If presidents are leaders, Reagan let America down on AIDS epidemic

"Reagan made America feel good again ..."
-- MANY PUNDITS




Sorry for the sarcasm, courtesy of Dana Carvey, but is there any "accomplishment" claimed for any of the 43 men who have been president that has been more ephemeral and less meaningful?

In fact, a metaphor that ties Ronald Reagan in with his decade very effectively might be that Reagan was the cocaine of presidents.

He may have made some people proud, but are they still proud? His most rabid fans say he won the Cold War, but even Mikhail Gorbachev said Jimmy Carter's emphasis on human rights had far more of an effect than Reagan's military buildup. In fact, it's worth arguing that Billy Joel's concert in the Soviet Union in 1987 had more of an effect as well.

Oddly enough, after Reagan left office in 1989, he was regarded by most historians as nothing more than a mediocre president. He had been mostly disengaged during his second term, and it was fairly obvious he was slipping mentally in the last couple of years.

The long decline of the American middle class started under Reagan, and the deficit spending that has left us with trillions of dollars of debt started in his administration.

But where Reagan will really be regarded with infamy is in the way his administration ignored the AIDS epidemic. When a reporter brought it up in 1982, press secretary Larry Speakes couldn't stop laughing about it.

Hudson in 1985

In the summer of 1985, Reagan learned that his friend Rock Hudson, who had been a closeted homosexual in Hollywood in the '50s and '60s, had AIDS.

Still, it was September 1987 before the president mentioned AIDS in a speech. By then 20,849 Americans had already died from the disease, which had spread to 113 countries.

Would it have made a difference if the full force of the government had been brought to bear on the disease in 1982?

Of course it would, but in 1982 Reagan ally Jerry Falwell was calling AIDS "God's wrath upon homosexuals," and Reagan aide Patrick Buchanan said it was "nature's revenge on gay men."

Reagan wasn't saying anything. It enabled him to maintain vicious, heartless policies while letting others look like the bad guys.

I never thought Reagan was an evil man, but I certainly think he was a stupid man. I think his view of what America should be was formed in the 1920s and never really changed.

When I first read Randy Shilts' book, "And the Band Played On," in 1987, it was one of the most compelling stories I had ever read.

And give HBO credit. Three outstanding movies about the AIDS crisis were all made for HBO. First was the Shilts book, second was Tony Kushner's "Angels in America" and Larry Kramer's "The Normal Heart," which was produced as a play in 1985 and finally became a movie in 2014.

Kramer's play may be one of the angriest great plays ever written. Starting with the happy days in the New York gay scene in the late '70s and ending in the mid '80s before Reagan ever even mentioned the disease although more and more men were dying "Normal Heart" is one of the most emotionally powerful stories I've ever seen.

The choice of music for the final scene is brilliant. "The Only Living Boy in New York," from the last Simon and Garfunkel album, has just the right mix of poignance and melancholy to end the movie.




More than 36 million people have died from AIDS worldwide, including a huge chunk out of two generations of American men. God only knows what creativity, with accomplishment we lost because they didn't live out their years.

I don't want to be presumptuous and compare them to Reagan, but I've got no problem saying we would be a better country if these gay men had lived and Falwell and Buchanan didn't.

And his ignorance of what was happening around him is hardly the only reason America would have been better off if Ronald Reagan had never been president.