The Triumph of Nancy Reagan by Karen Tumulty (short books for teens txt) 📕

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 visage 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 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