I’m having a tough time putting my head around the death of a long-time friend, boss, mentor, adversary, colleague, confidant, and Yoda-like wise man.

(The concept for this 1980 Jimmy Carter campaign button was pure John Dornan.)

I’m having trouble wrapping my head around the fact that John Dornan is dead.

Five years older than I, John was an important part of my life for 50 + years.

John Dornan was my boss, my foil, my mentor, my counselor, my colleague, my confidant, my cheerleader and my friend, not always in that order, with varying degrees of intensity. As our lives advanced in different directions, and different parts of the country, the intensity of my admiration for him, for who he was and was not, only increased.

Our paths first crossed, when I was less than two years out of college and working as a field organizer for the teachers union in upstate New York. John was part of a team of trainers—steeped in Labor history and the labor organizing philosophy and techniques of the legendary Saul Alinsky—who taught us “field reps,” how to get teachers to join the union.

That was not an easy task in hot beds of Right Wing Richard Nixon Republicanism like Palmyra, New York, where thousands of Mormons flocked each year to visit the birthplace of their sainted founder, Joseph Smith. In fact, I was accused of being a “Communist” by a male high school teacher, when I made a pitch for Palmyra’s teachers to join the union.

For political activists like myself, who marched against the Vietnam War, and for Civil Rights, labor organizing for the teachers’ union was sacred work, with Nixon in the White House, and the soon-to-be-imprisoned authoritarian John Mitchell as Attorney General. To us, John Dornan, and the other Alinsky acolytes he traveled with, were our Joseph Smiths.

“Oh, no,” I could hear Dornan mutter, shaking his head with a smirk. He’d want nothing to do with a comparison to a Saint, especially a Mormon Saint, who’d have no tolerance for John’s lust for life.

A few years later, I was working for NEA’s large, Prince George’s County, Maryland affiliate, and John was already in a senior position at the Coalition of American Public Employees, working with the Civil Rights leader, James Farmer. I was looking to return to New York—where I was born, raised and went to college– and John was putting together a National Education Association team to join him in Albany, NY, to make a direct challenge to Albert Shanker’s tyrannical grip on the teacher union movement.

Dornan greeted me on the expansive patio of his stylish DC apartment, and we drank wine and talked about politics and education into the night, and I told him how, three years later, I was still angry at Shanker for supporting the Vietnam War Hawk, “Scoop” Jackson in 1972, over George McGovern for President.

I don’t remember how I got back to my Maryland condo that night, but I knew I liked this bright, feisty guy, and saw in him an easy melding of class, grace, intelligence, and a political passion for the underdog. We’d go on to work together for the next five years and remain friends for the next 50.

John was the Director of Communications for the NEA in New York, and I was his Editor-in-Chief of our statewide publication “The Advocate.” On the job, he was a creative person’s ideal boss—encouraging, nurturing, supportive of wild ideas—but when I became active in the Staff union, and squared off against his management team, both of our competitive natures, made us adversaries.

Our male ego game-playing continued on the tennis court, where we were evenly matched, building mutual respect for each other’s toughness and refusal to ever give up. I was young, full of myself, and self-righteously obnoxious, and delighted in testing how far I could push Dornan at work, sometimes feeling as if I were daring an older brother to rein me in. Time and time again, John surprised me, always backing me up, and standing behind decisions that might have made other supervisors uncomfortable. Two specific incidences come to mind.

One involved a crusading story I wanted to do exposing sweatshop conditions at a cap and gown facility in Albany, NY, at a building where the family of one of my coworker’s had a financial interest. The co-worker complained loudly to Dornan, and to our Executive Director Pat Orrange–one of the few female union leaders in the country–who would later become John’s life partner. Orrange, an effusive & charismatic Buffalo native, and Dornan, gave unwavering support for my reporting—and for what the story exposed. It was, they said, the right thing to do, and reflected our values.

Another, tougher call, involved the 1980 Presidential Campaign, when the NEA and its affiliates were supporting Jimmy Carter for re-election. Carter had delivered on his promise to create the first federal Department of Education in American history, and the NEA, appropriately so, felt an obligation to support him for that enormous achievement and his strong support for public education.

