In appreciation: Sandy Berger

I had the privilege of knowing Samuel R. Berger for 65 years. Sandy, as everyone knew him, died on Dec. 2, 2015, at age 70. Our friendship began in Mrs. Hultslander’s kindergarten class at the Millerton School, and my wife, Meg, and I last saw him on Nov. 8.

Sandy had a keen interest in people. As former President Clinton humorously observed at his Memorial Service at Temple Sinai in Washington, D.C., on Friday, Dec. 4, Sandy was a great humanitarian, but unlike many who profess to be such, he actually liked real people. Add to that his natural empathy and his wonderful sense of humor, and the result was a person with a rare capacity for true friendship.  

As has been mentioned in some of the national coverage of his death, Sandy was a passionate baseball fan and that may have been the greatest test of our friendship. He loved the Brooklyn Dodgers and I was an insufferable Yankee fan. During our childhood in Millerton, the Yankees and Dodgers were often in the World Series and the Dodgers seldom won. Sandy, ever patient and taking the long view, knew his time would come. It did in our freshman year in college. The Dodgers had moved to Los Angeles and were playing the Yankees in the World Series. They swept the Yankees four straight. Mel Allen, the longtime Yankee announcer, did the television play-by-play for the final game. He had laryngitis and by the end of the game could hardly talk. Two hours later a man knocked on my dorm room door and handed me a telegram. I opened it and read: “Ed. Even Mel Allen choked. Sympathy. See you soon. Sandy.” 

Sandy could have left Millerton and never looked back, but he didn’t. He enjoyed visiting the area to the extent his busy schedule allowed. Whenever we saw him, after inquiring about us and our family, his next questions were about his friends in Millerton and Amenia and what was going on in those communities. When we saw him in early November, he was delighted to hear that our classmates George Kaye and Victoria Perotti had just been elected supervisor in their communities and asked me to send him their e-mail addresses. For many years, he kept his subscription to The Millerton News and especially enjoyed Bernie Silvernail’s column on local history. 

During the memorial service, former President Clinton, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Vice President Joseph Biden all spoke of Sandy’s wisdom, wit, warmth and perseverance as did, most eloquently, Sandy’s daughter Sarah and son Alex. When speaking at a gathering of his family and a group of close friends afterward, I told them that many of those qualities could be traced back to his time in Millerton. 

Sandy’s parents, Rose and Albert Berger, were business people with a strong sense of civic and social responsibility. They were actively involved in the effort to consolidate the Amenia and Millerton school districts into the Webutuck Central School District, and Al was a member of its first Board of Education.

They purchased the department store business from Lena Bloch in 1952, located in what is now Oblong Books and Music, and it became Berger’s Department Store. Two years later, Al Berger died from a heart attack. Sandy was 8 and his sister, Laurie, was 12. Sandy once told me how difficult it was for his mother. Not only had she unexpectedly lost her husband, but her education had prepared her to be a teacher, not a business person. Sandy and Laurie worked in the store, and Rose successfully continued the business until both children had graduated from college. 

We attended Webutuck when it was under the aspirational leadership of Superintendent Mike Rindsberg, who was so committed to seeing we got into the right colleges that he would drive us to visit them. Sandy’s interest in history and government was nurtured by exceptional teachers, my mother, Leola Downey, and her close friend, Violet Simmons, whose admonition to her students was: “The difficult we do right away, the impossible takes a little longer.” His confidence to express himself publicly was helped enormously by his participation in our school plays under the direction of our gifted English teacher, Jack Bower. 

Sandy and I came of age in a world that valued public service as a way to help people improve the quality of their lives. Given Sandy’s rare combination of intellect, personality and sense of social responsibility, a career in public service was a natural fit. 

That his work would take him to a point where he would become one of the key architects of our nation’s foreign policy, and by extension the world’s, is remarkable but even more remarkable is that it never changed him. I believe it was his capacity to keep the important things in life in perspective that drew an estimated 1,000 people to Temple Sinai to remember Sandy and celebrate his life.

As usual, Sandy said it best when in an Aug. 25, 1999, interview in The New York Times he told R.W. Apple: “Where I grew up is very important to what I am. My perspectives are still more Millerton 1960 than Washington 2000. The small-town sense of community and social responsibility — that’s the lasting imprint of Millerton on me.”

— Edward Downey is a Millerton native and founding partner of the law firm of Downey, Haab & Murphy, PLLC, in Millerton.