The Triumph of Nancy Reagan

by Karen Tumulty

  In an interview more than thirty years after Ronnie’s amfAR speech, Parvin reflected on what it achieved and what it didn’t. “There was good stuff in it, but not enough,” he told me. The speechwriter reproached himself for the deletion of a passage about Ryan White, an Indiana teen who had been infected with HIV from a 1984 blood transfusion and was subsequently ostracized in his hometown of Kokomo, Indiana. White rallied for the right to attend school and, in doing so, raised awareness of the need to end prejudice and ignorance around the disease. “I was fighting so many big battles that I caved on that one and didn’t mention him. I still regret that I didn’t fight that one,” Parvin said. White died in April 1990, just weeks before his high school graduation; four months later, Congress passed its largest-ever measure to provide assistance to people suffering from AIDS and named the law in his honor. Not until the final weeks of White’s life did Ronnie meet with the boy, and by then, the fortieth president was a private citizen.

  Belated as it was, the speech did mark a turning point for both of the Reagans. They finally began drawing the spotlight that followed them to the plight of AIDS victims and the stigma they faced. In July, not quite two months after his amfAR address, Ronnie visited the National Cancer Institute’s pediatric ward and cuddled a fourteen-month-old baby infected with HIV. The photo made the front page of the next day’s New York Times. In May 1988 Nancy became honorary chairman of the first international event at the United Nations for children affected by AIDS. To help publicize and raise money for it, Nancy invited eleven-year-old Celeste Carrion, who at the time was the oldest known surviving child born with AIDS, to the White House.

  In late June 1987 Ronnie also signed an executive order creating the President’s Commission on the HIV Epidemic to investigate and recommend measures that federal, state, and local governments should take in response. It had an inauspicious beginning, however. In its early months, the thirteen-member panel nearly collapsed due to poor leadership and internal feuding. The commission was also criticized for being packed with conservatives whose views did not conform with mainstream scientific thinking about the disease. Nancy waged a battle with adviser Gary Bauer over her insistence that the commission include an openly gay member. Bauer told reporters he would be “very surprised if an administration opposed to making appointments on the basis of race or sex would agree to make an appointment based on bedroom habits.”

  Nancy won. Dr. Frank Lilly, the chairman of the genetics department at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and a board member of the advocacy and service organization Gay Men’s Health Crisis, was named to the panel. Lilly’s appointment caused a sensation. Senator Gordon Humphrey, a conservative Republican from New Hampshire, complained that the administration “should strive at all costs to avoid sending the message to society—especially to impressionable youth—that homosexuality is simply an alternative lifestyle.” Calling gay sexual practices “unnatural” and “immoral,” Humphrey said only heterosexuals should have been named to the AIDS panel. Dr. Lilly himself put out a statement that said, in part: “As far as I know, I am probably among the first openly gay persons to have been appointed to a significant position in any US administration.” There was little doubt in Washington circles how he had gotten there. An unnamed administration official told the New York Times that Lilly was on the commission “because the first lady said so.”

  When the panel’s first chairman resigned in October amid turmoil, Ronnie named retired navy admiral James Watkins to head it. The reception to that appointment was skeptical, given that Watkins had no medical background and was a staunchly conservative Catholic. But he turned out to be exactly the kind of manager who was needed: focused, disciplined, curious, and empathetic. “All you have to do is walk into the pediatric ward of Harlem Hospital and see those children,” he said. “Nobody wants them. They have no place to go. That gets you.” His leadership was such that the panel came to be known as the Watkins Commission.

  A draft of its final report was due in mid-1988, in the waning months of Ronnie’s presidency. Expectations were that it would blame the federal government for a lack of leadership on AIDS, set out a battle plan for fighting the disease, and call for antidiscrimination legislation. All of which meant that it was likely to be ignored and buried by the Reagan administration’s top policy makers. The week before the report came out, Nancy got a call from family friend Doug Wick. He asked if he could bring someone by to meet the Reagans.