John Dornan, always bubbling with creative ideas, conceptualized the button design that would mark the campaign for Carter’s re-election in New York State. It contained a peanut-shaped mouth full of grinning teeth, with the typeface saying: “NYEA/NEA says… (teeth) for president. The idea was quintessential Dornan: irreverent, clever, smart, fun and to the point.

Despite Dornan’s going all-in for Carter—and working with my future boss Mario Cuomo, who headed Carter’s New York State campaign—I was out there, as a leader in the Albany County Progressive wing of the Democratic Party, campaigning for Teddy Kennedy in the NYS Democratic Primary against Carter, which Kennedy won handily in the Spring of 1980. Not once did John Dornan come down on me for opposing the NEA’s choice, even though Al Shanker’s AFT was backing Kennedy, and opposing Carter, and the NEA was paying my salary. John had every right to pull me back into the NEA/Carter fold, but he never exercised that option, and my respect for Dornan only grew.

In fact, over the years, he made clear his mutual respect for me, without being overtly dramatic or too demonstrative, which was not part of Dornan’s DNA. John introduced me at one NEA Convention, as “our Communications scholar,” after I completed my Masters Degree in Communications. He recommended me to succeed him to teach in the Labor Studies Program for Cornell University, a position which I prized and continued to do for 22 years, always making sure I used John’s recommended Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky, as one of my required texts. Each time I picked up the book, to read a phrase or a bullet point to my class, I was reminded of Dornan’s devotion to Alinsky’s Rules.

Our lives fast forwarded to 2016, when Hillary Clinton ran for President against Donald Trump, and North Carolina, with 15-electoral votes, loomed large in the Democrats strategy to win the White House. John and Pat were now living in Raleigh, following their long and illustrious careers in education. Both were deeply involved in the political, educational and social justice issues across the State of North Carolina. I wanted to come to a key “swing state” to do voter protection for the Clinton campaign against the Trump troglodytes, and John Dornan and Pat Orrange, welcomed me to fight the good fight alongside them, once again..

I arrived in Raleigh in early October, 2016, bought a return airline ticket for the day after Election Day, and settled in for what I hoped would be three weeks of good solid, voter protection work, all on my own dime. John and Pat had arranged for me to stay with a friend of theirs who had a spare room, and paved the way for me to be part of the Clinton campaign’s North Carolina operation.

John Dornan and Pat Orrange and their friend Millie Ravenel, welcomed me with open arms, to the North Carolina campaign. The first week went well, participating in several voter protection training sessions across the State, and working out of Clinton’s Raleigh campaign headquarters, making phone calls. Then something strange happened.

A little-used GOP back office in Chapel Hill, a heavily Democratic Area, was firebombed. What made the firebombing immediately suspicious–aside from the fact that the Orange County, NC, GOP is virtually non-existent in elections — was that Donald Trump began “Tweeting” about the bombing immediately after it happened, blaming “Hillary Clinton supporters” and “Democrats” for the crime, without any shred of evidence.

In fact, every single Democrat or Hillary supporter I’d encountered in North Carolina was gravely concerned about doing everything the law provided to prevent violence in the election. It was the reason many of us were willing to put our lives on the line in that open-carry, gun-loving state.

Trump’s feigned hysteria carried the stench of another famous fire: the one in the German Reichstag, started by the White Nationalist Party of Adolph Hitler during the German national elections of 1933, and blamed on the Communists. The Reichstag Fire, was immediately pounced upon by Nazi leaders as “evidence” of terror from the left, and the need for the authoritarian rule which their leader promised. It was instrumental in leading to the election of Hitler as German Chancellor. No evidence was ever produced to support the Nazis’ wild claims.

I wrote about this suspicious fire for my blog, and the article was picked up by my friend, the writer Joe Conason, in his The National Memo, an on-line publication with about 300,000 readers nationwide.

When the Clinton campaign people found out about my article, entitled “Trump’s Reichstag Fire in North Carolina,” they demanded that I either take the article down (as if that were possible after it went viral nationally) or leave the campaign—for which I was volunteering on my own time, and at my own expense.

I refused. I told them they knew I was a writer, when I volunteered for them, and that I would not censor myself, especially since everything I wrote was so supportive of the campaign. The Clinton campaign’s 28-year old communications director in North Carolina, clueless about what the Reichstag Fire was, told me I was too militant, and had me escorted out of the building.

