Saving lives, building bridges, reflecting on his Lewiston roots.

It was a night for celebration.

Someone dropped the gold medal in a carafe of vodka and, while everyone else did shots, Bernard Lown didn’t think he’d see his Nobel Peace Prize again. After years of braving insults and suspicion with dogged insistence, Lown and Eugene Chazov had gotten the world’s attention: With their scenarios that counted millions of dead, neither Russia nor the U.S. could win a nuclear war.

Finally, people who mattered were listening. Lown and Chazov had been honored for their work against nuclear proliferation.

On that happy night in Russia in 1985, the prized medal found its way back to Lown. It’s now on loan to the National Library of Medicine’s exhibit on medical activism. Lown says proudly that he got his rabble-rousing start in Lewiston-Auburn.

In October, his adopted hometowns will rename South Bridge for Lown, a prospect that despite his many achievements and accolades – he also invented the defibrillator – still touches him.

“A bridge is really, in a way, a symbolic embodiment of my life. What is good doctoring but a bridge to another human being? What is peace-making except a bridge to another culture?” he said recently during an interview at a home on Sebago Lake.

“That, to me, is an enormous honor. I’ve got about 20 honorary degrees. The bridge means more than those.”

Lown spent the first half of August in Naples, the place he calls “a New England version of Shangri-la,” resting. Before he returns to Maine for the bridge dedication, he has a grueling press tour planned.

At 87, Lown has written a book, “Prescription for Survival: A Doctor’s Journey To End Nuclear Madness,” about the struggle to start International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, winning the Nobel and the high cost of ignoring history.

He’d like the world to listen again.

Lewiston: ‘My deep education’

In Utena, Lithuania, there were no telephones, no radios, no cars. Teenagers didn’t follow sports teams. Instead, with that same fervor, they followed the news. Anti-Jewish sentiment ran high. Adolph Hitler was a man to be feared. When Lown’s parents told him the family had to leave, he didn’t ask why.

An uncle, Philip, owned Lown Shoe in Auburn, Maine. Bernard’s father, Nison, had already visited the States once, impressed by the boundless opportunity. Nison, Bernard and a brother, Harold, moved to Lewiston in 1935. His mother and two siblings followed.

Though he didn’t speak fluent English, Lown enrolled as a sophomore in high school at age 14.

“Lewiston, I found, the one thing that was lacking was the fear factor. There was no fear. Where in Europe, you were looking at the next headline. Where is Hitler going? What is happening with Stalin Russia? Lithuania was a tiny little pumpernickel principality,” Lown said. “There’s an African saying, ‘When elephants fight, the grass is destroyed.’ We were the grass.”

The standard of living was much higher in Lewiston. There was no question of going without food. Nison, a sawmill owner and prominent Jewish community leader in Lithuania, took a job at Lown Shoe and worked his way up to company director.

“My education begins in Lewiston. Not my formal education, my deep education,” Lown said.

In 1937, when his father offered him a job at Lown Shoe for $15 a week, the boy was suddenly a wealthy man. Lown didn’t realize there was a strike going on – the strike that would mark the decline of the local shoe industry – and that he was hired to be a replacement worker.

Coming to work during his third week on the job, “one of the pickets, a little French man, says, ‘Scabs.’ And this guy walking beside me punched him in the nose, knocked him unconscious. He fell in the snow. His nose was bleeding, his teeth were knocked out and the police came and arrested him.”

Police didn’t bother the strikebreaker who did the punching. Lown quit.

He sided with the workers. Nison was management. They argued so much they couldn’t sit together at the dinner table.

“That made a radical out of me,” Lown said. “That began my radicalism, in Lewiston, and I’m proud of it. If you don’t have an experience like that, your life is different.”

Though he passed Bates College every day on his way to school, after graduation Lown enrolled at the University of Maine in Orono. A dean said if he worked hard, he had C-student potential. Lown arranged to have all his classes on Wednesdays and Thursdays and then hitchhiked home to spend the rest of the week there.

“My father would go bananas. ‘I’m paying all of $75 (a semester) and you are not even at the university,'” Lown remembers his father saying. “To me Lewiston was a big metropolis, like New York.”

