* * *
As connections to her past fell away one by one, Nancy was increasingly turning her thoughts to the Reagans’ future beyond the White House. She began laying plans soon after Ronnie was reelected. In April 1985 the president noted in his diary that Nancy was taking an overnight trip to Los Angeles to scout for a place where they might live. “That comes under the heading of looking ahead,” he wrote wryly.
Their living situation was not her only concern as Nancy looked ahead. From the outset of the Reagan presidency, she, more than Ronnie himself, had been preoccupied with what history would make of him. One project that she launched—and later regretted—had its origins in the middle of his first term and would continue for a decade after Ronnie was out of office. On Valentine’s Day 1983 Oregon senator Mark Hatfield had invited a group of biographers to dine with the Reagans and Librarian of Congress Daniel J. Boorstin at Hatfield’s home in Georgetown.
Among them was Edmund Morris, a cerebral, Kenya-born former advertising copywriter who three years earlier had won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Teddy Roosevelt. Ronnie lit up when he was introduced to Morris. He told the author how much he had loved the Roosevelt book, and how Nancy had felt the same way about a biography of first lady Edith Kermit Roosevelt, written by Morris’s talented wife, Sylvia Jukes Morris. “Those first few months in the White House, we would lay in bed and read ’em side by side,” Ronnie said.
Over a dinner of lemon piccata chicken around a table decorated with red plastic hearts, the group talked for more than an hour. Much of the conversation centered on how important it was for posterity to have a full and accurate record of both the events of the Reagan presidency and the thoughts of the man who drove them. Ronnie agreed, adding: “I still look over my shoulder when I’m, you know, walking out of the White House and the marines are saluting and all, and I say, ‘Who—me?’ ”
The president also told them stories of the unlikely life he had lived before he assumed the most powerful office in the world. One that stuck with Morris was how the year 1949 had been Ronnie’s lowest point. He was newly and unhappily divorced. He had a shattered leg and was struggling to get around on crutches. The movie roles were drying up. So, it seemed, was his future. “And then along came Nancy Davis,” he said, “and saved my soul.”
Morris also sensed a certain intensity being directed his way by one of the others at the dinner. “Throughout the seventy minutes we stayed at the table, I was aware of Mrs. Reagan’s stare, as a scuba diver in dark water senses two large, pale, accompanying jellyfish. I braced myself to glance at her: she gave a thin return of smile before looking away,” he recalled. Morris figured out eventually that the real purpose of the dinner had been to entice him to become the authorized chronicler of the Reagan presidency, a role modeled somewhat on what historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. had done when John F. Kennedy was president. Schlesinger’s 1965 book, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, had won both a Pulitzer and a National Book Award.
Richard Darman subsequently invited Morris to the White House and formally made the proposal that he write a definitive biography of the fortieth president. He would be given an opportunity to observe his subject at close range and in real time. Morris declined, saying he was committed to finishing another volume on Roosevelt. But after a couple of years, the author changed his mind, figuring he could not pass up the extraordinary arrangement he was being offered. He would have unprecedented access, and the White House would have no say over what he wrote. In November 1985 Random House beat out six other publishers to sign a $3 million deal with Morris, which at the time was the highest advance ever paid for a single book. “For the first time, a president is allowing not only a historian but a talented writer to see history as it occurs, without imposing restrictions on the manuscript,” said Random House chairman Robert L. Bernstein.
Morris quickly came to understand that the whole endeavor had been dreamed up by Nancy and Deaver. They were also responsible for his selection as the man to do it. As Morris told me in 2017, not quite two years before he died: “Reagan couldn’t have cared less. He had no curiosity about himself, and he couldn’t care less who wrote about him.”