  The woman he wanted the Reagans to talk to was former museum director Elizabeth Glaser, the wife of Paul Michael Glaser, a star known to millions of television fans as Detective Dave Starsky on the late-1970s police drama Starsky & Hutch. Elizabeth, the best friend of Wick’s own wife, Lucy Fisher, had a secret known only to those closest to her: near the end of her first pregnancy in 1981, she had started hemorrhaging. Her daughter, Ariel, was delivered safely, but Elizabeth’s bleeding wouldn’t stop, so doctors gave the new mother a transfusion of seven pints of blood. Four years later, Ariel started getting sick; lab work showed it was AIDS. Elizabeth had been infected by the transfusion of HIV-tainted blood. Ariel had gotten the disease from her mother’s breast milk.

  That mother and daughter had the disease was just the beginning of the horror. Further testing showed that the Glasers’ younger son, Jake, born in 1984, was also HIV positive. Jake had contracted the virus in utero. At the time, there was nothing to do for children in that situation. What drugs were available had not been tested or approved for pediatric use. Elizabeth Glaser’s bright, curious daughter was getting sicker and sicker; she and Paul pulled Ariel out of nursery school, knowing she would be shunned, and when they told the parents of her playmates, some dropped out of sight.

  One day Glaser sat at her kitchen table and made a list of people who she felt needed to hear her story. Among the names she wrote down was that of Ronald Reagan. She first broached the idea with Wick over lunch. “Think about it this way,” she told him. “I’m a white heterosexual woman from their socioeconomic class and from Hollywood. Many people still think of AIDS as God’s punishment for homosexuals. Even if the president doesn’t believe that, there are still many political people who are not paying any attention to the epidemic. Maybe, just maybe, I can help change their views.”

  Wick wasn’t sure he could pull off an introduction. He warned her that many people wanted to meet the president; even if he got her in to see Ronnie, the most they could probably get was a quick, perfunctory session and a photo in the Oval Office.

  When Wick approached Nancy, the first lady told him to bring Glaser to the residence that weekend, which was two days before the Watkins Commission’s report was to be released. When Wick and Glaser arrived at the White House, he saw that Nancy had arranged things so that Elizabeth would have the president’s undivided attention. Coffee and sandwiches had been set out. Nancy, Wick could tell, wanted to make sure that the meeting would take place in a comfortable, intimate setting.

  After they all sat down, Glaser began: “My life is very complicated, and I am here because I am hoping you can help…” She poured out the story of the past seven years. Both Reagans got tears in their eyes as she described how Ariel, after months of being unable to walk or talk, had recently opened her eyes and said: “Good morning, Mom. I love you.” Ariel would die seven weeks later, at the age of seven.

  That day in the White House, Nancy, with her customary directness, turned the conversation in a direction that Glaser hadn’t anticipated.

  “How is it for your husband?” the first lady asked.

  “It’s horrible,” Glaser answered. “It has been very difficult for Paul, but he has been remarkable. He is our hero, and he has stood by us.”

  Nancy pressed: “What is your relationship with him?”

  Glaser, startled, suddenly began to understand what Nancy was getting at. “Relationship. What does she mean? Is this woman asking me about my sex life?” This, after all, was an administration that didn’t even want to talk
about condoms. But she sensed that Nancy was asking out of a genuine sympathy. So, Glaser told her that, yes, she and Paul continued to have a sexual relationship, taking all the precautions that her doctors had recommended, and added: “My husband kisses me and touches me, and he is really quite wonderful.”

  A meeting that was supposed to have lasted for twenty minutes stretched into an hour. As Glaser and Wick were getting ready to leave, Ronnie’s eyes locked with the distraught mother’s.

  “Tell me what you want me to do,” the president said.

  “I want you to be a leader in the struggle against AIDS, so that my children, and all children, can go to school and continue to live valuable lives; so that no one with AIDS need worry about discrimination,” Glaser replied. “Secondly, you have commissioned a report on the epidemic that’s been written by a phenomenal man. I ask you to pay attention to that report.”

  Ronnie responded: “I promise you that I will read that report with different eyes than I would have before.”