So, a few weeks before the Presidential election of 2016, I found myself adrift in Raleigh, N.C, 2500 miles from my California home, “fired” from a cowering campaign I was volunteering for, with a return plane ticket back to the West Coast the day after election day, still several weeks off. I got into the Red Toyota pick-up truck I was renting, and drove, almost instinctually, over to John & Pat’s house, where I found John Dornan home. He was my port in the storm.

“You’re not going to believe this,” I told him, as he opened the door, and I proceeded to tell him what had just transpired.

“Are you serious?” John asked, shaking his head in disbelief. “Are you serious?” I can still hear John’s distinctive voice and emphasis of incredulity.

Then, John Dornan and I sat on the beautiful back deck of his house in a lovely section of North Carolina’s Capitol city, and drank wine all afternoon, looking out at the lush greenery of his yard, with some of the majestic trees beginning to try on their fall clothes, and we talked about the trajectory of politics and our lives, and the weakness of the Clinton campaign, and the impossible insanity of Trump becoming President, and I was transported back to the spacious patio of his DC apartment some 40 years earlier, where I felt safe and protected from anything that could come our way, since John had a far more pragmatic and straightforward look at things than I did, and instinctually knew how to approach each situation with a sense of humor, and his despair in check, just enough to allow his natural sense of hope, and humanity, light the way.

He needed no translation when after each good person’s death I’d say “All the wrong people are dying,” especially when there were so many other prospects to choose from. And, now, it’s happened again, to the wrong person, leaving an irreparable rip in the lives of those who loved him.

Damn it, Dornan, I’m gonna miss you. You lived longer than you ever expected; longer than your father did, and more years than Saul Alinsky, who died at age 63.

But in your wry wisdom you left us with a legacy straight out of Rules for Radicals, fittingly, from the last paragraph of the last page:

“When Americans can no longer see the stars, the times are tragic. We must believe that it is the darkness before the dawn of a beautiful new world; we will see it when we believe it.”

I re-read that line, on the day after I learned of Dornan’s death, and was stunned that it was exactly my mother’s mantra: “Always darkest before the dawn.” A 92-year Polio survivor, and a devout Catholic, my mother was the ultimate organizer of hope, everlasting.

You made me a believer, once again, John, in the darkest of times, and left us forever with the image of Jimmy Carter’s grinning teeth lighting-up your own mischievous, Yoda-like smile.

###

One year to the day after his finest hour in the U.S. Senate, Chuck Schumer shows that time, and courage, have passed him by.

(Photo by Haiyun Jiang for the New York Times, 3/14/25)

Last year on March 14, then-Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, was a profile in courage.

He stood in the well of the U.S. Senate and directly challenged Israel’s recklessly disproportionate slaughter of tens of thousand of Palestinian children and women in Gaza, and the lawless reign of terror of Israeli Prime Minister, Bibi Netanyahu, beholden to Israel’s xenophobic Extreme Right Wing.

Schumer, the highest ranking Jewish public official in American history, knew what he was risking. His hold on Senate leadership was tenuous, if AIPAC—the Right Wing political action committee doing Bibi’s bidding in US Elections—shifted their considerable financial support behind Republican Senate candidates instead of Democrats. Yet, he fearlessly confronted the bully Bibi, and the Extremist cabal controlling Israel.

Schumer, never a spellbinding speaker, was eloquent:

“I speak for myself, but I also speak for so many mainstream Jewish Americans — a silent majority — whose nuanced views on the matter have never been well represented in this country’s discussions about the war in Gaza….

“I speak as a member of a community of Jewish Americans that I know very well. They are my family, my friends. Many of them are my constituents, many of them are Democrats and many are deeply concerned about the pursuit of justice, both in New York and around the globe. From the Talmud — Tikkun Olam, the call to “repair the world” — has driven Jews around the globe to do what is right….

Schumer detailed the horrific crimes committed by Hamas on October 7, 2023, when 1200 Israelis and other were murdered, the forcible kidnapping of over 200 hostages, and the disportionate response of the Israeli Government—in direct contravention of the IDF’s own Ethical Code of Conduct in War—resulting in the indiscriminate bombing and slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian children and women.

