By JACK LESSENBERRY
They filmed a few scenes in Michigan last week for the soon-to-be-shown HBO movie, "You Don't Know Jack," about the apostle of assisted suicide, Dr. Jack Kevorkian.
I imagine I'll see the movie, but for me, I imagine it is bound to be an anticlimax, no matter how well Al Pacino and Susan Sarandon portray Dr. Death and his sidekick, Janet Good. You see, I do know Jack. I had a ringside seat at the real thing. I covered the Kevorkian trials for the New York Times and many other papers.
I also had behind-the-scenes access to the defense team for the first trial, which I covered for Vanity Fair. I also participated in the making of several news documentaries about the man and the issue.
I talked to Kevorkian, who told me he had assisted something like 130 suicides, perhaps a hundred times between 1993 and 1999, when he finally managed to get himself sent away for second-degree murder. He ended up serving eight years.
When the judge sentenced him, the suicide doctor winked at me.
"Now I've got them right where I want them," he said.
Wrong. Dr. Death, who was once the second-most-famous man in the country, had used up his 15 minutes of fame. Prisoners, as his prosecutor told me, don't usually get to hold press conferences.
Out of sight; out of mind. During the eight years he was in prison, he was mostly forgotten. When he came out, it was to a different world. After Sept. 11, the idea of voluntary suicide didn't seem quite so fashionable. Interest soon waned.
It took me a while to figure Jack Kevorkian out. Though he had a medical degree and had been a pathologist, he really wasn't a doctor. Essentially, he was a brilliant, if undisciplined, scientist who was fascinated by the transition from life to death.
Though his equally brilliant lawyer, Geoffrey Fieger, helped coach him for his courtroom appearances, he had virtually no authentic human warmth. He intellectually believed those who were hopelessly suffering should be allowed to end their lives with a physician's aid. (I agreed with him then, and still do.)
However, he also ruined his own movement and largely discredited himself by his increasingly reckless behavior. By 1998, Michigan had stopped prosecuting him for assisted suicide.
At least one other doctor began following in his footsteps. But Kevorkian then switched to euthanasia, taped himself doing it, and challenged the law to come after him. For good measure, he fired his lawyer, and tried to defend himself. He made a mess of it.
I've seen Jack Kevorkian only once since he got out. (He said that I am "too objective" and he doesn't want to talk to me anymore.) He is now 81, and spends most of his time reading and writing in a decidedly downscale Royal Oak apartment.
Ironically, he did accomplish something big for mankind that he most likely never intended. When he helped his first of his 130-odd patients die, back in 1990, the medical community was far too insensitive toward people in pain. There was almost no such thing as "end-of-life care," but Dr. Death changed that.
Suddenly, the hospice movement was winning vast new support from both government and private sources who saw it at least partly as an alternative to Jack Kevorkian.
Doctors became more sensitive to their patients' needs. Today, they are far more likely to prescribe adequate pain medication.
Much-deserved honor
Michigan's Department of Natural Resources is waiving its normal rule against naming a park after a living person, as well it should. On Thursday, Tri-Centennial Park along the Detroit River will be re-dedicated.
It will now become the William G. Milliken State Park and Harbor. That's an honor both much-deserved and, frankly, overdue.
As Dave Dempsey observed in his 2006 biography, "William Milliken, Michigan's Passionate Moderate," the former governor was not only the state's longest-serving chief executive, but "the greenest governor of the 20th century."
Milliken signed dozens of major environmental bills, was instrumental in passage of the bottle deposit law and helped clean up Lake Erie by insisting on limiting phosphorous in laundry detergent. The park's location is appropriate, too, because he also tried to do more to help Detroit than any other governor.
Gov. Jennifer Granholm and Detroit Mayor Dave Bing will be present at the ceremony, as will other local dignitaries and the now 87-year-old Milliken himself.
