Sanford D. Greenberg
About
In the many chapters of his life – as an inventor, policymaker, author, philanthropist, relentless optimist, and tireless advocate – Sandy Greenberg has combined great personal and professional achievement and leadership with service to community and country. In May 2023, Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences brought attention to this remarkable record by bestowing on Sandy its highest honor, the Centennial Medal, awarded to those alumni “whose contributions to knowledge, to their disciplines, to their colleagues, and to society at large have made a fundamental and lasting impact.” Greenberg’s story is even more remarkable when one considers that he has been blind since his college days.
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Sandy’s early years read like the American Dream writ large. A junk dealer’s son from Buffalo, New York, born into a family that had barely escaped the Holocaust, Sandy won a full scholarship to Columbia University. While sailing through his junior year, misdiagnosed glaucoma caught up with him in the middle of a first-semester exam. He had to stumble from the room, unable to read the questions he was being asked or the answers he had scrawled in his blue book.
Two months later, in February 1961, a Detroit surgeon said six words to Sandy that no one should have to hear: “Son, you will be blind tomorrow.” True to his word, the next morning the doctor destroyed Sandy’s vision to save his eyes, an irony for the ages.
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Back in Buffalo, his future shattered, Sandy met with a social worker, who laid out his new options: caning chairs, assembling screwdriver packages for a local tool factory, or becoming a rural justice of the peace. Instead, less than six years after being blinded, Sandy leapfrogged what seemed his destiny and joined the White House Fellows Class of 1966-67. His is a remarkable story.
What happened? Family and friends — including his girlfriend, Sue, now his wife of 61 years, the rock he could always lean on — refused to give up on Sandy or allow him to give up on himself. More directly, his college roommate traveled to Buffalo late that spring to insist that Sandy return to Columbia and to promise he would be Sandy’s eyes. In essence, the roommate became Sandy’s bridge over troubled water, appropriately, since that roommate is Art Garfunkel, still Sandy’s dear friend and godfather to his children.
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Most important, though, was Sandy himself and his iron determination not to be viewed as limited by his blindness. He not only returned to Columbia to start his senior year; Sandy graduated on time as Phi Beta Kappa and as class president. But he didn’t stop there. A doctoral program in government at Harvard followed, interrupted by a Marshall Scholarship at Oxford University and an MBA from Columbia. He also attended Harvard Law School, and was finally rewarded with an MA and PhD from Harvard.
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He received a designation in 1966 as one of ten “Outstanding Young Men of America” by the U.S. Junior Chamber of Commerce, and his appointment as a White House Fellow under President Lyndon Johnson.
As a Fellow, Sandy worked with the Departments of Defense, State, Commerce, and NASA; and with task forces on information systems and biomedical research, which would sow the seeds of later initiatives in the private sector.
Sandy had already achieved a degree of financial independence by inventing sound-compression technology that allowed him to play back taped lectures at higher speeds than the sighted can generally process. Selling the patent for that helped fund his first post-White House Fellows enterprise, a technology company staffed with, among others, former Johnson Special Assistant Bill Moyers, former Cabinet secretaries Orville Freeman and Willard Wirtz, and James Goddard, head of the Food & Drug Administration. This melded culture clearly worked because Sandy’s company would help design key computer software used on the famed Apollo 11 mission — the fulfillment of Sandy’s fascination with President Kennedy’s vow to land a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s.
In time, Sandy's honors and public service accrued. He was asked to join the Council on Foreign Relations and became a member of the board of the National Committee on US-China Relations, and further tapped to serve as Chairman of the Rural Health Care Corporation, created by Congress to bring the benefits of telemedicine to rural America. He was a founding director of the American Agenda, an organization established by Presidents Carter and Ford to identify for President George H. W. Bush the six most urgent problems confronting the nation and to recommend bipartisan solutions. President Clinton asked Sandy to serve on the National Science Board, which operates the National Science Foundation and advises both the President and Congress on policy matters related to science and engineering.
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In 2016, he was also invited to join the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. By then, he was serving as Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Johns Hopkins Wilmer Eye Institute, the largest research and clinical enterprise in ophthalmology in the nation — a position he still holds.
Underlying Sandy’s entire adult life has been the 1961 promise he made to God in a Detroit hospital bed as a newly blind 19-year-old: that he would do everything in his power to end blindness for everyone, forever. In 2012, Sandy and his wife Sue began delivering on that promise in earnest and without reservation. That October, Sandy announced the creation of the Sanford & Susan Greenberg Prize to End Blindness: $3 million to be awarded in December 2020 to that person or persons who had done the most by that date to rid the world of this ancient plague.
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In furtherance of that goal and to continue the momentum created by the Greenberg Prize, the Greenbergs have since launched the Sanford and Susan Greenberg Center to End Blindness, in conjunction with the Wilmer Eye Institute and Johns Hopkins Medicine, a teaming that brings the goal of ending blindness tantalizingly close.
In 2023, Sandy Greenberg’s lifetime of service and purpose was recognized with two honors: the White House Fellows Foundation and Association’s John W. Gardner Legacy of Leadership Award, presented “for his lifetime of leadership and service, for his dedication to his profession and his country, and for his enduring support of the White House Fellows program,” and the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Centennial Medal, mentioned earlier. In introducing Sandy for the latter honor, Marianne Steiner noted that, “He singlehandedly put blindness on the global agenda at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.”
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Sandy’s memoir — Hello Darkness, My Old Friend: How Daring Dreams and Unyielding Friendship Turned One Man’s Blindness into an Extraordinary Vision for Life — appeared in 2020 with a Foreword by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, an Introduction by Art Garfunkel, and a Final Word by Margaret Atwood. A young adult version, Hello Darkness, was published in 2022. The memoir is now under development as a feature film by Wayfarer Studios.
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