The White House announced that the president had telephoned Hudson to wish him well “and let him know that he and Mrs. Reagan were keeping him in their thoughts and prayers.” In Ronnie’s July 24 diary entry, the president indicated he had not known the nature of Hudson’s malady when they spoke: “Called Rock Hudson in a Paris Hospital where press said he had inoperable cancer. We never knew him too well but did know him & I thought under the circumstances I might be a reassurance. Now I learn from TV there is question as to his illness & rumors he is there for treatment of AIDS.” After this entry, Ronnie’s diaries do not mention AIDS again for nearly two years.
On the same day the president spoke with Hudson, the White House received a desperate appeal for help in arranging a transfer for the actor to a French military hospital. The telegram from Hudson’s publicist, Dale Olson, which was addressed to assistant press secretary Mark Weinberg, claimed the hospital was the one facility in the world that could provide “necessary medical treatment to save life of Rock Hudson or at least alleviate his illness.” The hospital’s commander had turned down Hudson as a patient because he was not French, but the telegram said Hudson’s doctor “believes a request from the White House or a high American official would change his mind.” Weinberg took the matter not to Ronnie but to Nancy, and the two of them agreed to refer it to the American embassy in Paris.
In later years, it would be said that the first lady was callous in how she handled it, but it is also possible to appreciate that Nancy had been put in a situation where she had no good option. She was not averse to making discreet interventions on behalf of friends in trouble, as she had when Capote was thrown in jail. But Hudson’s illness was one of the biggest stories in the world at that moment. Had Nancy done a special favor on behalf of someone rich and famous while tens of thousands of others were dying of the disease in obscurity, she would have been justifiably criticized for that as well. Probably more so. There was also precedent to think about: no doubt, this would not be the last such request they would get. Was that kind of intercession on behalf of her friends a proper role for a first lady?
Despite the claims made in the telegram, it does not appear that the French hospital could have helped Hudson. According to And the Band Played On, a definitive book on the early AIDS epidemic by journalist Randy Shilts, when Hudson’s French doctor saw his patient’s dire condition, he concluded that any further treatments would do no good. Hudson spent $250,000 to charter a Boeing 747 and went home to Los Angeles, where he would die two months later. Before he did, Hudson authorized his doctors to make a public statement: “Mr. Hudson is being evaluated and treated for complications of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.”
Hudson’s heroic public acknowledgment that he was suffering from the disease changed the national conversation around AIDS and finally put the story on the front pages of the newspapers. In the two months that followed his announcement, more than $1.8 million in private contributions were raised to support AIDS research and care for its victims. The amount was more than twice as much as had been collected in all of 1984. The government stepped up as well. A few weeks after Hudson’s death, Congress doubled the amount of federal spending dedicated to finding a cure. “It was commonly accepted now, among the people who had understood the threat for many years, that there were two clear phases to the disease in the United States: there was AIDS before Rock Hudson and AIDS after,” Shilts wrote. “The fact that a movie star’s diagnosis could make such a huge difference was itself a tribute to the power the news media exerted in the latter portion of the twentieth century.” Shilts himself died of AIDS in 1994 at the age of forty-two.
After Hudson was stricken, the president began asking his White House physician to explain more about AIDS to him. Hutton told Ronnie that it was caused by a hitherto unknown infectious agent for which the body seemed to have no defense. “You mean like the measles virus, but one that won’t go away, that arouses no immune response?” Ronnie asked. At another point, Ronnie mused: “I always thought the world would end in a flash, but this sounds like it’s worse.”
Inside the West Wing, however, there was strong resistance to growing public calls for the Reagan administration to become more aggressive in combatting the disease. Some of the president’s more conservative advisers contended that AIDS should be viewed as the consequence of moral decay rather than as a health issue. White House communications director Pat Buchanan, before joining the administration, had written a column in which he sneered, “The poor homosexuals—they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution.” Many of Ronnie’s allies on the Right were more concerned with identifying and isolating those who had AIDS than treating and caring for them. In 1986 conservative lion William F. Buckley, the Reagans’ longtime friend, proposed tattooing HIV-positive people—on the upper forearm if they were IV drug users and the buttocks if they were homosexual.
As the White House tried to keep AIDS at arm’s length, the effects of the epidemic were being felt close at hand. After Deaver left the president’s staff, he dispatched a young Floridian named Robert Higdon to assist Nancy and help organize a foundation to build a future presidential library. A kid barely out of college, “I was scared to death of her at first. Everybody said she was like the dragon lady,” Higdon said. However, the two of them clicked, and Higdon became Nancy’s go-to person when she needed something done discreetly. For instance, he was the one who made the quiet arrangements for her to have a facelift in New York in 1986 and to recuperate away from public view in the apartment of her friend, the heiress and clothing designer Gloria Vanderbilt.
But Higdon was suffering a private agony that he could not bring himself to share even with her. His partner, a prominent Washington real estate developer, was dying of AIDS. “I lived two years with it in secrecy, and worked in the White House,” Higdon told me more than three decades later. He started to cry at the painful memory. “I thought, here I work for the president of the United States, and I can’t keep my partner alive,” Higdon said. “I have all the power in the world right in front of me. What can I do? Nothing.”
