Washington Blade - November 14, 2003
Christopher Seely

"Gay people must never forget that Ronald Reagan was as evil to us as Hitler was to the Jews," said Larry Kramer, founder of ACT UP, an AIDS organization born in the Reagan years that touted the slogan "Silence = Death."

The debate over Reagan's AIDS policies resurfaced when the script of a two-part CBS miniseries, "The Reagans," was leaked to the New York Times, including a controversial line about people who were dying from AIDS in the 1980s.

"Those who live in sin shall die in sin," Reagan says in the original script, which prompted a forceful conservative backlash, ultimately resulting in the miniseries being transferred to Showtime and delayed until some time next year.

In reality, despite protest from activists, Reagan didn't utter the word "AIDS" in a public speech until 1987. By then, more than 24,000 people had died from AIDS, according to a death toll calculated by the HIV/AIDS prevention branch of the federal Centers for Disease Control & Prevention.

But conservatives who worked in the administration said that the quote was not only inaccurate but not representative of the president's views.

" When I saw that quote it was very jarring because it bore no resemblance to the president that I knew and worked for," said Gary Bauer, now president of American Values, a conservative advocacy group.

Bauer served in Reagan's administration for eight years, the last two as Reagan's chief domestic policy advisor. He later headed up the Family Research Council, a group that led opposition to gay rights measures in the 1990s, before unsuccessfully running for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000.

But not everybody in Washington at that time supported the Reagan administration's response to AIDS, according to U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), a Congressional leader on AIDS funding and awareness during Reagan's terms and still today.

"I can't respond to a fictional quote from a movie I haven't seen," Waxman said in a statement issued in response to an interview request. "It's no secret, though, that I and many others bitterly opposed the Reagan administration's deliberate policy of ignoring the AIDS epidemic.

"While the administration looked the other way, incalculable harm was done as thousands and thousands died and the disease spread unchecked. Those are simply the facts," Waxman said.

Reagan's inaction on AIDS probably stemmed from the fact that the overwhelming majority of people dying were gay, Waxman charged in a column published in the Washington Post in 1985.

"This is the administration whose White House director of communications, Patrick Buchanan, once argued in print that AIDS is nature's revenge on gay men," Waxman wrote. "One cannot help but wonder if the administration's approach to the epidemic comes from such open disdain for the victims."

Showtime undecided on 'sin' scene's fate

The New York Times reported Oct. 21 on the AIDS "sin" comment attributed to Reagan in the miniseries. Soon after, CBS removed the line from the miniseries as one of a series of edits designed to make the program more "balanced." Two weeks later, on Nov. 4, the network's parent company Viacom transferred the miniseries to CBS' sister cable network, Showtime.

The miniseries' move was not in response to the outrage of conservative Reagan supporters, but because the miniseries did not "present a balanced portrayal of the Reagans for CBS and its audience," according to a CBS statement.

Showtime has not decided whether to include the "sin" line in its final edited version and does not know when in 2004 the dramatized documentary will air, according to a statement from the cable network.

"Showtime will collaborate with the filmmaker to create a final film that will be the kind of quality programming its subscribers have come to expect from the network," the statement says.

But conservatives wishing to prevent a "smear" of Reagan and preserve an untarnished image of him are not satisfied with the Viacom switch to Showtime, said Michael Paranzino, founder of BoycottCBS.com, which led the protests against the miniseries.

"A smear is a smear, and a lie is a lie," Paranzino said in a statement on his Web site. "This is a desperate effort to save face with the fringe Left."

Paranzino did not respond to interview requests by press time.

Hoping for a media counter attack, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation called for a closer examination of Reagan's AIDS policy to derail "revisionism efforts" by Reagan supporters.

The controversial "sin" line in the script is "clearly fictionalized," but "the broader reality it attempts to convey is evident in the history of the federal government's inadequate response to the AIDS crisis under the Reagan administration," according to a statement on the GLAAD Web site.

" This CBS program sounds, if anything, like it was too tame," Kramer said.

Reagan's inner circle: gays 'deserve' AIDS?

AIDS was first known as Gay Related Immune Deficiency because the disease seemed only to affect gay men, noted C. Everett Coop, Reagan's Surgeon General, in a 2001 speech to the Kaiser Family Foundation's National Symposium on U.S. AIDS Policy.