  The Watkins Commission’s report, released on June 27, 1988, was unsparing, starting with its contention that there had been a “distinct lack of leadership” from the federal government. “It was a stunning repudiation of just about every aspect of the Reagan administration’s handling of AIDS, as well as a sweeping battle plan for how the nation might cope with the epidemic in coming years,” journalist Randy Shilts wrote. Among its 579 specific recommendations was a call for the administration to drop its opposition to needed laws that would prevent discrimination against people who carry the AIDS virus; an increase of $3 billion a year in funding for the fight against AIDS at the federal, state, and local levels; comprehensive education about the disease, starting in kindergarten; and a new public health emergency response system, giving the surgeon general broad powers.

  Despite his assurances to Glaser, Ronnie took only modest actions in response to the report and ignored its central recommendations. “Time went by, and nothing happened. It was almost unimaginable, but the White House took the report and put it on the shelf. Hope for thousands of Americans and people around the world sat gathering dust in some forgotten corner of some forgotten room,” Glaser wrote later. “I was with President Reagan for an hour. I know his commitment was genuine and his intentions sincere, but the decision not to act wasted more precious time. Each step of the way when nothing was done, thousands more people became ill or died. I looked at my country, my government, and the only conclusion to draw was that they still just didn’t care.”

  Glaser pondered whether there was anything she could do on her own. She had learned on her trip to Washington that her story could move people. But that meant she had to sacrifice her privacy—and that of her two HIV-positive children—to get it out. After Ariel died, Elizabeth and a group of friends started the Pediatric AIDS Foundation, which went to work putting millions of dollars in the hands of researchers more quickly than the government seemed capable of doing.

  Around that time, she and her husband got word that the tabloid National Enquirer was working on a story that would reveal their family’s situation; the couple decided to step forward ahead of it, granting an interview to the Los Angeles Times that was published on Friday, August 25, 1989. By then, Ronnie was out of office and living in Los Angeles. He saw the story and called Janet Huck, the reporter who wrote it, to ask for Glaser’s number. Her phone rang on Sunday morning. Ronnie told her how sorry he was to hear about Ariel’s death, asked whether there was anything he could do, and promised to set up a meeting with his staff. Shortly after she hung up, the phone rang again. It was the ex-president, calling back because Nancy wanted to talk with her.

  “Nancy was extremely compassionate and told me how saddened she was by Ari’s death,” Glaser wrote in her memoir. “She said she knew from her own experience with breast cancer how hard it was to go through an illness in public. But she said as difficult as it is, it can do a great deal of good. She was astounded by the number of women who wrote to say that they went in for mammograms after her mastectomy.

  “Mrs. Reagan said that she felt our being out in public would help bring attention to the issue of pediatric AIDS and the problems families face. She also offered to be of any help that she could to the foundation.”

  Two days later, Glaser was in Ronnie’s suite of offices in the Century City section of Los Angeles, meeting with Mark Weinberg, the former White House press aide who headed up communications for the ex-president’s office. He said Ronnie was eager to cut a public service announcement. In the 1990 spot, Ronnie offered what sounded like a note of regret. “I’m not asking you to send money. I’m asking you for something more important: your understanding. Maybe it’s time we all learned something new.”

  Ronnie and Nancy also sat on the foundation’s advisory board, and attended its first big fund-raiser, which was themed “A Time for Heroes.” The Hollywood Reporter wrote later that at the June 2, 1990, party, a reporter asked the former president whether he wished he had done more about AIDS. As an aide shouted, “No questions!” Ronnie said: “Well, that’s when it was invented.” A strange and detached answer, which suggested he did not understand that the power to confront the epidemic had been in his hands. Nancy whispered something to him, and he added: “But we did all that we could at the time.” Which was not true.

  In 1992 Glaser addressed the Democratic National Convention in New York that nominated Arkansas governor Bill Clinton as the party’s candidate to take on then-president George H. W. Bush. At that point, her foundation had raised $13 million, much of which went to what it called the Ariel Project, seeking ways to prevent transmission of AIDS from mother to child. Glaser lamented the death four years earlier of her daughter, who she said “did not survive the Reagan administration. I am here because my son and I may not survive four more years of leaders who say they care but do nothing. I am in a race with the clock. This is not about being a Republican or an Independent or a Democrat. It’s about the future—for each and every one of us.”