When Lown pulled straight A’s, “he thought I faked it, (that) I mailed (the report card) myself. He once called the university to find out what I was doing. He couldn’t believe it.”

“How could you get an A when you were in Lewiston all the time?”

Building trust, saving lives

Lown went on to attend Johns Hopkins Medical School and become a cardiologist. He retired from practice on his 86th birthday. He’s still a professor emeritus at Harvard Medical School.

“Prescription,” which came out July 21, took three years to finish. He relied heavily on thousands of scrapbook pages going back to the ’50s to jog his memory.

Writing it was a “formidable task, as difficult a task as any I had undertaken. Far more difficult and far more investing of time than inventing the defibrillator,” Lown said. “If we have a huge reading audience of this book, and they think through what is being said, it will contribute to more lives being saved than the defibrillator.”

“This is, I think, an antidote. It’s an immunization against international military adventures.”

The 400-page book details everything from his anxieties about a nuclear war to his first time meeting the cardiologist Chazov (as he stepped out of an elevator, Lown writes, his eyes were drawn to the dapper-looking man with ugly shoes. “Only a Russian would wear such shoes.”)

The pair went on to co-found IPPNW, but only after a lengthy courtship of sorts. It took convincing on both sides of the Atlantic that intentions were sincere.

“It’s so difficult, the struggle, especially when you’re thinking you’re doing God’s work, you’re doing things for humankind, and (yet) you’re maligned, you’re attacked, you’re slandered and endlessly, endlessly, ‘Why are you working for the Russians?’ ‘Why are you a KGB-dupe?’ ‘Why are you so simple-minded?’ ‘Why are you so naive?’ And worse, ‘Why are you a traitor?'” Lown said.

That skepticism didn’t end when Lown and Chazov’s group won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985. In response, the Wall Street Journal titled an editorial “The Nobel Peace Fraud.”

As Lown writes in the book, attitudes started to shift, at least in Norway, when Lown and Chazov jumped to the rescue of a Russian cinematographer having a heart attack during a press conference the day before the awarding of the peace prize.

Headlines trumpeted: “NOBEL DOCTORS SAVE MAN’S LIFE.”

Public opinion slowly changed. “I think we had a rough sell even after the Nobel,” Lown said. “The Soviet Union disappeared and that’s when the whole (‘Why are you so naive’) argument became nil.”

Today IPPNW has members in 62 countries. On its Web site, the group asks and answers the question, “Isn’t this really just another group of left-wing, anti-American zealots?”

The answer starts, “Unequivocally not.”

‘There would be no Iraq…’

Lown said he made a point to mix colorful anecdotes with his reflections and stern warnings for the future to make the book more appealing. It’s a heavy topic, he admits. But the threat of nuclear war and nuclear weapons hasn’t, and isn’t, going away.

“Had we understood the nuclear issue, had we understood what we did in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I am persuaded there would not be a Vietnam War. I am persuaded if there was no Vietnam War, there would be no Iraq war. I’m persuaded we would not have terrorism today,” Lown said.

“The greatest threat to America, other than global warming, is nuclear weapons. They are going to be in the hands of terrorists, they have to be. And when they do, some city of America, some big city, will become unlivable.”

Actions to combat that can start small, he said: Get involved. Join the Franco-American Heritage Center. Mentor children. Make an effort to help seniors. Embrace your community.

You start considering, “What is the value of this community if we’re going to have war that takes all our resources away and kills my boyfriend or hurts my girlfriend?” Lown said. “You begin to connect. You lift your view. Instead of looking to the ground, you’re looking to the distant horizon.”

Lown, married to his wife, Louise, for 61 years, returned to Maine every summer, to a lodge built by Louise’s parents, during all the years chronicled in “Prescription” – and still do. Louise graduated from Lewiston High School in 1940. As a teen, before they even dated she taught her husband-to-be English. Several years ago, they sold the lodge to one of his patients. Unwilling to give up Maine, they still rent it back each summer.

Lown’s horizon includes writing his next book and coming home. Dedication plans call for the unveiling of two new monuments, a reception at the Franco Center and a speech by Lown.

Talking about the honor and what it means to him, Lown paused and smiled.

“I hope the bridge is durable.”

Copy the Story Link