For the first five years of Coop's tenure as the nation's top physician, he said, he was "cut off" from discussing AIDS but did have a "definite impression about what was going on on Pennsylvania Avenue," he said in the symposium speech.

"Domestic policy folks in the White House isolated Ronald Reagan from the whole subject of AIDS," Coop said. "And because transmission of AIDS was understood primarily in the homosexual population and in those who abused intravenous drugs, the advisors to the president took the stand, 'They are only getting what they justly deserve.'"

More than 60,000 people died from AIDS during Reagan's two terms in office, according to the CDC. Prior to 1981, only 30 people died from AIDS, CDC figures showed.

"Picture your 50 best friends, one by one, dying all around you," Kramer said this week. "People were dying like flies."

But Bauer, once Reagan's chief domestic policy advisor, maintained that both Coop's and the miniseries' depiction of an "evangelical" Reagan don't reflect how the president actually spoke behind closed doors at weekly White House staff lunches.

"I can tell you without hesitation that in none of those lunches when this issue came up did the president ever use language even remotely similar to that, and that language does not reflect the faith perspective that he came from," Bauer said.

"He was not an evangelical, and he had a homespun American religion that believed in God and Jesus, but his language was not steeped in biblical references," Bauer said.

But Reagan's authorized biographer, Edmund Morris, drew a direct link between Reagan's religion and the AIDS epidemic.

In "Dutch," an authorized Reagan biography, Morris writes that once when speaking of AIDS, Reagan said, "Maybe the Lord brought down this plague" because "illicit sex is against the Ten Commandments," the New York Times reported.

Reagan's first public speech addressing AIDS was at the Third International AIDS Conference in Washington, D.C., in 1987, where he drew "hissing" from the crowd when he said, "Final judgment is up to God," according to a review of the history of HIV/AIDS policy by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Did 'lack of leadership' exacerbate epidemic?

Reagan signed the first "significant federal policy" dealing with AIDS into law more than a year later, on Nov. 4, 1988, during the final days of his presidency, according to the 1988 Congressional Quarterly Almanac.

Waxman drafted the law - 1988's Health Omnibus Programs Extension Act - which designated $1 billion in government funding for prevention programs, developed care and treatment networks, and accelerated research efforts.

But Reagan's earlier inaction slowed the efforts for funding AIDS research, drugs and education, according to the 1985 opinion article written by Waxman.

"We are losing the war against AIDS," Waxman said. "The Reagan administration's lack of leadership and commitment against this horrible disease is allowing us to lose."

For the most part, Reagan kept his involvement in the AIDS epidemic at a minimum, said Dr. Edward Brandt, who served as assistant secretary for health of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services from 1981 to 1984.

"I suspect that only one or two people know his views about it," Brandt told the Washington Blade. "I was perfectly content to be able to deal with that epidemic without having to worry about the White House."

Bauer characterized attempts by "left wing" AIDS activists to place blame on Reagan as a technique to score partisan political points.

"The homosexual rights movement has been, was then, and is today very aggressive in pointing fingers at the Reagan administration and other politicians as somehow causing the disease and making it worse," Bauer said.

Bauer now serves as president of American Values, an organization that supported the anti-gay national Marriage Protection Week last month.

The Log Cabin Republicans, a national gay Republican group, has challenged efforts to place blame on the Reagan administration for escalation of the AIDS epidemic, and supports CBS' decision to pull the "Reagans" miniseries.

"Sadly enough, the entire country in the early days of the AIDS crisis acted way too slowly and a part of that could have been because it was a gay-related disease," said Patrick Guerriero, president of Log Cabin Republicans. "But to lay the blame on one man or suggest in movie commentary that he was mean-spirited is a fabrication of history and unnecessary."

The AIDS epidemic is not a partisan issue, said Shana Krochmal, communications director at the Stop AIDS Project, which was founded in 1985. But Reagan should still be held accountable for his lack of leadership at the executive level, she argued.

"At a time when there was such great potential for leadership and action, and there was really an opportunity to stop the spread of the epidemic, Reagan chose silence and fear rather than action," Krochmal said.

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