Pubdate: Mon, 14 Mar 2016
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 2016 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: Dan Zak

HOW NANCY REAGAN JUST SAID NO ON HIV/AIDS

Nancy Reagan stared into the camera with her glistening hazel eyes. 
Her hair was a perfect feathery helmet, her lipstick a shade of 
coral, her ears pinned with gold.

"There's no moral middle ground," she said. "Indifference is not an option."

It was Sept. 14, 1986. She was talking about drugs. She was not 
talking about AIDS.

Reagan's vocal crusade against one scourge, and her relative silence 
on the other, adorn her legacy with complications after her death at 
94. Another former first lady at Reagan's funeral in Simi Valley, 
Calif., on Friday proved that these nerves are still raw.

"Itmay be hard for your viewers to remember how difficult it was for 
people to talk about HIV/AIDS back in the 1980s," Hillary Clinton 
told an MSNBC interviewer. "And because of both President and Mrs. 
Reagan - in particular Mrs. Reagan - we started a national 
conversation, when before nobody would talk about it, nobody wanted 
to do anything about it." In fact, the Reagans spent most of the 
1980s silent on the issue. Clinton apologized hours later, saying she 
"misspoke" - but she had already unleashed a torrent of criticism, 
inflaming an antipathy toward the Reagans that has long smoldered.

Nancy Reagan wasn't president, but she was a symbol, a spokeswoman, 
with her own kind of power. And she was damned by some for her 
actions on one issue - a drug policy stance that many viewed as 
simplistic - and damned for her inaction on another.

For many, the two stances seem to commingle. In 1988, the gay writer 
and pioneering AIDS activist Larry Kramer wrote a play titled "Just 
Say No" - borrowing Nancy Reagan's anti-drug catchphrase to skewer 
the Reagans and other influential people who were inattentive to the 
AIDS crisis.

"I put every bit of awfulness I could uncover into this," Kramer told 
Liz Smith of Newsday in 1991. His tone typified the ruthless contempt 
for the Reagans that came from the gay community in particular.

Marc Lamont Hill's first memory of Nancy Reagan was reruns of her 
1983 appearance on "Diff 'rent Strokes," where she cautioned a 
classroom of grade-schoolers against the drugs in their midst. The 
problem with "Just say no," Hill says, was the "just." It presented a 
one-word answer, out of context, as the only reasonable option for 
people surrounded by drugs.

"I think Nancy Reagan was well-intentioned but ultimately became an 
unknowing pitchwoman for a vicious, draconian drug war," says Hill, 
37, a professor of African American studies at Morehouse College 
."They didn't appreciate the relationship between drug abuse and 
public health, mental illness, resources, jobs, et cetera, so part of 
what the Reagan administration did is individualize a collective problem."

As Reagan was delivering her 1986 address, the United States was 
enduring twin health crises. Drug treatment centers were overrun with 
crack addicts; cocaine-related deaths had tripled over the previous 
five years. There were 25,000 reported cases of AIDS, with 3 million 
to 5 million expected in the ensuing five years.

And there was Nancy Reagan, staring intently at America, fretting for 
it as grandmother in chief, from the second-floor residence of the White House.

"When I first got [to the White House], they said I was a fluff head, 
you know?" she would later say to Johnny Carson. "That all I was 
interested in was clothes and shopping, and you know, all that. Then 
I guess after Ronnie was shot there was a kind of quiet period there. 
Then all of a sudden I was running the world. I was nuclear decisions 
and all of that."

First ladies have always been scrutinized for their influence, or 
desire for influence. Dolley Madison was the first "first lady," 
having earned the title even before she braved the siege of her 
residence. Eleanor Roosevelt held her own news conferences. Camelot 
would not have materialized without Jackie, the keeper of the Kennedy mystique.

And Nancy - what of Nancy? She was steel. She was cashmere. She was 
cold. She was class. And after a couple years of bad press, she was 
in need of a cause.

"Just say no," she told America's youth, starting in ' 83. 
Indifference was the enemy, she said, with all the warmth of a 
headmistress. Drugs were everyone' s problem to stop, she said. 
Critics at the time found the slogan simplistic and moralistic. The 
sentiment persists today.

"There's a way you could equate 'Just say no' with actually doing 
nothing," says Jennifer Brier, a professor of history and gender and 
women's studies at the University of Illinois and author of 
"Infectious Ideas: U.S. Political Responses to the AIDS Crisis."

"Abstinence as a way of dealing with drugs was absolutely akin to the 
policy of the Reagan administration about AIDS: They're both negative 
arguments - or calls for abstinence or not doing something - as 
opposed to acknowledging the reality"- which is that people will have 
sex or abuse substances, Brier says, and people should figure out how 
to make that behavior safer.

As Mrs. Reagan toured the country to speak and listen to the addicted 
and the vulnerable, AIDS was viewed as a problem for gay men alone, 
never mind that the two epidemics were linked by intravenous drug use.

The Reagans had beloved gay friends and colleagues. They were 
Hollywood people, after all. Decorator Ted Graber, who captained the 
White House's interior facelift, spent a night in the Reagans' 
private quarters with his boyfriend following the first lady's 60th 
birthday party in the summer of '81.

The Reagans are "tolerant about homosexual men," The Washington 
Post's Robert Kaiser wrote in March 1984, adding that "all the 
available evidence suggests that Ronald Reagan is a closet tolerant."

This was the '80s, though, and it was far safer to be in tolerant of 
drugs than it was to be tolerant of gays.

Elizabeth Taylor wrote a letter to Nancy Reagan encouraging her to 
make an issue of AIDS; the first lady's response was "frosty," 
according to Vanity Fair. When Rock Hudson was dying of AIDS in 
France in 1985, a plea for medical help was rebuffed by the White 
House, according to correspondence unearthed last year by Buzz- 
Feed's Chris Geidner.

"I spoke with Mrs. Reagan about the attached telegram" from Rock 
Hudson's people, wrote Mark Weinberg, special assistant to the 
president, in a memo. "She did not feel this was something the White 
House should get into."

Was she being cautious about giving preferential treatment to a pal? 
Or was she nervous about taking action on an issue that her husband 
had yet to formally address in public?

In 1986, President Reagan signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which 
appropriated $96.5 million solely for the construction of more prisons.

Just say no, the White House said.

No was the only thing gay Americans and first-time drug offenders 
were hearing from Washington.

Nancy Reagan did not hold the power of the pen, but she did have the 
president's ear. She reportedly pushed her husband to engage the AIDS 
crisis, eventually, but for a while it seemed as if the Reagans were 
occupying a moral middle ground they had forsworn on television.

In their twilight, Ronald Reagan became the patron saint of the 
modern Republican Party, and Nancy his devoted caretaker. She avoided 
the spotlight, but sometimes the spotlight found her. She supported 
marriage equality, her daughter Patti Davis told Sirius XM radio host 
Michelangelo Signorile.

The public was left to wonder: Had she always?

Regardless, her cause was now Alzheimer's, which had stolen her 
husband. Her concern and urgency were as intense as if she were 
talking to the nation's endangered youth from the White House. 
Meanwhile, the United States cleared $1 trillion spent on the war on 
drugs and 650,000 deaths related to AIDS.

"A lot of time is being wasted," Nancy Reagan once told the New York 
Times, after criticizing George W. Bush's opposition to stem-cell 
research. "A lot of people who could be helped are not being helped."
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom