I posted the review by Frank Rich of the upcoming HBO movie made from the play, "Angels in America." The play and Rich's review of it is so slanted about the Reagan admin that Andrew Sullivan at "The New Republic" protests.
The problem is that the HBO subscribers are going to think it is the truth. And no amount of protest will change their opinion. The rewriting of History to smear Reagan is just starting.
Rich in Irony
by Andrew Sullivan
Only at TNR Online
Post date: 11.18.03
The history of AIDS in this country is a deeply fraught and complicated one. It arouses deep emotions on all sides, as any plague that felled hundreds of thousands of marginalized people in the United States--and many millions more abroad--would do. But for that reason, and because the world is still peopled by the ghosts of friends who are no longer here, it surely behooves us to describe the record as accurately as we can, to treat the epidemic not as a political football game but as a tragedy with many lessons.
Alas, that hasn't always been the case, and still isn't. Exhibit A in the attempt to turn the human tragedy of AIDS into political agitprop was Tony Kushner's Angels in America. As such, it appealed and still appeals to the hard left, which is partly why it won a Pulitzer and entirely why Frank Rich of The New York Times single-handedly championed it in the 1990s. It has always been vital to the far left to portray the HIV epidemic as a political plot to kill gay people, a conscious, pre-meditated campaign of murder against a vulnerable minority, aided and abetted--as all good Stalinist agitprop requires--by petit-bourgeois traitors to the revolutionary cause. But that was never true. The truth wasn't pretty, but it wasn't as luridly malevolent as Kushner implies.
Last Sunday, Frank Rich suggested that HBO's upcoming television adaptation of the play amounts to revenge for the canceling of CBS's miniseries about "The Reagans." Here's an abridged version of his column, with my comments:
Tonight is the night when Americans might have tuned into Part 1 of "The Reagans" on CBS. But the joke is on the whiners who forced the mini-series off the air. Just three weeks from tonight, HBO will present the first three-hour installment of Mike Nichols's film version of Tony Kushner's "Angels in America," starring Al Pacino and Meryl Streep. (Part 2 is a week later.) This epic is, among other things, a searing indictment of how the Reagan administration's long silence stoked the plague of AIDS in the 1980's....
"Angels" is only minutes old when Mr. Pacino appears as a real-life crony of the Reagans--Roy Cohn, in his post-McCarthy-era incarnation as a still-powerful Republican fixer, closely tied to the Ed Meese justice department. A photo on his office wall shows him arm in arm with both the president and his vice president. Cohn is also a closeted gay man dying of AIDS. When he takes a sexual partner to the White House, he gloats, "President Reagan smiles at us and shakes his hand." Eventually Cohn will threaten to reveal "adorable Ollie North and his secret contra slush fund" unless the White House secures him a private stash of AZT, then the most promising AIDS drug and still unavailable to all but a few. Cohn gets his pills while thousands of other dying Americans are placed on hold.
It should be said from the beginning: There is no solid defense of the Reagan administration's policies toward HIV and AIDS. The administration was feckless for far too long; it didn't mount the kind of public relations campaign to alert people to the burgeoning epidemic that it should have; President Reagan's inability to even speak the word until well into his presidency is a damning indictment in itself. But this begs an obvious question: If this is true, why not stick to the readily available facts? Why invent events and dialogue and incidents in order to turn what was a shameful record of indifference into the appearance of actual malevolence? The only purpose is ideological, and in Roy Cohn, Kushner finds an emblem of all the hard left despises: a man who aided Joe McCarthy, a closet homosexual, and a friend of the Reagans. What more could you want? Kushner is writing drama, not history, of course. He has never claimed his play is a biopic. But Rich now tries to co-opt it as equivalent to a docudrama purportedly describing the presidency of Ronald Reagan. That's a comparison of two very different genres. Rich must know that. He's a very sophisticated and brilliant critic. But sometimes, his desire for ideological payback gets the better of his professional judgment. This is one of those times.
