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

“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