The Atlantic
How Lady Bird Johnson and Nancy Reagan advanced their husbands’ ambitions and their own
This article was published online on April 20, 2021.
Of the many images that lingered after the January inauguration of President Joe Biden the twinkling hand gestures of the poet Amanda Gorman, the rakish eyebrow-waggling of the second daughter, Ella Emhoff one of the more subtly significant was the scene of Doug Emhoff trying to figure out which side of his wife, Vice President Kamala Harris, to stand on. As the first and second couples moved to ascend the Capitol steps, Emhoff stood to her left; changed his mind and dashed to her right; then sort of bobbled, hesitating, before settling at her left. In an otherwise scripted and sober ceremony, the shuffle injected a spontaneous note as the second gentleman sought his place not sure quite what that place was.
The Atlantic
The Reagan Family’s Secret Battle Over the AIDS Crisis
The former first lady fought the most conservative elements of the Reagan administration in an attempt to get her husband to pay more attention to the deadly pandemic. It wasn’t enough.
, Simon & Schuster 2021.
In mid-1981 the U.S. Center for Disease Control noticed a set of medical curiosities: an alert from Los Angeles that five previously healthy young men had come down with a rare, fatal lung infection; almost simultaneously, a dermatologist in New York saying that he had seen a cluster of unusually aggressive cases of Kaposi’s sarcoma, an obscure skin cancer. These seemingly unconnected occurrences had two things in common. First, all of the victims were sexually active gay men. Second, their maladies pointed to a catastrophically compromised immune system.