To Nancy’s credit, he added, she never once tried to tell him what she thought he should write. She believed that with Morris’s insights and gifts, he would make the case for Ronnie’s historic significance and perhaps even lay the premise for a Nobel Peace Prize. Teddy Roosevelt, the subject of his previous biography, had won one in 1906; the medal was on the wall of the Roosevelt Room across the hall from the Oval Office. Nancy made sure that Morris got countless hours of interviews with Ronnie. The president also wrote letters to others, urging them to cooperate as well. So much access did Morris get that Ronnie once joked: “The other night, Nancy sneezed in her sleep, and I heard Edmund say ‘Gesundheit.’ ”
The book would take fourteen years to complete and become a source of lasting bitterness on all sides. It contained little exploration of politics or Ronnie’s ideas, and instead sought to penetrate his character; to capture his inner life. The endeavor became so frustrating to Morris that he, in desperation, employed an unusual narrative device of inventing fictional figures, including one he named Edmund Morris, a contemporary who meets the future president in 1926 and follows his life and career. “When I began writing, after he left the White House in January 1989, I struggled for about two years with an orthodox biographical style. He just kept evading me,” Morris told Publishers Weekly. “I had the insuperable problem of reconciling my close-up observations of him as president, when I could look at his fingernails and clothes and watch the expression on his face when he spoke, with the fact that I was not there observing him closely during his early life. When I hit on this device in 1992, it just seized me, it felt supremely right, and what feels good in one’s heart is usually sincere writing.”
Reagan World would not feel the same. Nancy blamed herself for choosing Morris and was bewildered that the project could have gone so far off the rails. Perhaps what had eluded the biographer was that, as close as he had gotten to his subject, there was no interior counternarrative to tell about Ronnie. At one point, Morris observed to Deaver that he couldn’t decide whether the president was the most complicated or the simplest man he had ever met. “Well, he’s pretty simple as far as I’m concerned,” Deaver replied. “What you see is what you get, Edmund. There is no big mystery here.”
The reviews of Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan upon its publication in the fall of 1999 were blistering, which did not surprise Morris. But the book found two fans: Ronnie’s children Ron and Patti, who themselves had struggled for their entire lives to get to the core of their father’s character. For Patti, the book not only brought new insights but also lifted some of her guilt for not having figured him out on her own: “I still don’t fully understand my father. After all those years of exhaustive research, even Edmund says the man is a mystery. But because of Edmund’s book, I have more clues, more threads to tie together.” Ron wrote that Morris’s biography “comes as near as any book I’ve read to capturing my father’s elusive nature.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
In mid-1981 the US Centers for Disease Control noticed a set of medical curiosities: an alert from Los Angeles that five previously healthy young men had come down with a rare, fatal lung infection; almost simultaneously, a dermatologist in New York saying that he had seen a cluster of unusually aggressive cases of Kaposi’s sarcoma, an obscure skin cancer. These seemingly unconnected occurrences had two things in common. First, all of the victims were sexually active gay men. Second, their maladies pointed to a catastrophically compromised immune system. About a month after those reports, a San Francisco weekly wrote that something it called “gay men’s pneumonia” was going around. By September 1982, there was a medical name for it: acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, or AIDS. The following May, scientists identified the retrovirus that was causing it: human immunodeficiency virus. HI
V.
It would take longer before it became clear who was at risk, how far the disease could spread, or what needed to be done to stop it. “At first, we thought it was gay men, and then it was intravenous drug users, and then that it was Haitians—which was a mistake,” said Anthony Fauci, a senior investigator who became director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in 1984. As the number of cases mounted, Fauci submitted an editorial to the New England Journal of Medicine in which he warned against assuming that AIDS would stay confined to the populations in which it had first appeared. But at that point, not even scientists were ready to accept how ominous the signs were. Fauci’s article was rejected because a reviewer for the medical field’s most prestigious publication deemed it to be too alarmist. It subsequently appeared in the June 1, 1982, issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine.
Nor was the story of dying homosexual men getting much traction in the mainstream media. Though more than half of those stricken were residents of New York City, the New York Times wrote only three stories about AIDS in 1981 and three more in 1982—all of which went on the inside pages.
The response of the Reagan administration was… silence. Even worse, as the crisis mounted, the administration targeted public health agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control, for massive budget cuts. The National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is the nation’s main backer of biomedical research, was also struggling with a funding squeeze.
