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.