Presidential Crises, Episode VIII: The AIDS Epidemic

The Past, the Promise, the Presidency

This week on The Past, The Promise, The Presidency, we are exploring a tragic national crisis that hits very close to home in 2021. The crisis of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Having lived through two years of a new coronavirus pandemic, we all intimately understand just how confusing and terrifying it can be for patients, doctors, and yes, presidents to confront a new and deadly disease. One of unknown origin, transmission, and incubation. Indeed, the only thing doctors could say with real confidence in the early 1980s about the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome is that those who got it died.

We have gathered three guests to help us understand the Reagan Administration’s lethargic response during the early days of the AIDS epidemic. We also explore the key roles of patients, activists, and healthcare workers who pushed the US Government to do more to combat the AIDS epidemic.

First we spoke to Dr. David Oshinsky, Pulitzer Prize winner, and director of Division of Medical Humanities at NYU Grossman School of Medicine and a professor in the NYU Department of History.

We then spoke to Dr. John Graybill an infectious disease specialist who was quite literally on the front lines of the first battles against this new virus in the early 1980s.

And finally, we spoke to Dr. Jennifer Brier, Professor of History and Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago. An award-winning public historian and activist, she is the author, among other works, of Infectious Ideas: U.S. Political Responses to the AIDS Crisis.

Together they helped us understand a moment when public health ran headlong into presidential politics.

Maybe that sounds familiar. All right, let's get to it.