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“It may be hard for your viewers to remember how difficult it was for people to talk about HIV/AIDS back in the 1980s," Hillary Clinton said. | AP Photo Clinton retracts praise for Reagans' HIV/AIDS legacy

Hillary Clinton credited Ronald and Nancy Reagan on Friday with starting a “national conversation” about HIV and AIDS — only to retract her comments hours later.

"While the Reagans were strong for stem cell research and finding a cure for Alzheimer's disease, I misspoke about their record on HIV and AIDS. For that, I'm sorry," she said in a statement issued on Friday afternoon.

The retraction came amid an online furor that exploded when Clinton praised the Reagans' legacy on HIV/AIDS during a TV interview at Nancy Reagan's funeral.

“It may be hard for your viewers to remember how difficult it was for people to talk about HIV/AIDS back in the 1980s," the former secretary of state told NBC's Andrea Mitchell at the Reagan Library in California. "And because of both president and Mrs. Reagan, we started a national conversation, when before, nobody talked about it."

“Nobody wanted to do anything about it. And you know, that too is something that I really appreciate, with her very effective low-key advocacy but it penetrated the public conscience and people began to say, 'Hey, we have to do something about this too,'” she continued.

"While I respect her advocacy on issues like stem cell & Parkinson's research, Nancy Reagan was, sadly, no hero in the fight against HIV/AIDS," Human Rights Campaign Chad Griffin, a Clinton supporter, said in one of the milder reactions to Clinton's remarks.

The Reagans' record on AIDS is mixed at best.

At a now-infamous 1982 news conference, when White House press secretary Larry Speakes was asked about the burgeoning epidemic, he replied, “What’s AIDS?”

“It’s known as the ‘gay plague,’” a reporter answered.

“I don’t have it,” Speakes replied. “Do you?” He added later that the president was not aware of the virus.

Reagan and Congress did, however, quietly increase funding for AIDS research as the disease began to ravage the gay community, and beyond. By fiscal year 1983, the federal government was spending $44 million per year on HIV/AIDS research.

By that time, a "national conversation" was well underway.

In 1985, According to BuzzFeed, the first lady turned down a request that the White House help get actor Rock Hudson — a friend of the Reagans who was dying from AIDS — into the “one hospital in the world that can offer necessary medical treatment" to save his life, or "at least alleviate his illness.” The first lady declined to help, on the grounds that "she did not feel this was something the White House should get into," according to a White House staffer's memo at the time. Hudson died weeks later.

Not until Feb. 5, 1986, did Reagan visit the Department of Health and Human Services and call finding a cure for AIDS "one of our highest public health priorities." He charged Surgeon General C. Everett Koop with developing a landmark report on the disease, which called on Americans to practice safer sex. And by 1989 — Reagan's final budget year — funding for HIV/AIDS research had risen to $2.3 billion.

Critics — and there are many — note that Reagan didn't give his first major speech on the matter, however, until 1987. The president did not even mention AIDS in public until he was asked about the disease on Sept. 17, 1985 — when he cast doubt on a Centers for Disease Control finding that the virus was not communicable by casual contact. By that point, more than 25,000 Americans had died of the disease.

After his presidency, Reagan seemed to have regrets about his failure to do more. He penned an op-ed in The Washington Post in memory of Ryan White, an American teenager who was expelled from his school after being diagnosed with the disease and died in April 1990.

"Sadly, Ryan's is not the only life to have been cut short by AIDS," Reagan wrote. "In a most poignant way, he told us of a health crisis in our country that has claimed too many victims. There have been too many funerals like his. There are too many patches in the quilt. We owe it to Ryan to make sure that the fear and ignorance that chased him from his home and his school will be eliminated. We owe it to Ryan to open our hearts and our minds to those with AIDS. We owe it to Ryan to be compassionate, caring and tolerant toward those with AIDS, their families and friends. It's the disease that's frightening, not the people who have it."