The Triumph of Nancy Reagan Karen Tumulty (motivational novels .TXT) 📖

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. HIV.

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