The president of the United States did not so much as publicly utter the name of the disease until September 1985. Even then, it was only because a reporter brought it up at a news conference. Ronnie made an obviously untrue declaration that AIDS was a “top priority” for his administration and indicated that he thought the existing levels of government funding to fight the disease were adequate. “It was clear that there was sort of muted silence about things, and a complete lack of the use of the bully pulpit to sound the alarm,” Fauci said when I interviewed him more than three decades later. Not until the spring of 1987 did Ronnie give a major speech about AIDS. By that time, the disease had already struck 36,058 Americans, of whom 20,849 had died.
The Reagan administration’s unwillingness to recognize and confront the AIDS epidemic has gone down in history as one of the deepest and most enduring scars on its legacy. Those who would defend Ronnie and Nancy insist that it was not the result of deep-seated bigotry on their part against homosexuals. Coming from Hollywood, the Reagans had many acquaintances who were gay, and they were comfortable in their company. Nancy, in particular, counted numerous gay men among her closest confidants. She was on the phone nearly daily with her friend Jerry Zipkin, the New York society gadabout. Her decorator Ted Graber slept in the White House with his partner, possibly the first acknowledged same-sex couple to do so. She was also sensitive to the specific dangers that gay men faced in society. When author Truman Capote was arrested in Anaheim for disorderly conduct in the early 1980s, Nancy put in a frantic late-night call to Deaver, and begged him to find a way to get the renowned author freed. “Jail will kill him,” she told Deaver, who prevailed upon Meese to pull some strings and secure Capote’s release.
Family friend Doug Wick, a Hollywood producer, recalls that when he got married in 1986, news that Nancy would be at the wedding brought “both great curiosity and some ill will” among his liberal friends. Patricia Resnick, a lesbian who had written the 1980 hit movie 9 to 5, decided to put the first lady on the spot at the reception by asking her to dance. Resnick was tipsy and did it on a bet. Nancy took Resnick’s hand and said, “Only if you lead.” Wick felt proud of Nancy as he watched the two women do a slow box step to the jazz standard “Embraceable You.” He hoped that Nancy had changed the perceptions of some in his circle who misunderstood her.
As far back as 1978, Ronnie had been willing to risk his political capital with social conservatives by opposing a California ballot initiative that would have barred gays and lesbians from teaching in the state’s public schools. His opposition helped sink the ballot measure. But Ronnie also held a religious belief that homosexuality was sinful. In the spring of 1987, he discussed the AIDS epidemic with biographer Edmund Morris and said that “maybe the Lord brought down this plague,” because “illicit sex is against the Ten Commandments.” Privately, Ronnie also trafficked in homophobic stereotypes, as did those around him. Press spokesman Larry Speakes recalled that after Ronnie’s weekly shampoo, the president would flick his wrist and tell aides in a lisping voice, “I washed my hair last night, and I just can’t do a thing with it.” Speakes wrote admiringly: “He does a very good gay imitation. He would pretend to be annoyed at someone and say, ‘If those fellows don’t leave me alone, I’ll just slap them on the wrist.’ ”
Speakes himself cracked a homophobic joke when reporter Lester Kinsolving asked him during an October 15, 1982, press briefing whether the president had any reaction to reports that six hundred people had contracted the “gay plague.” It was the first public question the White House had received on the subject. The press secretary’s response: “I don’t have it. And you? Do you?” The reaction from the assembled reporters was laughter. At subsequent briefings over the next two years, Kinsolving, who was considered a gadfly, continued to press the White House spokesman about AIDS, only to be met with dismissive wisecracks questioning the reporter’s own sexual orientation. And the White House press corps continued to find these exchanges hilarious.
In October 1986 the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward reported that during a meeting with his national security advisers, Ronnie had made note of Libyan leader Mu‘ammar Gadhafi’s partiality for eccentric clothing and quipped: “Why not invite Gadhafi to San Francisco, he likes to dress up so much?” To which Secretary of State George Shultz replied: “Why don’t we give him AIDS!” According to Woodward, others around the table thought this was extremely amusing. San Francisco officials demanded an apology, both to the city and to people infected with the disease.
