AIDS and Politics: Reagan Seeks a Cure

Under the headline “Reagan Defends Financing for AIDS,” the New York Times stated, in the words of reporter Philip Boffey, that President Ronald Reagan and

his Administration was already making a ''vital contribution'' to research on the disease.

The Times article appeared in September 1985. This was relatively early in the history of the disease, which had been utterly unknown only several years before. Early in Reagan’s first term in office,

he had been supporting research into AIDS, acquired immune deficiency sydrome, for the last four years and that the effort was a “top priority” for the Administration.

Reagan encountered some resistance for directing both funding and attention to the illness. But he “publicly addressed the issue of the lethal disease that has claimed thousands of victims, primarily among male homosexuals, intravenous drug addicts,” and other high-risk demographic segments.

Reagan’s opponents were concerned about sending large amounts of taxpayer dollars to various types of medical research. They argued that, while AIDS was subject to therapy, management, and treatment, it would be misleading to raise hope of an actual ‘cure.’

Nonetheless, Reagan’s “administration had provided or appropriated some half a billion dollars for research on AIDS since he took office in 1981.”

Reporting about Reagan’s effort to find help for those who suffered with the disease, Carl Cannon writes about Reagan’s meetings with people like

Los Angeles gay activist David Mixner, a friend of future president Bill Clinton. “Never have I been treated more graciously by a human being,” Mixner said of his meeting with Reagan.

As a former Hollywood actor, Reagan was a friend of Rock Hudson, who was dying of the disease. Although Reagan was advocating for AIDS funding,

it was Hudson who wouldn’t discuss AIDS; Reagan actually mentioned the disease publicly for the first time two weeks before his friend passed away.

Reagan had been addressing AIDS since early in his first term in office. By the beginning of his second term, he was becoming more vocal on the topic.

Although some opponents claimed that he never mentioned sickness until he’d already been in office for seven years, he had in fact addressed it clearly and repeatedly several years earlier.

Reagan first mentioned AIDS, in response to a question at a press conference, on Sept. 17, 1985. On Feb. 5, 1986, he made a surprise visit to the Department of Health and Human Services where he said, “One of our highest public health priorities is going to be continuing to find a cure for AIDS.” He also announced that he’d tasked Surgeon General C. Everett Koop to prepare a major report on the disease. Contrary to the prevailing wisdom, Reagan dragged Koop into AIDS policy, not the other way around.

But more than speaking early and often about the matter, Reagan consistently provided a budget for it.

The administration increased AIDS funding requests from $8 million in 1982 to $26.5 million in 1983, which Congress bumped to $44 million, a number that doubled every year thereafter during Reagan’s presidency.

Nor did Reagan shy away from direct involvement in the matter. Carl Cannon notes that, “in 1983, early in the AIDS crisis,” Reagan’s “HHS Secretary, Margaret Heckler,” with Reagan’s approval,

went to the hospital bedside of a 40-year-old AIDS patient named Peter Justice. Heckler, a devout Catholic, held the dying man’s hand, both out of compassion and to allay fears about how the disease was spread.

“We ought to be comforting the sick,” said Ronald Reagan’s top-ranking health official, “rather than afflicting them and making them a class of outcasts.”

“I’m delighted she’s here,” Justice said. “I’m delighted she cares.”

Peter Justice and other AIDS patients like him appreciated Reagan’s sincere desire to support and help them.

Because of Reagan’s efforts, significant progress has been made in managing the disease with various therapies, treatments, and medications. There is reason to expect more progress in the future. A true ‘cure,’ however, remains unlikely.

Since that time, substantial progress and meaningful help has been developed for AIDS patients. Ironically, not much came of the federally-funded efforts, during Reagan’s administration or under later presidents. The most effective medications, treatments, and therapies were developed outside the government in private-sector research.

Nonetheless, Reagan’s efforts were laudable and demonstrated an ethical attempt to render assistance to those who were suffering.

The 1950s: Decade of Progress

It is difficult and dangerous to make generalizations about a decade. Statistically, each ten-year period will have outliers and counter-trends within trends.

One can make an interesting argument, however, that the 1950s was one of the best decades in United States history for African-Americans.

In the 1950s, Blacks didn't have the massive unemployment numbers they have now. A greater percentage of them registered to vote and did vote.

A greater percentage of their children were born to an intact married couple. Public schools, various means of transportation, and most workplaces were being desegregated.