“The only real and sustainable solution to this decades-old conflict is a negotiated two-state solution — a demilitarized Palestinian state living side-by-side with Israel in equal measures of peace, security, prosperity, dignity and mutual recognition,” Schumer said from the Senate floor… I also believe Prime Minister Netanyahu has lost his way by allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel.

Schumer was surgical in his slicing up of Netanyahu’s assault on the highly regarded Israeli Judiciary, calling it a “weakening of Israel’s political and moral fabric, “ pointing out Bibi’s contemptuous disregard for the Rule of Law, and his embracing a lawless, extremist fringe of Israeli society—some of whom had been convicted of acts of terror, and tied to groups responsible for the assassination of former Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin– which did not recognize the legitimacy of the Judiciary, or any limits to the use of violence.

“Prime Minister Netanyahu has put himself in coalition with far-right extremists like Ministers Smotrich and Ben Gvir, and as a result, he has been too willing to tolerate the civilian toll in Gaza…As a lifelong supporter of Israel, it has become clear to me:

The Netanyahu coalition no longer fits the needs of Israel… The world has changed — radically — and the Israeli people are being stifled right now by a governing vision that is stuck in the past”

Schumer’s courageous comments stunned the Biden White House, itself caught up in playing a duplicitous game with Israel, condemning its slaughter of innocent civilians and deprivation of humanitarian aid to Gaza residents, and continuing to supply Israel with the huge, 2,000 pound American bombs that were causing massive destruction and loss of human life in Gaza.

American Jews, like myself and my own Rabbi, were proud that at last a major Jewish leader in this country was finally willing to confront the anti-democratic, anti-Jewish, Netanyahu government, which had wiped out Israel’s original governing laws, and the fundamental tenets of Judaism which emphasized a reverence for humanity.

A New York Times story of March 19, 2024, entitled “Part of my Core: How Schumer Decided to Speak Out Against Netanyahu,” noted that Schumer too, was influenced by what his Rabbi was saying.

Rabbi Rachel Timoner, from Schumer’s Reform Synagogue in Brooklyn, who had spoken movingly about the excruciating moral questions raised by this war in Gaza, told Schumer that the Far Right Extremists in Netanyahu’s government were: “endangering all of us because their agenda is about dehumanizing Palestinians, and it’s undermining Israel’s democracy and dearest values.”

Timoner told the New York Times, that she and Senator Schumer:

“share the belief that Israel has a right to defend itself against Hamas but talked about the desperate need to bring the hostages home and end the humanitarian crisis in Gaza through an agreement… even if we would only care about Israel’s safety and security, this war was actually harming Israel on the world stage and its relationship with the United States.”

Rabbi Timoner went on to tell The Times, what she thought of Schumer’s speech calling for new elections in Israel:

“This was him trying to discern the moral path and trying to step up in a way he knew was risky for him, to do something that he felt deeply was right.”

That delicate balancing act blew up in Schumer’s face when, three months later, Netanyahu came to address a Joint Session of Congress, with Schumer’s blessing, despite Bibi’s blustering, predictably, being full of calls to blatant Israeli nationalism, and accolades to Donald Trump, who was locked in a close Presidential campaign with Joe Biden.

Fast forward to exactly one year later, to March 14, 2025, and the stirring memory of Schumer’s courageous speech, dissolved into the shadow of his own cowardice, and his own failure to recognize that time and circumstances had made his old style of politics obsolete. Schumer had become, as he accused Bibi of being one year earlier, “stuck in the past.”

In what may well have been the worst and most damaging speech of his long public career in the Senate, Schumer failed to seize the moment and articulate the extraordinary damage being done to ordinary Americans every single day by Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Stephen Miller, Russell Voight and the anti-human rights, anti-Semitic screeds contained in Pogrom 2025, the call for a Christian, non-Jewish nation written by Voight and other Christian Nationalists, conducting a jihad against anyone “different” from their definition of who belonged in “Christian America.”

A year earlier, to the day, Schumer fearlessly confronted Bibi and his phalanx of fascist Right Wing extremists, threatening Israel’s very existence as a Democracy. Yet, when it came time to muster the same kind of courage at a crucial moment in the fight for democracy in his own country—and beat back the forces of extremism, nihilism and techno-terror tearing fundamental US government services away from veterans, the elderly, children and those most in need, Schumer flinched, slipping behind a shadow of cowardice.

