I wonder if Hillary had seen this? [View all]

[TheDormouse]

The Reagan administration's response to the AIDS crisis was absolutely apalling, no question about that! And I was shocked to read that Hillary had chosen to bring up that particular issue, of all issues, in her words of praise for Nancy Reagan.

But I am wondering whether Hillary (or her people) had seen this PBS show (linked below), or had read what Ron Reagan Jr had said about his mother on AIDS (linked below):

Historian Allida Black:
"Ronald Reagan didn't say the word 'AIDS' until 1987, and that was after Rock Hudson admitted that he had AIDS. At that point, 37,000 Americans had been diagnosed and 21,000 Americans had died....
I am profoundly convinced that Rock Hudson's, and later Roy Cohn's, diagnosis, both of whom were very close friends of Nancy Reagan, encouraged her to force the president and the Secretary of Health to in fact respond to the requests for additional research."

Ron Reagan:
"I spoke to him (President Reagan); she (Nancy Reagan) spoke to him, about, you know, 'You're, maybe you're not understanding just how bad this is. How widespread it is. Maybe your people aren't telling you what you need to know about this.' When Rock Hudson ended up with AIDS--somebody that they knew, somebody from the Hollywood community, somebody they liked--all of a sudden, now it's real. Now it isn't just some abstract thing out there.... So if you could personalize an issue, either because of a tragedy, like Rock Hudson's, or in some other way, that was the way you got to him. And she was well aware of that, of course."
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/nancy-reagan/2011/01/other-headline-9.html

Ron Reagan:
"I don't think I was really able to persuade him much on issues. And for the most part, no, I don't think the things we disagreed about we just continued to disagree about. No, I can't come up with one. I can say that my mother and I both began talking to him about the AIDS crisis at a certain point when we realized that the administration just really was kind of dragging its feet on this and ignoring what was going on. So, we talked to him about that and tried to explain how serious this was. Whether that was responsible for the administration kind of getting it together about AIDS, I don't know. But, certainly made the effort."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-goodman/1on1-with-ron-reagan-jr_b_819346.html


This is not to say that Nancy Reagan did help start a national conversation about AIDS. Far from it.
But maybe she was trying to do a little more behind the scenes than she has been getting credit for. (Admittedly, too little, too late!)