African-Americans had higher literacy rates.

Over the course of the twentieth century, Black populations became increasingly concentrated in inner-city neighborhoods. The problems which we now associated with urban life were less acute in the 1950s.

Fewer African-Americans committed crimes, fewer were arrested, fewer were convicted of crimes, and fewer were incarcerated. Their use of illegal drugs, and their abuse of legal ones, was much less.

It was after the 1950s, between 1960 and 2015, that life in the ‘ghetto’ became measurably characterized by unemployment, poverty, crime, drug abuse, and single parent families.

Life was not perfect in the 1950s. There were real problems and real tensions in race relations.

But in the 1950s, Blacks made progress. This decade was ‘the civil rights era.’

The 1950s saw the final and permanent end to the horrific practice of lynching. The last recorded lynching was in 1955. There were zero after that, and zero in 1952, 1953, and 1954.

During those same years, Rev. Martin Luther King led the Montgomery bus boycott and founded the SCLC.

A young African-American man was more likely to complete high school and get a job in the 1950s than in the year 2015.

The Supreme Court issued its landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954. President Eisenhower sent federal troops to ensure that the “Little Rock Nine” were able to obtain an education based on that Supreme Court decision.

Eisenhower also pushed the 1957 Civil Rights Act through Congress and signed it into law. He ensured that troops in the United States Army were fully integrated, moving President Truman’s symbolic Executive Order 9981 into reality.

All of these steps worked to crumble the “Jim Crow” laws, and the culture built around them.

America’s large cities were then more integrated than in the year 2015.

Life in the 1950s was not perfect. America had not solved all of its race-related problems. But there was an increasing sense of liberty, opportunity, and safety among Blacks - more than in previous decades, and sadly, more than in subsequent decades.

Eisenhower Appoints African-Americans

President Eisenhower took office in January 1953, at the beginning of a decade which would see the emergence of the African-American civil rights movement onto the stage of the national media. That movement would achieve great things during this decade, and “Ike” Eisenhower was a part of that accomplishment.

Among Eisenhower’s achievements was the appointment of Jesse Ernest Wilkins. Born in 1894, Wilkins was the first African-American to be appointed to a sub-cabinet level. On March 5, 1954, the New York Times praised Ike’s choice:

President Eisenhower’s nomination of J. Ernest Wilkins to be Assistant Secretary of Labor for International Affairs is an excellent choice. Mr. Wilkins, the first Negro ever to be named to a sub-Cabinet post, has a splendid reputation at the Chicago bar, to which he was admitted in 1921.

In August 1954, Time magazine reported that Wilkins “became the first Negro ever to attend a White House Cabinet meeting as the representative of a department.” Historian Jim Newton claims that “it was the first time an African-American ever attended a meeting of a president’s cabinet” at all.

Shortly after appointing Wilkins, Ike attended a meeting of the NAACP. On March 11, 1954, the New York Times reported that

President Eisenhower said he believed in President Lincoln’s statement that this nation was dedicated to the proposition that all men were created equal and with the writers of the Declaration of Independence that all men were endowed with certain inalienable rights.
There are vociferous minorities that do not hold to the concepts set forth by the Founding Fathers, the President said, and added: “But by and large the mass of Americans want to be decent, good, and just and don’t want to make a difference based on inconsequential facts of color or race.”

Eisenhower’s speech at the NAACP gathering, given only a few days after appointing Wilkins to the highest post ever occupied by an African-American, was a strong statement about how the Eisenhower administration would promote civil rights during the 1950s.

A few months later, on November 9, 1954, the New York Times ran an article under the headline, “President Picks Negro to Help Combat Job Discrimination,” reporting Eisenhower’s choice of James Nabrit to “prevent discrimination in hiring and dismissals in plants with Government contracts.”

Well known, of course, is Eisenhower’s September 1957 order to send the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock, Arkansas, where the governor of that state, Democrat Orval Faubus, was obstructing the integration of schools. By that time, Ike’s record had clearly marked him a president who was promoting civil rights for African-Americans.

In that same year, Eisenhower worked to move the 1957 Civil Rights Act through Congress. Although some senators and representatives resisted it, and Senators Johnson and Kennedy diluted some of its provisions, Ike was adamant that it must pass.

Seeing that Johnson and Kennedy had weakened some aspects of the bill, Ike was not satisfied, and so later moved the more potent 1960 Civil Rights Act through Congress.

