Sebastian White :: Reagan's Enduring Legacy of Silence

OPINION

Reagan's Enduring Legacy of Silence

The Empty Closet | July 1, 2004
By Sebastian White

It seems eerily ironic that former President Ronald Reagan died when he did, on the fifth of June, for exactly 24 years earlier, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, stumping for then-candidate Reagan during a fundraising swing through Rochester, told a gathering of 800 local Republicans that President Jimmy Carter’s policies had put the nation on the cusp of "irreversible disaster."

In the aftermath of President Reagan’s death, a firestorm has erupted around the mainstream media and its (mostly) positive coverage of his enduring political legacy. While Reagan boosters tout his contributions to the fall of communism and a drastic reduction of America's tax burden, his innumerable critics contend an incomplete record is being lauded, one that omits grave realities of his administration’s policies.

As our emotional and temporal distance from Reagan’s death and his deeply emotional sunset interment move further from our consciousness, the mainstream and LGBT press are taking more liberty—rightfully so—by critically examining Reagan’s response to the AIDS epidemic, a public health crisis that emerged during his presidency and which some perceive to be his administration’s own "irreversible disaster."

While the world watched Reagan's funeral cortege snake its way along the hilly southern California coastline, the topic of conversation at a crowded rooftop gathering in Boston’s predominantly gay South End neighborhood was, predictably, Reagan on AIDS. In a paroxysm of frustration shared by so many who felt Reagan didn’t do enough to prevent the spread of the disease, one guest said of the Gipper, only half tongue-in-cheek, "they can’t get him in the ground fast enough."

Not surprisingly, her comment was especially well received among many of the older party guests, those who witnessed the devastating death toll when AIDS first surfaced. But it would be irresponsible to project full blame onto Reagan for the epidemic that today grips the lives of an estimated 40 million people worldwide. Still, it's undeniable that his inaction did hamper efforts to contain, or at least slow, the virus in its early years when open discourse and an unwavering infusion of cold hard cash were desperately needed in the search for answers.

By failing to position itself as a leader in the fight against AIDS, the Reagan administration also reinforced the public perception that the disease merited little concern since it only affected people living on the fringes of society, those for whom we should care little: gay men (the perverse), injection drug users (the self-indulgently weak), and Haitian immigrants (the hopelessly poor).

Reagan's administration’s fears, and a nation's lack of information, were evident in 1980s public opinion polls in which one-quarter to one-third of Americans either expressed support for quarantining people with AIDS, or said they were concerned about the impact of allowing children with AIDS in the public schools.

Looking at the complex and ever-changing virology that characterizes today's race for a cure, Reagan's inaction and his apparent inability to even utter the condition's name in public until mid-1987, six years after the first cases were reported in the New York Times and after thousands had died and even more had been infected, was a crushingly sad setback.

But even when President Reagan finally acted on AIDS issues, thanks to the gathering pressure from gay men and from the public health community, his credibility had been sullied and he was never able to shake his image as a compassionless conservative. The first Presidential Commission on the HIV Epidemic, created in 1987, did not include a single gay man, despite the fact that 75% of those infected at the time of committee's inception were gay. It took a concerted backlash before that panel gave in to demands from the gay community to expand and more accurately represent affected communities.

Assertions that Reagan cared little about the growing AIDS crisis have only been strengthened in recent years by reports that his Surgeon General, Dr. C. Everett Koop, couldn't get an audience at the socially conservative White House to discuss the matter. Koop has been quoted as saying that behind closed doors, the feeling in the administration was that people with AIDS were "only getting what they justly deserve."

AIDS truly was—and continues to be—a political fight for hearts and minds, one that Koop sadly lost in those early years.

Reagan’s "silence was deafening," according to Mervyn Silverman, director of San Francisco's Department of Public Health during the 1980s. It’s unsurprising, then, that for many people, Reagan’s enduring legacy won’t necessarily be his efforts to loosen the grip of communism around the world, his controversial "Reaganomics," or his backpedaling on civil rights.

In the words of Allen White, a San Francisco writer, "history may ultimately judge his presidency by the thousands who have and will die of AIDS."

Indeed, it will be up to the future generations to establish for themselves what Reagan meant for America and for the world, and to examine carefully whether AIDS really had to become an "irreversible disaster"—both medically and politically—that it became under the aegis of the intriguing character who rose from rags to Hollywood riches to become America's 40th president.