As was the case with many Americans during the early years of the epidemic, the Reagans’ practical understanding of AIDS was colored by fear, ignorance, and scientific uncertainty. One day, when hairdresser Robin Weir was making one of his twice-a-week visits to the White House, Nancy inadvertently took a sip from his water glass. Afterward, she went to White House physician John Hutton in a panic, worried that she might have contracted the disease. Hutton tried to reassure her that it was impossible to get AIDS that way, but she wasn’t satisfied. “How do you know?” Nancy demanded. “How do you know?” Weir died in 1993 at the age of forty-five from what his obituaries described as a combination of colitis, bacterial sepsis, and a heart attack, all three of which are often associated with AIDS.
But it is also clear that Nancy became attuned to the seriousness of the epidemic earlier than the president did—in part, because her son, Ron, was seeing it up close. “I’m in New York, I’m dancing, I know people who are HIV positive. Dancers, fashion designers, people like that. Doria was working at Andy Warhol’s Factory [his studio] at the time, and she’s in contact with a whole range of people. So we are well aware of what’s going on and how serious it is,” Ron said. “I began speaking to my mother about it. My mother would always say this to me: ‘I’m a doctor’s daughter.’ Anything kind of medically oriented, she was very pro that. I would talk to her about people, how many people, who these people were. And she began to understand that this is a big deal. This is a crisis.… She began to sense that pretending this isn’t happening is not a good way to go.”
Nancy and her son began looking for opportunities to discuss AIDS with Ronnie. “We’d start mentioning it, bringing it up as a topic, starting to get it into his head,” Ron recalled. He acknowledged that their effort did not get very far with his father. Where Nancy “could appreciate things a little bit more abstractly, it very much helped if he could put a face on something,” Ron said.
In 1985 the epidemic did indeed gain its face: the once-magnificent vis
age of actor Rock Hudson. When Hudson was revealed to be dying of AIDS, “the whole picture changed” for the president, Ron said. During the 1950s and 1960s, Hudson had been one of the country’s biggest movie stars. But while Hudson wooed Elizabeth Taylor, Lauren Bacall, Gina Lollobrigida, and Doris Day on the screen, he lived a closeted existence off it. If the world had known that the man that fan magazines declared to be Hollywood’s most handsome star was actually gay, Hudson’s career would have been destroyed.
The first lady, given the acuity of her radar and her gossipy network of California friends, surely was aware of Hudson’s secret life. Ronnie probably knew about it too. Hudson attended a state dinner in May 1984, and Nancy noticed that he looked gaunt. When she expressed concern about his health, Hudson told her that he’d caught the flu while filming in Israel but had recovered and was feeling fine. A picture from that dinner in her White House scrapbook shows Hudson beaming alongside the first couple, his hand clasped with Nancy’s. Afterward, Nancy sent Hudson a set of photos from the evening. She enclosed a note suggesting he have a doctor check a red blotch that one image showed on his neck. It had been bothering him too, so he did, in June, the month after the state dinner. The skin irritation turned out to be Kaposi’s sarcoma, and that was how Hudson learned that he had AIDS.
By the summer of 1985, the fifty-nine-year-old actor’s deterioration had become obvious. He made an appearance in Monterey, California, with Doris Day, with whom he’d costarred in some of the most popular romantic comedies of his heyday. Reporters and friends were shocked at how frail he looked. When Hudson collapsed in the lobby of the Ritz Hotel in Paris in July, his publicist put out a statement that he had inoperable liver cancer. The American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, where he was rushed, blamed his condition on “fatigue and general malaise.” But news reports shot across the globe speculating that it was AIDS and that Hudson had come to Paris seeking a miracle cure. In 1985 there was no effective treatment for AIDS; the first AIDS drug, AZT, wasn’t approved until two years later.
The Triumph of Nancy Reagan Page 45
