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

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 used explicit language, explaining that AIDS was transmitted through