  It was a fair criticism, delivered in a powerful speech. Nancy felt “a little betrayed, a little hurt, because they had come forward for her personally, and by then, they had kind of a personal relationship with her,” said Wick, who had arranged that first meeting back in 1988. “But Elizabeth felt she was fighting for her kid’s life, so pleasantries didn’t really matter.” Glaser’s race with the clock ended a little more than two years after that convention speech. She died on December 3, 1994, at the age of forty-seven. Her HIV-positive son, Jake, survived, and with the help of breakthrough medicines, became a healthy adult.

  AIDS activists sensed a disturbing undercurrent in the Reagans’ belated involvement in their cause, a subtle message that some of its victims were more worthy of sympathy than others. Barry Krost, an openly gay Hollywood producer and manager, had been among the earliest and most prolific fund-raisers for AIDS charities. After Ronnie left office, Krost occasionally crossed paths with Nancy. “The first time was with a group of ladies. They were her friends. They called them the Kitchen Cabinet or something like that,” he said. “They were trying to raise money for an event in Washington, and they kept mentioning the ‘innocent’ victims of AIDS, and after about the tenth time—do remember, I was young and a bit more irritating than I am now—I just said to them, ‘Well, this is confusing me, because I frankly don’t know who the guilty ones are,’ and I left.”

  Later, however, Krost had another encounter with Nancy in Los Angeles. He was leaving Le Dome, a fashionable restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, when he spotted the former first lady dining with a mutual friend, Barbara Davis, the wife of billionaire oilman and movie studio owner Marvin Davis. “Barbara says hello to me and introduces me to Mrs. Reagan. I don’t do that boring thing, ‘Oh, we’ve met.’ I assume she’s met a million people. I say, ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you,’ ” Krost recalled. “And she just looked at me and said, ‘It’s a pleasure to see you. We owe you an apology.’ ” Nancy didn’t add anything fu
rther, he said. “She didn’t have to. I just said, ‘Thank you.’

  “Look,” Krost added, “she ended up living a remarkable life and being a remarkable person. And I think, in the end, she did good.” Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that she tried to. But when it mattered the most, while her husband was still in office, Nancy might have spoken up publicly. She might have pushed harder to jolt the president of the United States out of his passivity. Almost eighty-three thousand cases of AIDS were confirmed while Ronnie was in the White House. Nearly fifty thousand people died of the disease. Those numbers—those lives cut short—are a part of his legacy that can never be erased.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Of all the things that Nancy wanted to see her husband achieve, there was one that stood above all the others in its ambition and its potential to change history. Ending the Cold War, she believed, could be the accomplishment that secured Ronnie’s reputation as a giant among American presidents. She made no secret of her dream that a man once branded as a cowboy and a jingoist might even win the Nobel Peace Prize. As Lou Cannon put it in one of his biographies of Ronnie: “Improving US-Soviet relations became Nancy Reagan’s special cause. Although few thought of her as a peaceful force, she became a force for peace within the White House.”

  For any first lady to become involved in major questions of foreign policy was unconventional and politically tricky. For Nancy in particular, it ran counter to her well-cultivated image as a traditional, prefeminist helpmate—one who had vowed that she would never stick her nose in matters of state, as Rosalynn Carter had done by attending Cabinet meetings. Nor were Nancy’s views welcomed by the more hawkish members of her husband’s Cabinet and National Security Council. In a 2002 oral history for the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, Caspar Weinberger, the implacable Soviet foe who served seven years as Ronnie’s defense secretary, described Nancy as “a strong influence” on her husband, persistently pulling him toward “closer relationships with the Soviet Union.” Weinberger noted that Nancy “was more receptive to the idea of forming a working relationship with the Soviets than some of the rest of us were, and more willing to trust them. She believed strongly in his negotiating capabilities.”