Fearing a “far worse” outcome for the country if he stood strong against the Republican’s Continuing Resolution (CR) designed to cripple social programs for most Americans, Schumer gave away the only power card he held, whimpering away into the night, without as much as a flicker of a fight. It was hard to imagine how much worse things could get than the Trump/Musk/Voight troika had already made them for millions of middle-class families.

Instead of caving, Schumer could have held the Senate Floor for many hours, allowing Democratic leaders and veterans like Senator Mark Kelly, Tammy Duckworth and Ruben Gallego to filibuster against the life-threatening impact the Trump/Musk/Voight attack upon the VA, for example, has had on Veterans Services, and how it was Veterans and people of color who were suffering the greatest personal damage and loss of income from the wholesale elimination of tens of thousands of their jobs.

Holding the Senate floor open for hours could have enabled Senators to express the outrage of their constituents from across the country, dominated media coverage for as long as they kept the debate burning, inundated social media, TV and all media with scorched earth attacks on how the GOP was fire-bombing all public human services, the way White Supremacists set Black Wall Street ablaze in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921.

A vote delayed by Schumer, would have allowed time for citizen advocacy groups like Indivisible, Vote Vets, the ACLU, Democracy FORWARD, the SCLC, the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund and others to challenge and condemn Elon Musk’s illegal mass firings and his theft of the private, proprietary data of hundreds of millions of Americans.

And, if Schumer signaled he was ready to fight into the night, instead of hiding in his own shadow, public employee unions whose members are reeling from a frontal attack on the US Government by a band of felons, would have had the time to organize by the tens of thousands in DC and in communities and states across the country, where most public employees labor to improve the lives of their neighbors.

Chuck Schumer, who has relinquished his leadership position in the US Senate by failing to galvanize the forces of common sense and humanity against the CR—or Catastrophic Resolution—needed then, more than ever, to remember what his Rabbi said about him during his finest hour, one year earlier, when he stood up to Bibi Netanyahu and extreme Right Wing forces in Israel:

“This was him trying to discern the moral path and trying to step up in a way he knew was risky for him, to do something that he felt deeply was right.”

We needed that kind of courage from Schumer last week in the face of Trump and the extreme Right Wing forces in our own country, not the cautious cowardice that caused him to slip behind the shadows of the night.

It’s still all about racial hatred, ignoring the Rule of Law, and dragging the U.S. Constitution back to the era of Apartheid America & burning crosses.

(The site of the once beautiful Oak Park, Montgomery, Alabama, Public swimming pool, filled in with cement and planted over by the all-white Montgomery City Council rather than allow Black children to swim in it with White children, despite a court-order to do so.)

There’s a new “N” word being spit out of the mouths of hate-filled fanatics, and it’s “DEI.”

Most of the people using the term—which is shorthand for “Diversity, Equity & Inclusion”—slime it in a derogatory fashion, the way beer-bellied Southern Sheriffs in Mississippi and Alabama used to shout out the “N” word, every time they brought down a billy club on the head of John Lewis, or Fannie Lou Hamer, or some other black or white person peacefully marching for freedom.

Using it as a harpoon of hate, the Stephen Millers, Elon Musks, Pete Hegseths, Donald Trump’s and JD Vance’s—all smug, inhumane White men of privilege peddling poison like the Sacklers selling Oxycontin—smirk when they spread the slur, knowing it will color a dark face over the concept of “favoritism,” crowding out the real life images of Trump & Musk’s Apartheid-loving wealthy fathers, and of Vance’s owner, the anti-democratic, tyrannical techy immigrant Peter Thiel, just enough to boil the bile of their vile followers, conditioned to believe that it’s poor Black folks and women who are stepping on their throats, when it’s the billionaires and bigots skillfully slitting them.

“IDEA”—for Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Acceptance—would have been a far better term for the fair offering of opportunity, started by LBJ 60 years ago to expand the possibility of getting a government contract to people who were not part of rigged rich men’s network-–the kind that produced $40 billion in federal contracts for a wealthy South African white man named Musk—whose family made its money on the backs of an Apartheid-driven economic system, one small step above slavery.