The 1950s were the decade in which the civil rights movement began and made most of its progress. Eisenhower was an integral part of that success.

Richard Nixon and the Politics of Race

By late 1968, the Democratic Party was at war with itself. The ‘hawks’ wanted to continue a full-blown war effort in Vietnam; the ‘doves’ wanted immediate and complete withdrawal of all United States military from the conflict.

The massive war effort, initiated by President Kennedy and expanded by President Johnson, was so closely tied to the identity of the Democratic Party that its chances of winning the 1968 presidential election were rapidly approaching zero.

In a last-ditch effort to change public opinion, the Democrats attempted to insinuate that Richard Nixon was less than enthusiastic in his support for African-American civil rights.

This effort backfired. Nixon’s public record included his efforts to round up votes in Congress, both for the 1957 Civil Rights Act, and for the 1960 Civil Rights Act. By contrast, both Kennedy and Johnson had opposed those two bills.

In an August 1968 televised commentary, William F. Buckley noted that

Mr. Nixon was backing civil rights bills way before John Kennedy was in point of historical circumstance.

Johnson, an unrepentant racist, would eventually be shamed into offering at least lip service to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He did so on the basis of purely political calculations. Nixon, on the other hand, had supported civil rights legislation nearly a decade earlier, when it was less popular to do so.

It is unverifiable at best, and hazardous at worst, to speculate about a leader’s psychological motivations, but it’s worth noting that Nixon was raised in a Quaker household in California. Those two aspects of his heritage may have made him more willing to take unpopular stands. Buckley said that

The time to back a civil rights bill, you may have noticed, is as of the moment when it becomes popular. Up until that moment it becomes completely forgivable if you don’t do so. Lyndon Johnson is considered a great friend of the Negro people, but he voted against a whole series of civil rights bills over a period of years.

As Eisenhower’s vice president, Nixon’s legislative efforts had been noted by Black voters, who gave him a decent showing in the 1960 national elections. Buckley argued that, in the intervening eight years, there’d been no real change in Nixon’s allegiances:

Some 30 to 35 percent of the Negro people voted for Nixon in 1960. I think somebody ought to get around to telling us what it is that Mr. Nixon has done since 1960 that alienates those votes.

In 1968, a trend emerged which would later be called ‘identity politics’ or ‘the politics of identity.’ This strategy calls for candidates to appeal to voters, not as rational human beings who share the common needs and wants of all human beings, but rather as isolated groups: by race, by religion, by gender, etc.

Rather than assuming that voters are rational human beings who share the same desires for peace, prosperity, justice, liberty, and freedom, the tactic of ‘identity politics’ divides voters into demographic segments, and dictates that they should vote a certain way because they are men or because they are women, because they are African-American or European-American, because they are Jewish or because they are Christian.

This approach would come to dominate national electoral politics a few decades laters, but in 1968, it was in its infancy. Buckley noted that those who opposed Nixon

are trying very hard to mobilize all of the Negro votes on a racist basis. On the one hand, they tell us we shouldn’t treat people as simply members of a race, members of a group. On the other hand, they’re always trying to deploy them as members of a group, members of a race.

As it turned out, Nixon won by a large margin in November 1968 and became president. In hindsight, especially after the events of the Watergate scandal, it is difficult to see Nixon with the untainted view which the voters had of him at that time.

Not only did Nixon continue to effectively promote civil rights during his presidency, but he also ended the Vietnam war and ended the draft. Nixon effectively desegregated labor unions and integrated both schools and neighborhoods.

The Democratic Party’s self-destructive meltdown in 1968 hamstrung it for several years afterward, enabling Nixon’s easy reelection in 1972.

The Politics of Leaving Vietnam

America’s involvement in the southeast Asian war was long, complex, and unpleasant. All three of those adjectives were intensified, not by the military and physical realities in Vietnam, but by the political and social dynamics inside the United States.

At the beginning, Eisenhower had solidly refused to put U.S. combat troops into action. He’d further warned Kennedy against any direct U.S. engagement in the fighting in Vietnam.

At the end of Ike’s time in office, America had 900 military observers in Vietnam, in January 1961. JFK sent combat troops in large numbers. By November 1963, there were 16,000 U.S. soldiers on the ground, and casualties began.