Two other things to note: There is of course no evidence that Cohn somehow used Iran-Contra blackmail to get allegedly forbidden stashes of AZT. AZT was already in existence as a licensed drug for cancer. Cohn may have used connections to get into a drug trial of some kind. But he didn't need to blackmail or sexually covet Ollie North to get it. And all such trials put the unlucky people outside them "on hold." Using this incident, as Rich does, to imply that the real truth about the Reagan administration will now be told is nonsense. (And to add a bitter irony, the high dose monotherapy that Cohn and many others tried almost certainly did them far more harm than good. It poisoned their livers, and made those few who survived less sensitive to the combination therapy that eventually saved so many.)
It also remains true that it wasn't till the middle of Reagan's term that we even knew what the virus was that caused AIDS, let alone how exactly it was transmitted or how to treat it. A retrovirus had never been cured in human history (it still hasn't been); and the notion that the government had a magic wand of some kind that it simply refused to wave in order to cure AIDS is sophomoric. The administration did, ironically, vow to find a vaccine--thus endorsing the dumbest line of research imaginable. (Almost 20 years later, we're barely any closer to such a thing. One shudders to think how many resources would have been wasted if the government had indeed directed all early HIV research toward such an unmanageable project.)
The government's main responsibility at the time, as Rich says, was to prevent transmission; the Reagan administration's failure to do this swiftly or effectively is damning enough without exaggerating it. (The Thatcher government showed that conservatism and sane public health were not contradictory.) But again, in ironic retrospect, it's not clear how effective this would have been anyway. What was needed was specifically targeted information to those most vulnerable--not hysterical, blanket warnings to unaffected heterosexuals, as eventually occurred under Reagan in 1988. But gay men organized and educated themselves independently of the government, and transmission rates plummeted in the mid-1980s. The direct line from Reagan's policies and the deaths of thousands is therefore nowhere near as straight as some would now have us believe. The argument grants government too much power; and individuals too little (which is unsurprising given its leftist provenance). If you want to read an intelligent and nuanced account of the early years, read Randy Shilts's As The Band Played On. Shilts's sin--and the reason that he was vilified as viciously as Kushner was celebrated--is that he actually criticized some gay activists, as well as the Reagan administration, for resisting efforts to counteract the plague early enough. But in the polarized politics of AIDS, such complexities are generally unrewarded.
Back to Rich:
How much of this really happened and how much is fantasy? Mr. Kushner is not making a historical documentary, or practicing journalism, any more than those behind "The Reagans" were. Whatever his script's fictions, it accurately conveys the rancid hypocrisy among powerful closeted gay Republicans in Washington as AIDS spiraled.
But isn't there an obvious difference between a magical realist fantasy--where dreams become enacted, angels appear, and all sorts of metaphors are turned into dramatic imagery--and a biopic on network television, allegedly recounting the presidency of Reagan? Kushner's play is, to my mind, vastly overrated. But it makes sense in its own fantasist, red-diaper-baby echo chamber. It certainly isn't making anywhere near the same factual claims as "The Reagans." Angels is designed to be biased. Networks aren't supposed to be.
And though "Angels" takes note of the falling of the Berlin Wall, it doesn't feel that it owes a president any sanctuary from free speech. "If he didn't have people like me to demonize," says one angry non-Republican gay character, Reagan would have ended up the "upper-right-hand square on 'The Hollywood Squares.'" The Reagans are "not really a family," goes another riff. "There aren't any connections there, no love."
But who has been arguing that Reagan should be immune from public criticism? "The Reagans," after all, will be shown on cable. Why is that not as much free speech as a miniseries on another cable channel, HBO? And are the kinds of sentences excerpted here really serious political criticism? When and how, for example, did Ronald Reagan actually demonize homosexuals? Can we have a single public quote? As a way to demonstrate how justifiably angry some gay men were, this rhetoric is a fair dramatic device. But as an indicator of actual history, it's flawed.
... As Lou Cannon, the most respected of Reagan biographers, wrote in his authoritative "President Reagan," "Reagan's response to this epidemic was halting and ineffective." The president mentioned to his own doctor that he thought AIDS was as transitory as measles. Mr. Cannon's bald accounting of the net results of this inactivity speaks for itself: "There were only 199 reported cases of AIDS in 1981. Eight years later more than 55,000 persons had died from this new scourge, exceeding the total of U.S. combat deaths in either the Vietnam War or the Korean War."
