| The Reagans. A 2003 CBS/Showtime movie
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This made-for-television movie has been the source of much controversy in the fall of 2003. CBS decided to pull the movie and to sell it to its affiliated cable network Showtime, which will air the movie for the first time on November 30. Here are some preliminary pieces to put the movie into context; check for further updates after the movie airs.
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Reagan Legacy in Polls (last updated November 29, 2003) (back to top)
Ronald Reagan's legacy has grown over time, and about 73 percent of Americans now approve of his presidency in retrospect. However, his time in office was much more controversial; his average approval rating was only 53 percent during his presidency and, unlike all other post-World War II presidents, he never had the approval of more than two-thirds of those surveyed by the Gallup organization while he was in office.
In Office
As measured by Gallup polls, Reagan on average had a 53 percent job approval rating in office. He thus trails behind five other post-World War II presidents : John F. Kennedy (70 percent), Dwight Eisenhower (65 percent), George H.W. Bush (61 percent), Lyndon B. Johnson (55 percent), and Bill Clinton (53 percent).
Reagan's job approval rating went up and down during his presidency. He began with low job approval ratings and his overall approval rating was 50 percent for his first term. His ratings were up at the beginning of his second term but fell because of the Iran-Contra affair. His average approval rating was 48 percent in 1987 and 53 percent in 1988, though, like most presidents, he got a final lift in his last month of office, getting a 63 percent approval rating in December 1988.
Reagan's highest job approval rating was 65 percent; all other post-World War II presidents saw higher job approval ratings at some point during their terms.
Reagan personally was seen "favorably" while in office, with about 70 percent seeing him "favorably" on average throughout his presidency and 33 percent seeing him "highly favorably." But again, he trails behind five other presidents in terms of average favorability while in office : Kennedy (88 percent), Eisenhower (84 percent), Johnson (77 percent), Ford (73 percent), and even Nixon (80 percent) saw higher favorability ratings while in office.
Out of Office
Nonetheless, Reagan's stature has grown over time. About 54 percent of Americans surveyed approved of his presidency when asked in 1990, and about 71 percent approved when asked in 1999. Moreover, Reagan is now seen by many Americans as the greatest president of all time; he came in first in a 2001 survey, with about 18 percent of Americans naming him as such.
Sources: The Gallup Organization is on-line here.
Reagan and AIDS (last updated November 29, 2003) (back to top)
The Reagan administration has often been criticized for its handling of the AIDS crisis. The disease was first identified in 1981 and resulted in almost 6,000 deaths by the summer of 1985, but it was not the subject of a White House report until October 1986 and President Ronald Reagan did not give a major speech devoted to the subject until May 1987.
Critics say that the Reagan administration wanted to avoid public discussion of sexual practices and drug use and thus acted too slowly, failing to treat AIDS as a public crisis and failing to provide adequate funding on education efforts, treatment and research.
According to Edmund Morris's authorized biography of Reagan, Reagan was unconcerned by AIDS and knew very little about it at least until the death of actor Rock Hudson in October 1985. Reagan still found AIDS "a fit subject for humor" as late as December 1986, but seems to have exhibited more sympathy by 1987. Reagan called AIDS a "tragic thing" and a "horrible disease" in a May 27, 1989 interview with Morris, and speculated around this time that "maybe the Lord brought down this plague" because "illicit sex is against the Ten Commandments."
Morris notes that Reagan was not necessarily prejudiced against homosexuals but generally disapproved of sex out of wedlock and what he considered untraditional values. Reagan told Morris : "I think people were happier and better off when there wasn't the tremendous plague of single motherhood cases or abortions - the thousands and thousands and thousands that take place regularly now and, uh, whether it's going to take such a tragic thing as that disease … that horrible disease to return us to a sense of values that were very much a part of our generation."
Reagan gave only one major speech devoted to AIDS and did not do so until May 1987, just days after being interviewed by Morris. In that speech, Reagan called for routine testing of applicants for marriage licenses and for mandatory testing of selected groups. "Just as most individuals don't know they carry the virus, no one knows to what extent the virus has infected our entire society. AIDS is surreptitiously spreading throughout our population, and yet we have no accurate measure of its scope. It is time we knew exactly what we were facing. And that is why I support routine testing," he said.
At the same time, many prominent sources were calling for greater action by the federal government.
The Surgeon General, Dr. C. Everett Koop, became the Reagan administration's most active spokesman in the AIDS crisis when he released a 36-page report on October 22, 1986, in which he called for explicit public education about AIDS and the use of condoms, criticized proposals for quarantining AIDS patients, and called for tolerance. Koop had not become a member of the Assistant Secretary's Executive Task Force on AIDS until 1985, and was not asked to produce his report until early 1986.
"Overnight," Koop later told an interviewer for the book Plagues and Politics, "I lost the constituencies I'd had, which included right-wing conservatives, right-wing religious bodies, pro-life people and I gained all the liberals and moderates that weren't already with me. And I got the blessings of the people in public health."
A week later, the National Academy of Sciences released a 390-page report that called the federal government's response "inadequate" in many key aspects, such as in planning anti-AIDS efforts and in educating the public on how to avoid infection. The report called for a massive public-education campaign, funding of $2 billion a year by 1990, and "perhaps the most wide-ranging and intensive efforts ever made against an infectious disease."
Sources: Edmund Morris, Dutch: A memoir of Ronald Reagan (Random House, 1999). C. Everett Koop's October 1986 report on the AIDS epidemic is on-line here. Fitzhugh Mullan, Plagues and Politics: The story of the United States Public Health Service (Basic Books, 1989). Philip M. Boffey, Reagan urges wide AIDS testing but does not call for compulsion, New York Times, June 1, 1987. Philip M. Boffey, Federal efforts on AIDS criticized as gravely weak, New York Times, October 30, 1986.
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