The transition from Eisenhower to Kennedy was a transition from a United States policy of strictly avoiding the presence of any combat troops in Vietnam, and strictly avoiding any direct military engagement in the conflict there, to JFK’s policy of direct military involvement with large number of soldiers.

If the Kennedy administration represented a decision to plunge America into the war, then the Johnson administration represented a decision to escalate massively the war effort.

President Johnson increased troop levels. By 1968, there were 536,100 U.S. soldiers in Vietnam.

More forces on the ground meant more fighting, more wounded, more POWs, more MIAs, and more deaths. The majority of the 58,307 fatalities in Vietnam took place during the Johnson administration - 16,899 in 1968 alone.

President Johnson also notoriously micro-managed the military. Normally, trained and experienced military officers make strategic and tactical decisions. Johnson, however, began to schedule Air Force missions and select their targets. The result was both frustration on the part of the officers and inefficacy of the missions and of the military presence generally.

LBJ’s enlarged war effort provoked a domestic social crisis.

While some Americans were supported the continued military efforts, and while others were rabidly anti-war, many were internally torn. Rarely, if ever, in the nation’s history had a military endeavor been so criticized.

While most voters saw and recognized the socialist communist threat posed by North Vietnam, and the shredding of human rights which its victory would mean, they also saw on daily TV the brutality of combat, and questioned whether the deaths of young American soldiers was the best way to counter North Vietnam.

The reader will be aware of the significant social upheaval which resulted from concerns about the war in Vietnam, but which also resulted from, and synergized with, other societal concerns, ranging from drug use to efforts to undermine cultural frameworks.

Large public demonstrations and other protests put pressure on both political parties to offer some solution to the public.

The Democrats were divided amongst themselves. Some, the ‘hawks,’ wanted to maintain the patterns of Kennedy and Johnson, and to keep large-scale military commitments in Vietnam.

Others, the ‘doves,’ wanted an immediate end to the U.S. presence and to the draft.

With two extreme factions, the Democratic Party was at war with itself, and the few moderate voices were drowned out. Each of the two sides seemed oblivious to the disadvantages of their hardline stances: either stubbornly continuing the massive war effort, or abruptly creating a power vacuum by eliminating the American presence.

As his party disintegrated, Johnson announced in March 1968 that he would not seek reelection.

The Republicans took a more nuanced approach. In their 1968 platform document, they sought “a coherent program for peace,” and to develop that program in “the cause of long-range world peace.”

Critics alleged that the Republicans were too ambiguous in their wording, but the voters were tired of the extremism in other party. In August 1968, William F. Buckley said, during a TV commentary,

Yes, it is an ambiguous plank. And there is no question but that the war in Vietnam having been so badly fought, not as the result of any failure in our military but as a result of a failure in our policy, has led to a great confusion. The war in Vietnam is not justifiable in the opinion of Mr. Nixon unless it in fact represents a salient, which is armed by the communist world, however loosely spoken of, which is directed against our best interests. It was because Mr. Kennedy and subsequently Mr. Johnson believed that it was, in which point of view every single one of the people who are professionally charged with evaluating America’s interests concurred that it was that we went to war there. But we failed to win it.

In early August 1968, neither party had chosen its nominee for the presidential elections. The war was a central question in both the primary elections before the conventions, and later at the conventions themselves.

The Democratic Party hoped to harness the energy of the radicals who organized public protests against the Vietnam War. But Kennedy and Johnson were both identified with the core of the party.

Because Johnson’s decisions seemed to come at the cost of massive casualties while failing to achieve victory in the war, Buckley noted that “the failure to win it has caused a number of developments not the least of which is the domestic turmoil from which” some segments of the Democratic “party seek to profiteer.”

In late 1968, the political process moved quickly. Nixon received the GOP’s nomination, and was decisively elected in November.

Working to create a friendlier relationship with China, Nixon thereby reduced China’s enthusiasm for North Vietnam, and reduced the likelihood that Vietnam would become merely an extension of China.

Nixon ended both the U.S. involvement in Vietnam and the draft. The North quickly conquered the South, and the two halves were united under the North’s socialist government. China, however, was not on friendly terms with the North, and so the undesirable situation of Vietnam becoming an extension of Chinese communism was avoided.

The Continuously Changing Situation in Afghanistan

From the time that military operations began in Afghanistan in October 2001, the situation there has metamorphosed constantly, demanding ongoing adjustments in strategy and tactics by the United States forces.

