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

come out in favor of allowing people infected with the virus to participate in routine school or work activity. “The president can’t be this far out on a limb,” someone said, according to Parvin’s notes, which do not identify the speaker. “His major responsibility is to protect Americans who are not yet ill!” As the discussion began spiraling out of control, Parvin decided to play his ace card. “Mrs. Reagan wants it this way,” he said.

Parvin didn’t win everything, but by invoking Nancy’s name, he got much of what he wanted into Ronnie’s first major address on AIDS. Files in the Reagan Library give an indication of how the conservative forces tried to dig in as the date for the speech grew near. Three days before, White House officials were asked for their responses to the latest draft. A senior member of the Domestic Policy Council named Robert Sweet returned his copy with a note: “I have very serious concerns about the tone of this speech as it is written. It does not reflect the president’s deep sense of moral justice. I strongly urge major revision.” For instance, Sweet objected to one reference in the text to “safe” behavior; he wanted it to say “appropriate” behavior. He also suggested deleting a line asserting that “only medical science can ever truly defeat AIDS,” and proposed “but only by changing our behavior we can ever truly defeat AIDS.” Sweet crossed out language that said victims of the disease should not be blamed, and wrote in the margin: “Homosexuals and drug users choose their lifestyle—it’s the innocent children, hemophiliacs, and unsuspecting spouses who are the victims.” None of the revisions he wanted was made.

The amfAR dinner was held in a tent outside a restaurant along the Potomac River. Hundreds of people, some of whom had AIDS, gathered outside, holding lit candles in memory of those who had already died of the disease. The atmosphere inside could hardly have been more tense. Anthony Fauci, who was sitting in the front row of the audience, noticed that Nancy seemed to be acting as “an orchestrator” of the head table, anxiously trying to manage how things were going. “She wasn’t the quiet first lady sitting off to the side. It was clear that she was buzz-buzzing up there,” he said.

Ronnie’s speech was repeatedly interrupted by catcalls and hissing. Booing started when the president announced that AIDS would be added to the list of contagious diseases for which immigrants and others seeking to enter the country permanently could be denied entry. It grew louder as he called for “routine” testing of federal prisoners, immigrants, and marriage license applicants. The proposal did not go as far as the mandatory testing that many in the administration had wanted and activists had feared. But Ronnie offered no assurances that those who tested positive would be guaranteed confidentiality or protected against discrimination. And while the president lamented the plight of some groups susceptible to the virus—hemophiliacs, spouses of IV drug users, blood transfusion recipients, babies of infected women—nowhere in the speech did he mention the words gay or homosexual.

What people in the audience didn’t know was how much worse it could have been had Nancy not intervened through Parvin. After the amfAR dinner, Elizabeth Taylor downplayed the fury that many in the room felt. “I know there are some people who disagree—that was quite clear,” the actress said. “But I think what the president said was quite in concurrence with what we all hope and pray for: that there is a cure for AIDS.” The reviews in the media were positive, though not glowing. “The president’s Sunday-night speech on AIDS was sensible,” a June 2 Washington Post editorial said. “Much talk had preceded the event—Mr. Reagan’s first speech devoted entirely to the subject—and it was rumored that warring camps within the administration were trying to persuade him to take different positions. In the end, the speech took something from both sides and set out a cautious approach. Compassion was the keynote.”

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,