Ronnie’s first significant initiative against the disease came in February 1986, when he declared combatting AIDS to be “one of our highest public health priorities,” and asked Surgeon General C. Everett Koop to prepare a major report on it. Critics noted, however, that on the very same day, the administration submitted a budget that called for sharply reducing federal spending on AIDS research and care programs.
Koop, an imposing figure who wore an admiral’s uniform and an Amish-style square-cut gray beard without a mustache, was an unlikely champion for AIDS activists. He was a deeply religious Presbyterian and antiabortion crusader deemed “Dr. Unqualified” in a New York Times editorial when he was nominated in 1981. His expertise was in pediatric surgery, not public health. Initially, he put most of his effort as surgeon general into raising awareness of the dangers of smoking. But once he was tasked to write the report, Koop undertook a full-scale effort to discover everything that could be known about AIDS.
As it happened, his personal physician was Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “He would come in, he would sit down right on the couch, and he would say, ‘Tell me about this.’ So, for weeks and weeks, I started to tell him all about the things we were doing,” Fauci recalled. “Then he started going out and learning himself. So, as we were getting into the second term, and he realized this was a big problem, he shifted his emphasis from tobacco to HIV.”
Koop wrote his thirty-six-page report on AIDS at a stand-up desk in the basement of his home on the National Institutes of Health campus. He did not submit it for review by Reagan administration policy advisers because he knew that the White House would have watered down its conclusions and recommendations. Released on October 22, 1986, it was a bombshell, projecting that 270,000 Americans would contract the disease by 1991 and that 179,000 would die of it. The report use
d explicit language, explaining that AIDS was transmitted through “semen and vaginal fluids” and during “oral, anal, and vaginal intercourse.” A version was ultimately sent to every one of the 107 million households in the country, which was the largest mass mailing in American history. It carried a message from Koop: “Some of the issues involved in this brochure may not be things you are used to discussing openly. I can easily understand that. But now you must discuss them. We all must know about AIDS. Read this brochure and talk about it with those you love.”
Conservatives liked some of what was in the report. It warned against “freewheeling casual sex” and asserted that the surest means of preventing AIDS were through abstinence and monogamy. But they weren’t so happy with Koop’s recommendation that condoms be used as a fallback. And they were especially disturbed by his call for schools to begin educating children as young as third grade about the disease. Ronnie himself was uncomfortable with the implications. “Recognizing that there are those who are not going to abstain, all right. Then you can touch on the other things that are being done,” he said in an April 29, 1987, interview with a group of reporters. “But I would think that sex education should begin with the moral ramifications, that it is not just a physical activity that doesn’t have any moral connotation.”
Meanwhile, the administration’s internal differences over AIDS started playing out in public. Secretary of Education William J. Bennett, who was a voice of Christian conservatives in the Reagan Cabinet, publicly called for mandatory AIDS testing for hospital patients, prison inmates, immigrants, and couples getting married. Koop, expressing the opinion of most medical experts, warned that such a dictate would be counterproductive, because it would foster discrimination and drive victims of the disease—many of whom already lived at the edges of society—further underground.
Disagreements within the Reagan family also became more open. In July 1987 Ron appeared in a television commercial in which he criticized his father’s administration for its lack of action. “The US government isn’t moving fast enough to stop the spread of AIDS. Write to your congressman,” Ron said and then added with a grin, “or to someone higher up.” In interviews, the president’s son took aim at Bennett in particular, saying that in calling for widespread AIDS testing, his father’s Cabinet secretary was pandering to the right-wing view that the disease was a punishment for homosexuality. Ron also appeared in a thirty-minute privately funded AIDS education film, which aired on the Public Broadcasting System. In it, he held up a condom and spermicide and urged: “Get them and learn how to use them.” The president was annoyed with his outspoken son. Ronnie made it clear in one diary entry that his own views aligned more with Bennett’s. Ron, he wrote on July 18, 1987, “can be stubborn on a couple of issues & won’t listen to anyone’s argument. Bill volunteered to have a talk with him. I hope it can be worked out.”
Behind the scenes, Nancy had also been pushing her husband to shift his stance on AIDS. She wanted him to start by speaking out more forcefully about it. Opportunity presented itself when screen legend Elizabeth Taylor, whom Nancy had known since their days together at MGM, asked Ronnie to give the keynote address at a fund-raising dinner for the American Foundation for AIDS Research, or amfAR, a leading organization of which Taylor was the national chairman. The event was to be held in Washington on May 31, 1987, the night before what would be the largest scientific meeting ever held on the subject of AIDS. At the bottom of her letter, Taylor scribbled a note: “P.S. My love to you, Nancy, I hope to see you soon. E.”