No matter. Whether it’s the N-word, the C-word, “DEI” or any good IDEA, Trump’s troglodytes would have gleefully trashed it to ramp up racial-hatred and keep all but the very wealthy down-trodden and dumb. It’s just like the maniacal, methodical weaponization of the word “woke”, the opposite of which is to be asleep, blissfully ignorant, of what’s being done by racist Right-Wing ideologues.

We’ve heard and felt this kind of blind hatred many times before in this country, nationally and in the smallest of communities.

In her brilliant book The Sum of US: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, Heather McGee documents how public swimming pools became spiteful graveyards of racial equality:

“The American landscape was once graced with resplendent public swimming pools, some big enough to hold thousands of swimmers at a time. . . By World War II, the country’s 2,000 pools were glittering symbols of a new commitment by local officials to the quality of life of their residents, allowing hundreds of thousands of people to socialize together for free.”

Except, of course, if your skin was darker than Barbie’s

McGee writes:

“ By the 1950’s the fight to integrate America’s prized swimming pools would demonstrate the limits of white commitment to public good”.

In Baltimore, in 1956, after a 3-year court fight and the drowning death of a 13-year-old Black child in a public river, the NAACP won the right for “all Baltimore children to have the chance to swim with other children, regardless of skin color.”

However, what ended up happening, as McGee writes is that “instead of sharing the pool, white children stopped going to the pools that Black children could easily access, and white adults policed (through intimidation and violence) the public pools in white neighborhoods.”

There was no need for “No Blacks Allowed,” signs; Black kids were just kicked out, in violation of the law, which no one enforced.

A few years later at the old Oak Park pool in Montgomery, Alabama, attempts at offering Black children the chance to escape Alabama’s oppressive summer heat—as the local Parks Department envisioned after a federal court ordered it—was shamefully drowned in the shallow end. The Montgomery City Council swiftly voted to eliminate the Parks Department.

McGee writes, astonishingly that:

“The Council decided to drain the pool rather than share it with their Black neighbors. Of course that decision meant that White families (non-wealthy white families) lost a public resource as well…Uncomprehending white children cried as the City contractors poured cement into the pool, paved it over, and seeded it with grass that was green by the time the summer came along again.”

The spite-filled insanity of the all-white Montgomery City Council’s decision to fill the glorious Oak Park public swimming pool with cement, rather than allow Black children (or white kids, for that matter) to swim in it, was, of course, blamed on the Federal court and the Black community, by the KKK and other local White Supremacists, just as the racists running the Trump Administration are doing today toward DEI.

The “N” word of that time, however, was not “DEI,” but the actual “N” word. Now it comes in the form of vicious, vituperative attacks on diversity programs in the public and private sectors, made at screeching Stephen Miller decibel levels, and are the burning crosses of our time.

Judge Dan Brenner’s keen intellect, boundless compassion, great heart, and sharp sense of humor keep instructing us how to live a full, meaningful life of great dignity and delight.

It’s been 9 years since my friend and former colleague, Judge Dan Brenner, was struck and killed by a car while crossing a street in LA.

I was stunned when I heard the news. It was inconceivable to me: Dan Brenner, the picture of life, a brain of sheer wizardry and wonder was dead. Gone, at 64 years old.

Yet there he was, one night, very much alive in my dream. I jumped ahead of a group of people I was walking with and called out to him.

“Dan! Dan!,” I shouted to him down the hall. “Dan Brenner.”

I quickly turned around to the people with me.

“It’s Dan Brenner!” I screamed at them.

They looked at me like I had lost my mind. They didn’t see anything or anyone at the end of the hallway.

I called out again.

“Dan! Dan Brenner!”

No answer. Odd, pitying looks from everyone around me.

I woke up with a start, wondering why I saw Dan Brenner so alive in my dream. He was a constant source of joy and genius for me, when he served as General Counsel to the national HIV/AIDS non-profit I ran, Cable Positive.

Why had I seen him so clearly now? It could be because I was again, becoming immersed in the law, taking on a new challenge as Executive Director of the Sonoma County Bar Association, during a time of heightened disregard for the rule of law in the United States. After years of working at the highest levels of communications law in Washington, DC, Dan, a Stanford University Law School graduate, returned to his native LA, to care for his aging mother, and became a local judge.

