Four years of silence, then a follow-up question

On 17 September 1985, Ronald Reagan publicly said the word AIDS for the first time in his presidency. Not in a speech. But because a journalist asked about it at a White House press conference.

By then the epidemic was already more than four years old. More than thirteen thousand people in the USA had been diagnosed, and an estimated eight thousand had died. The President now called research a top priority and defended his administration's spending against the charge that it was doing too little. He did not mention that Congress regularly approved more money for AIDS than the White House had even requested.

A memo from four days earlier shows how much the subject was being wrestled with internally. Two government lawyers reviewed the prepared talking points. One of them was John Roberts, later Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. He recommended deleting the point that, according to the best scientists, the virus was not transmitted through casual contact. The President, he argued, should not commit himself on a disputed question or reassure the public in case he later turned out to be wrong.

Reagan stuck to that. Asked whether children with AIDS should be allowed to attend public school, he dodged the question. He understood both sides, he said, and was glad not to have to make that decision himself. A day later, the heads of the CDC and the National Institutes of Health went before the press and made clear what had long been known: AIDS is transmitted through blood and sexual contact, not through casual touch.

The White House had set the tone years earlier. When a reporter asked the President's spokesman about the epidemic in October 1982, he was met with laughter in the press room and the counter-question of whether he himself had AIDS. Reagan only gave a speech of his own on the subject in spring 1987. By then tens of thousands had already died in the USA.