Ronnie accepted the invitation, no doubt at Nancy’s urging. But the first lady did not trust the White House communications shop, where Buchanan had only recently departed, to strike the right note in drafting what the president would say. She knew that her husband would be speaking to a skeptical—in fact, downright hostile—audience. So, Nancy recruited her favorite outside speechwriter, Landon Parvin, who had left the White House in 1983, to come back and craft the address.
“The reason I was called was because Mrs. Reagan was afraid that if it was given to the inside speechwriting staff, it would be too right-wing,” Parvin told me. He recognized that this was going to require a major battle with the conservative forces of the West Wing and that he could not win it without Nancy’s assistance. “I may need your help,” he told the first lady. “I may have to use your name.” Nancy gave Parvin permission to claim her proxy wherever he felt it was necessary.
As Parvin began researching the subject, he discovered something that surprised him: the president had never held a meeting with Koop about AIDS and, in fact, had little contact at all with the surgeon general. He called Nancy, who set up a session where the two of them could talk. But instead of the tête-à-tête that Parvin had hoped for, it turned into a much larger group, which included Bennett and domestic policy adviser Gary Bauer. “It was like a Cabinet meeting, in effect,” Parvin recalled. “The White House staff had arranged to load it with conservatives, so that Koop couldn’t get the president too much to himself.”
The unsurprising result was a fierce argument over what the president should say. Parvin’s notes from the session indicate that Koop wanted Ronnie to tamp down unwarranted and stigmatizing fears about the disease. He urged the president to make it clear that people could not get AIDS from swimming pools, telephones, mosquitoes, or by allowing their food to be prepared by someone infected with the virus. One person in the room objected that “the jury is still out” on secondary means of transmitting the disease.
There was another debate over whether to have Reagan remind people that the government’s own US Public Health Service had come out in favor of allowing people infected with the virus to participate in routine school or work activity. “The president can’t be this far out on a limb,” someone said, according to Parvin’s notes, which do not identify the speaker. “His major responsibility is to protect Americans who are not yet ill!” As the discussion began spiraling out of control, Parvin decided to play his ace card. “Mrs. Reagan wants it this way,” he said.
Parvin didn’t win everything, but by invoking Nancy’s name, he got much of what he wanted into Ronnie’s first major address on AIDS. Files in the Reagan Library give an indication of how the conservative forces tried to dig in as the date for the speech grew near. Three days before, White House officials were asked for their responses to the latest draft. A senior member of the Domestic Policy Council named Robert Sweet returned his copy with a note: “I have very serious concerns about the tone of this speech as it is written. It does not reflect the president’s deep sense of moral justice. I strongly urge major revision.” For instance, Sweet objected to one reference in the text to “safe” behavior; he wanted it to say “appropriate” behavior. He also suggested deleting a line asserting that “only medical science can ever truly defeat AIDS,” and proposed “but only by changing our behavior we can ever truly defeat AIDS.” Sweet crossed out language that said victims of the disease should not be blamed, and wrote in the margin: “Homosexuals and drug users choose their lifestyle—it’s the innocent children, hemophiliacs, and unsuspecting spouses who are the victims.” None of the revisions he wanted was made.
The amfAR dinner was held in a tent outside a restaurant along the Potomac River. Hundreds of people, some of whom had AIDS, gathered outside, holding lit candles in memory of those who had already died of the disease. The atmosphere inside could hardly have been more tense. Anthony Fauci, who was sitting in the front row of the audience, noticed that Nancy seemed to be acting as “an orchestrator” of the head table, anxiously trying to manage how things were going. “She wasn’t the quiet first lady sitting off to the side. It was clear that she was buzz-buzzing up there,” he said.
Ronnie’s speech was repeatedly interrupted by catcalls and hissing. Booing started when the president announced that AIDS would be added to the list of contagious diseases for which immigrants and others seeking to enter the country permanently could be denied entry. It grew louder
as he called for “routine” testing of federal prisoners, immigrants, and marriage license applicants. The proposal did not go as far as the mandatory testing that many in the administration had wanted and activists had feared. But Ronnie offered no assurances that those who tested positive would be guaranteed confidentiality or protected against discrimination. And while the president lamented the plight of some groups susceptible to the virus—hemophiliacs, spouses of IV drug users, blood transfusion recipients, babies of infected women—nowhere in the speech did he mention the words gay or homosexual.
What people in the audience didn’t know was how much worse it could have been had Nancy not intervened through Parvin. After the amfAR dinner, Elizabeth Taylor downplayed the fury that many in the room felt. “I know there are some people who disagree—that was quite clear,” the actress said. “But I think what the president said was quite in concurrence with what we all hope and pray for: that there is a cure for AIDS.” The reviews in the media were positive, though not glowing. “The president’s Sunday-night speech on AIDS was sensible,” a June 2 Washington Post editorial said. “Much talk had preceded the event—Mr. Reagan’s first speech devoted entirely to the subject—and it was rumored that warring camps within the administration were trying to persuade him to take different positions. In the end, the speech took something from both sides and set out a cautious approach. Compassion was the keynote.”
The Triumph of Nancy Reagan Page 46