Between October 2001 and January 2009, troop levels averaged under 20,000 in Afghanistan, with a peak of 32,800. After January 2009, Obama ordered a “surge” and the number of U.S. soldiers rose to over 100,000. The total number of NATO forces peaked at 140,000 in 2011. (The NATO numbers include troops from Georgia, Germany, Turkey, Romania, Italy, the UK and Australia.) By June 2015, the Obama administration was projecting a drawdown, resulting in troops level at approximately 1,000 during 2017.

Changing situations on the ground, however, now have Obama projecting 5,500 soldiers in Afghanistan through 2017. Journalist Mike Sigov reports:

About 9,800 U.S. troops are in Afghanistan now. At the end of next year or in early 2017, the number is to drop to about 5,500 and stay at that level through the end of President Obama’s term in 2017.

Military situations are often fluid and unpredictable. While domestic politics prefers predictable wars, the very phrase ‘predictable war’ is perhaps an oxymoron.

Korea: Stretched Thin

After 1945, the constellations of the postwar world began to emerge as various nations situated themselves and their stances became clear. While it was clear that the chill of the Cold War was descending upon the globe, it was not yet obvious that this cold would be very cold indeed.

The Communist surprise attack on South Korea was an indicator that the Cold War would be more serious than some had supposed.

President Harry Truman saw the Communist aggression not only as the occasion for a U.S. response in Korea, but also as the occasion to review U.S. preparedness worldwide, and make adjustments to defense policy as needed. Historians Allan Millett and Peter Maslowski write:

Much to the surprise of the Truman administration, the North Korean People’s Army (NKPA) crossed the 38th Parallel on June 25, 1950, and opened a three-year war for control of the Korean peninsula. The Korean War brought a major shift in United States military policy, for it provided an atmosphere of crisis that allowed the nation to mobilize for one war in Asia and rearm to deter another war in Europe. By the time the conflict ended in an uneasy armistice in July 1953, the United States had tripled the size of its armed forces and quadrupled its defense budget. It had also redefined the Communist threat to a challenge of global proportions.

As the reality emerged that the Communist threat was more than regional, President Truman assigned four objectives, not so much to the military broadly, but rather more specifically to the Army: to maintain and support a field army in Korea; to maintain and support one in Europe for the anticipated WWIII; to collaborate with the Air Force on a continental air defense system; and to maintain a strategic reserve should it be needed elsewhere on the planet.

These four tasks proved to be massive. The simultaneous effort to address all four of these goals stretched the Army thin. Historian William Donnelly writes:

The President and the Congress, however, did not provide the Army with sufficient resources to accomplish all four missions, and the service steadily deteriorated during these two years. The hurried expansion of the active force during the war’s first year, together with three decisions, created a serious manpower dilemma for the Army. These three decisions were: (1) to institute individual rotation in Korea; (2) not to hold draftees and mobilized reserve component personnel on active duty for the duration of the war; (3) to cut the Army’s budget but not its missions. The result was a constant shortfall of personnel, both in quantity and in quality, affecting combat effectiveness, operational readiness, training, and retention.

When the fighting in Korea began, the U.S. Army was adequately but not well prepared.

Because the war came as a surprise - unlike some other conflicts in the nation’s history - it is understandable that troop levels at the outbreak of hostilities were suboptimal. Historian Russell Weigley writes:

The troops in Japan were not well trained, partly because Japan offered so little ground for that purpose. Like nearly all American Army formations in early 1950, their units were understrength. Infantry regiments had only two battalions instead of the standard three, and artillery battalions had only two batteries instead of three. But the American troops were at least close by, and the Korean peninsula was accessible to air power vastly superior to anything the North Koreans could muster even without the atomic bomb, and to naval power which, though its ships were getting old and often had to be removed from mothballs to get into the fight, remained far and away the premier force of its kind on the globe.

American forces performed admirably in Korea, but the Army never reached a fully proficient presence there.

While one cannot write properly of ‘winning’ or ‘losing’ as the outcome of that conflict, it is objectively true that South Korea with its United Nations allies came very close to winning, and handily so. The lack of a South Korean victory was a negotiated and self-inflicted loss.

The U.S. Army performed admirably in Korea, but had to overcome handicaps to do so. Had the President Truman and the Congress allocated resources differently, a more proficient military would have given South Korea an even more dominating advantage.