I hadn’t seen him for some 16 years, seven years before he was killed, but he came to life for me again, the moment I stepped inside a building at Stanford Law School last week, a place where Dan excelled.

I was there for a symposium on how the State of California would continue to respond in court to every single illegal action of the Trump Administration. Before the session on Immigration Rights began, I went up to the front of the room to talk with former Law School Dean, and Stanford Law Professor Robert Weisberg.

“Professor Weisberg,” I said outstretching my hand to shake his.

“Did you remember having Dan Brenner as a student?”

Weisberg’s kind eyes twinkled.

“Sure,” he said. “ I remember Dan. He was an outstanding student.”

We chatted about the terrible way Dan’s life ended, and I mentioned to the Professor that I knew coming to Stanford Law School for a day long series of seminars on how California will continue to fight for the rights of individuals, would unlock torrents of memories about Dan Brenner.

Brenner and I first met when I was a student at Hofstra University School of Law, and Dan—then the General Counsel at the FCC—was a guest lecturer in Professor Stuart Shorenstein’s Communications Law class. When Dan Brenner taught, there was no time for boredom; his mind raced so fast, his humor was so relentlessly quick, that if you snoozed, you’d lose.

Fifteen years later, when I was hired to head Cable Positive, I saw Dan again at the National Cable Show in New Orleans. I went up to him at the Cable Positive Board of Directors meeting where I would be introduced, and whispered in his ear.

“I’m the only person in the entire Cable Television industry who’s ever been your student in law school,” I said, catching him off guard for a nano-second, watching his gentle eyes smile before his warp-speed wit went into action.

“And, I must have done a good job,” he said, “because you’ve chosen not to practice Communications Law.”

In fact, Dan did a very good job, which is no surprise to all of us who knew, admired and loved him. Whether working as Counsel to former FCC Commissioner Mark Fowler, as General Counsel for NCTA, or as a leading voice on Cable Positive’s Board for a decade, Dan Brenner’s brilliance in his work was only equaled by his boundless compassion, and his razor-sharp wit.

A proud, Gay man, Dan once did stand-up comedy for a time, performing at such legendary venues like The Duplex in NYC’s Greenwich Village. In a room full of a diverse group of people, Dan’s laser-like eyes & mind would scan the crowd, and declare that he was holding a black-tee-shirt contest, to see who owned the most.

In venues outside of Cable Positive, it was easy to be distracted by Dan’s intelligence and how devastatingly funny he could be, with a few carefully chosen words and nuances. Cable Positive benefited by both of those gifts of his, but they took a back seat to his passion for the organization’s mission and his deep feeling for individuals—around the world—living with HIV, and those being discriminated against because they were different.

Dan Brenner represented the heart-and-soul of Cable Positive and why the industry’s commitment to fighting AIDS was so unique. He understood intuitively—long before he worked meticulously with staff developing our “One-for-One Program” of domestic and international anti-retroviral drug assistance, that presaged the PEPFAR program–how a rich and powerful industry had a responsibility to direct its vast resources to help people in dire need.

I always respected and admired how he challenged me constantly at Cable Positive, and loved the fact that, through our work with him in fighting HIV/AIDS, he was always fearless in acting on his deep feelings for others, inspiring all of us along the way. His humor was his shield against despair.

Maybe Dan Brenner burst into my subconscious the other night because the Trump Administration tried to instantly delete the PEPFAR program abroad, which saved 25 million lives since it’s inception, and has illegally dismantled the USAID program, damaging the health and safety of tens of millions more. Such inhumane actions would have depressed Dan Brenner for days on end, until he figured out a way to use his genius, his sharp legal mind, and his humor to fight back.

Maybe I saw him down the hallway of an unidentified office building, or in the classrooms of Stanford Law School, because I was starting a new challenge to strengthen my respect for the law, and how it could help people, which is how Dan spent the final days of his brilliant, bright, full life.

Maybe he was signaling to me that this was a higher calling, or that he would use his sub-conscious cameo to tease me that he wouldn’t tell anyone that he had become the man of my dreams. That quip would be quintessential Dan Brenner.

I’m not sure what it was, but seeing Dan Brenner, alive and smiling again, told me that whatever I was doing at this very moment in my life, was precisely the right thing.