At The New Yorker, Michael Specter writes—Hillary Clinton, Nancy Reagan, and AIDS:

President Reagan’s first speech on the subject wasn’t until May 31, 1987. By then, more than twenty-five thousand people, the majority of them gay men, had died in the United States. His Administration ridiculed people with AIDS—his spokesman, Larry Speakes, made jokes about them at press conferences—and while I do think it rude to speak ill of the dead, particularly on the day of a funeral, this issue cannot be ignored. Nancy Reagan refused to act in any way in 1985 to help her friend Rock Hudson when he was in Paris dying of AIDS. (Last year, Buzzfeed published documents that make this clear.)

Clinton’s comments caused an outcry and she apologized rapidly, writing, in a statement issued on Twitter, “While the Reagans were strong advocates for stem cell research and finding a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, I misspoke about their record on H.I.V. and AIDS. For that, I’m sorry.” She deserves recognition for that. But her correction, while not nearly as offensive as her earlier comments, was also misguided.

In the nineteen-eighties, I covered the AIDS epidemic and the stem-cell wars for the Washington Post. I do not recall any occasion on which Ronald Reagan said or did anything that could be considered as “strong” advocacy for stem-cell research. One son, Ron, Jr., was in favor of the research and said so at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, the year his father died. That same year, Michael, Reagan’s other son, made a statement about that issue to anti-abortion-rights publications, which nobody ever contradicted: “The media continues to report that the Reagan ‘family’ is in favor of [embryonic] stem cell research, when the truth is that two members of the family have been long time foes of this process of manufacturing human beings—my dad, Ronald Reagan during his lifetime, and I.”

The idea that Ronald Reagan finally did focus on AIDS, if only belatedly, is also a fiction. [...]

In 1990, when Ryan White died of AIDS, Reagan wrote a letter that ended with the words, “Ryan, my dear young friend, we will see you again.” But that letter really just shows the limits of Reagan’s sympathy. Ryan White was an absolutely delightful Indiana schoolboy who, in the early nineteen-eighties, received a transfusion of H.I.V.-infected blood. So he was an “innocent” AIDS victim, unlike the gay men Reagan did not like to mention. It is no coincidence that Reagan would feel comfortable singling White out to honor, nor is it by chance that the single biggest piece of H.I.V. legislation ever enacted in the United States is called the Ryan White Act.