The Reagan administration was horrible on AIDS
Identifying Nancy Reagan as a progressive force inside the Reagan administration on AIDS may be accurate, but it's also setting the bar profoundly low. The reason there was no national conversation on AIDS before the Reagan administration is that literally nobody had ever been diagnosed with AIDS before Reagan took office.
When AIDS was initially identified in the early 1980s, a range of public officials stepped into action. As Laura Helmuth wrote in 2014:
Some people did behave nobly. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was on it from the very beginning, with research, new surveillance programs, and prompt and clear updates and reports. A year after the first recognition of AIDS, Rep. Henry Waxman held a congressional hearing on the crisis and directed AIDS funding to the National Institutes of Health. (We’re really going to miss that guy when he retires at the end of this term.) The surgeon general pushed for sex education and mailed a frank report to every household in the country on how AIDS is and isn’t transmitted. San Francisco established new clinics and a model for how to care for AIDS patients. The Shanti Project, Gay Men’s Health Crisis, ACT UP, and other groups advocated for better treatment, faster testing, and more funding. People cared for the sick and dying. Afterward they sewed panels for the AIDS Quilt, the most heartbreaking memorial in the history of human civilization.
During these early years of the crisis, the White House's main reaction was to literally laugh off questions about whether anything should be done. Here's a 1982 exchange between a journalist and White House Press Secretary Larry Speakes:
Q: Larry, does the President have any reaction to the announcement—the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, that AIDS is now an epidemic and have over 600 cases?
MR. SPEAKES: What’s AIDS?
Q: Over a third of them have died. It’s known as "gay plague." (Laughter.) No, it is. I mean it’s a pretty serious thing that one in every three people that get this have died. And I wondered if the President is aware of it?
MR. SPEAKES: I don’t have it. Do you? (Laughter.)
Q: No, I don’t.
MR. SPEAKES: You didn’t answer my question.
Q: Well, I just wondered, does the President—
MR. SPEAKES: How do you know? (Laughter.)
Q: In other words, the White House looks on this as a great joke?
MR. SPEAKES: No, I don’t know anything about it, Lester.
By 1985, Reagan finally said the word "AIDS" in response to a question at a press conference, and in 1987 he addressed it in a speech. Those small concessions, as well as some funding for research into the disease, came as a result of tireless advocacy and activism work from a range of groups that eventually forced the White House's hand.
Nancy Reagan was, it seems, relatively more open to those activists' arguments than many other key players in the Reagan administration. But the fact that Clinton would point to Ronald and Nancy Reagan as leaders on a national conversation around AIDS, rather than to the activists themselves, is revealing of her insider perspective on social change.