But this is a silly argument. On those grounds, Bill Clinton is far more responsible than Ronald Reagan, since he presided over the years which saw the heaviest toll from AIDS in America. Clinton also routinely asked for lower funding for HIV research than the Republicans in Congress eventually provided. He also refused to enact needle exchange programs. Does that mean that Clinton was a murderer? Or somehow evil? Of course not. These kinds of crude assignments of moral blame tell us nothing about the reality on the ground, the real difficulties of effective HIV prevention, or the mind-bogglingly complex task of finding a treatment or cure. All Rich and Kushner are doing, by rhetorical sleight of hand, is using the deaths and sickness of millions to score partisan political points.
Dr. Everett Koop, the frustrated surgeon general who tried to enlist Reagan in the AIDS battle late in his second term, gave a speech to a Kaiser Family Foundation symposium in 2001 explaining what went on in the White House during the 80's. In Dr. Koop's account, he was kept out of all AIDS discussions for the administration's first five years, while "the advisers to the president took the stand" that homosexuals and intravenous drug users were "only getting what they justly deserve." In Mr. Cannon's biography, anti-Koop forces within the administration are identified as William Bennett, Gary Bauer and Patrick Buchanan--all of whom, uncoincidentally enough, were vociferous in the assault on "The Reagans."
Rich will get no argument from me on the moral grandstanding of Messrs Bennett, Buchanan, and Bauer. They each have a record of devastating and malign hostility to gay people. But plenty of other less compromised people objected to "The Reagans." It had all the historical integrity of a biopic of Clinton written by Sean Hannity.
...The zeal with which the likes of Gary Bauer and the Rev. Jerry Falwell, among others, have suddenly taken to championing the Reagan record on AIDS may have less to do with Ronald Reagan than with trying to bury their own records back then. Not that they've changed much since. It's because of their continued efforts--and those of other political operatives like them--that even the current administration's admirable AIDS initiative in Africa is hindered by restrictions that give a higher priority to abstinence than safe sex as a form of HIV prevention. Science is politicized in the Bush White House, as it was in Reagan's, to the point where AIDS researchers have complained that terms like "gay" and "anal sex" must be omitted from their grant applications to the National Institutes of Health, lest they prompt the administration to shut them down. The same family-values pressure groups have also lobbied the White House to throw up roadblocks for embryonic stem-cell research, a possible cure for other diseases.
Rich manages one single word--"admirable"--to describe the Bush administration's efforts to combat HIV and AIDS in Africa. But it remains one of the strangest historical ironies that this effort was, in fact, pioneered by the religious right. As soon as HIV became a non-gay disease, they discovered compassion. But the result cannot be gainsaid. They succeeded with their political masters in a way the AIDS and gay lobby never succeeded with Clinton. The sums dwarf anything the Clinton administration did or even tried to do. This is not to say that Clinton may not, in some way, have wanted to do the right thing. But the record is complicated, hemmed in by political and scientific realities that neither Kushner nor Rich want to explore. Why? Because such nuance would get in the way of their anti-Republican hysteria.
...As onstage, "Angels" ends on a bright winter's day in 1990, as old friends gather by the fountain in Central Park harboring a statue of the Bethesda Angel. "This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all," says Prior Walter (Justin Kirk), a young man who discovers his first lesion of Kaposi's sarcoma at the start of the drama but is still alive at the end. "We are not going away," he says. "We won't die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward."
And so it has. Neither CBS nor those who intimidated it can suppress the story of just what happened in America in the 1980's, a time when too many died in secret and too many of those who might have helped looked away.
No one should indeed deny the story of those, like Reagan, whose indifference to HIV and AIDS will always tarnish them. But Rich cannot have it both ways. Angels cannot both be a fantasia and a record of "just what happened." Its rhetorical flourishes cannot be justified both dramatically and empirically. Part of the problem with some (but by no means all) of the gay and AIDS activists of the 1980s was that they occasionally eschewed hardheaded research and reform for hysterical and self-defeating theatrics. It's sad to realize that two decades later, some people still haven't matured.
Andrew Sullivan is a senior editor at TNR.
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