgrading the field, what had to happen in terms
of consumer organization, what had to happen in
terms of press and media and public relations, you
know, the handling of this whole situation.

lt was an amazing meeting, an
amazing meeting that fundamentally changed the
paradigm away from let's fix Willowbrook to let's
create a New York community system.

Meanwhile, Geraldo had sort of been

co-opted by the sysiem to run this whole campaign

77
called "One-to-One" which was just a big circus in
order to try and figure out ways of getting public
charity support for group home programs, 6, 8, 10,
12 people each; anything was better than 5000! So the
whole notion of single person apartments, individual
respite care model, never was on the drawing
boards. It was all a matter of kinda wiping your
behind with wax paper. You just spread the
problem thinner but you didn't change anything.

And Geraldo had been told by his
bosses: Get out of this. You spent enough time
on this. This isn't news anymore. This is not
bringin’ in advertisers anymore.

And Geraldo came to heel quickly and
pretty much let us go. He would not follow the deep story,
would not keep the issue clarified, because we had
to keep explaining to the public that just because
people know that we've got an "Auschwitz" in our
midst, you know, doesn't mean that because you
don't read anything about it that it's all gone.
Because, you'd think that when the

news comes out... Oh, we'll fix it right away.

78
That's not the way it works.
What happens is, you lose the news,

you lose the truth, you lose the reality of the
situation, so nothing was really happening. More
money was being poured in at a totally token level
to create cosmetic changes. They were beginning
to rotate administrators. They brought in this
little bantam cock guy Misorag Ristich who had been expelled
from Minnesota for abuses as an administrator and they
made him the administrator of Willowbrook, you
know?

He brought me into his office one day.
We were head-to-head all the time because
| had really cranked up memos to them day after
day talking about the deficiencies here, the
problems there, the needs here and there, and he
said to me: How old are you? I said: I'm
thirty-two. He says: I'm thirty-four. Look
where | am and look where you are, you know? Do
you wanna keep this kind of a thing up? And |
said to him: Listen to me, Misorag. | said:

"The only reason you have your job is because of

79

80
me, so you better do the right thing here ‘cause
you are really expendable. | will take you out so
fast you won't know what happened to you. You
better do the right thing here."

But he was such an arrogant,
arrogant, stupid little man and so he rolled and
they brought another guy in and then they brought
another guy in and what happened was that the
system had been decapitated. They removed
Grundberg who was the NY Commissioner of
Mental Retardation, who was really, really a
dangerous man, really a dangerous man, and they
brought in a guy from Pacific State Hospital in
New York named Bob Hayes.

THE INTERVIEWER: M-m h-m-m.

We're actually out of time for this
segment so this is a good logical break point.
Thank you and we'll come back for more.

(Conclusion of interview of William

Bronston.)0