Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (83 page)

In the aftermath of Iran-Contra, Admiral Poindexter, Air Force general Richard Secord, Albert Hakim (an Iranian-born U.S. citizen and arms dealer), and Oliver North were charged by a federal grand jury with conspiring to illegally divert profits from the U.S.-Iran arms sales to the Nicaraguan Contras. In 1989, a federal court convicted North on three charges relating to the Iran-Contra affair, including altering and destroying evidence. With the judge in the case calling him a “fall guy,” North was sentenced to a suspended sentence, 1,200 hours of community service in a drug program, and a $150,000 fine that he would presumably pay out of his substantial speaking engagement fees. Poindexter was convicted on five charges and received a six-month prison term. North had worked under national security advisers Robert C. McFarlane and John M. Poindexter. In 1989, McFarlane pleaded guilty to withholding information from Congress during its investigation. In 1990, Poindexter was convicted of conspiracy and of lying to and obstructing Congress.

But none of the convictions stuck. In 1987, North and Poindexter had testified about the Iran-Contra affair during the congressional hearings and had received immunity, or freedom from prosecution, on matters of their testimony. The courts overturned the convictions of both North and Poindexter on grounds that their 1987 testimony might have influenced the outcome of their later trials. Only one person, former CIA agent Thomas G. Clines, went to prison as a result of Iran-Contra. He was sentenced to 16 months in prison for evading taxes on income from the operations.

In 1992, Caspar W. Weinberger, Reagan’s secretary of defense, was charged with lying to Congress and government investigators in connection with the Iran-Contra affair. But Weinberger, who was indicted by Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, was given a presidential pardon by George Bush in 1992. Bush also issued pardons to a number of key participants. Elliott Abrams and Alan Fiers Jr. had pleaded guilty to withholding information from Congress. Duane Clarridge had been indicted on seven counts of perjury and was awaiting trial. Clair George had been convicted of two felony counts of perjury and false statements and was awaiting sentencing when pardoned.

Bush’s own role in Iran-Contra remained murky. During the investigation, he stated famously that he was “out of the loop.” After Bush lost his 1992 bid for reelection, entries from diaries that were belatedly given to Special Prosecutor Walsh showed that Bush had been informed about the progress of the arms-for-hostages deal in 1986. Bob Woodward reported later in
Shadow
that Bush had said, “Good things, such as the release of the hostages and contacts with moderates, will in the long run—in my view—offset this.” In the end, writes Woodward, “the records showed that Bush had attended many meetings on the Iran arms sales, but Independent Counsel Walsh felt at that point that his role was not central. . . . Some of Reagan’s key national security people, even Secretary of State Shultz, supported this view. They dismissed Bush as a decorative yes man, a heartbeat away from the presidency but miles away from heavyweight decision making.”

On January 18, 1994, Special Prosecutor Lawrence E. Walsh issued the final report of the Iran-Contra affair. The report said the Iran-Contra operations “violated United States policy and law,” and it criticized the Reagan and Bush administrations for involvement in a cover-up. However, Walsh acknowledged that there was no credible evidence that the president authorized or was aware of the diversion of the profits from the Iran arms sales to assist the Contras.

Iran-Contra was a potentially dangerous escapade that might have seemed like the work of some novelist forming a scenario for a takeover of the inner workings of American government. Only Oliver North wasn’t fiction. It is exactly his brand of zealotry that created the need for the system of checks and balances that exists at every level of the system.

(Two key Iran-Contra figures, Elliott Abrams and John Poindexter, resurfaced in 2002 in the administration of the younger Bush. Pardoned by senior Bush, Abrams was named to be President Bush’s director of Middle Eastern affairs at the White House. John M. Poindexter, a national security adviser to President Reagan whose convictions on five felony counts were later overturned, was named to direct a controversial Pentagon project that would assemble information on suspected terrorists in the aftermath of September 11.)

A
MERICAN
V
OICES

R
YAN
W
HITE,
who contracted AIDS from an infected blood-clotting medicine he took to counter hemophilia, speaking to a presidential commission on AIDS (1988):

I came face-to-face with death at thirteen years old. I was diagnosed with AIDS: a killer. Doctors told me I’m not contagious. Given six months to live and being the fighter that I am, I set high goals for myself. It was my decision to live a normal life, go to school, be with my friends, and enjoy day-to-day activities.

The school I was going to said they had no guidelines for a person with AIDS. . . . We began a series of court battles for nine months, while I was attending classes by telephone. Eventually, I won the right to attend school, but the prejudice was still there. . . . Because of the lack of education on AIDS, discrimination, fear, panic and lies surrounded me. I became the target of Ryan White jokes.

Ryan White died in 1990 at age eighteen.

What was the “gay plague”?

Germs and what goes on behind bedroom doors have always taken a backseat to dates and battles and speeches in most history books, but they have often had much more to do with history than most politicians, kings, generals, or court decisions ever did. Squeamishness among teachers, academics, and publishers, along with America’s resilient Puritan ethics, have long meant that sex, disease, and death are the unmentionable parts of history that the schoolbooks leave out. During the 1980s and 1990s, however, sex and disease were never a bigger part of American history, as a new and terrifying ailment completely altered the way the country behaved and thought about sex.

“Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.” The headline appeared inside the
New York Times
on July 3, 1981. Written by Dr. Lawrence K. Altman, a physician who covered medical news for the
Times,
the article was about 900 words long. Altman’s story described how doctors were reporting a small but frightening number of patients who were mysteriously dying from a rare and especially fatal form of cancer. “The cause of the outbreak is unknown,” Altman wrote, “and there is as yet no evidence of contagion.”

Little did Altman or anyone else know in 1981 that the appearance of this rare cancer was the visible, early phase of one of the most deadly epidemics in human history. It would not only kill millions but completely alter social behavior, sexual attitudes, and relationships. The medical mystery Altman described would eventually blossom into the full-blown international plague of AIDS. More than twenty years after Altman’s article, the first of more than 900 he would write on the subject, AIDS/HIV had affected some 60 million people worldwide and more than 20 million were dead, according to the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO).
³

It was only a few years before Altman’s article appeared that the medical world had announced one of its greatest victories with the eradication of smallpox. The last known naturally occurring case of smallpox was in Somalia in 1977, and the last known case was due to a lab accident in England in 1978. (Two research stores of smallpox are still secured in labs in the U.S. and Russia.) This triumph for modern science, along with the great strides made against polio, yellow fever, and a host of other killing diseases, left the medical world fairly confident.

Then came the mystery ailment. At first, the disease that became known as AIDS was ignored by Americans when the symptoms began to appear in 1981. It seemed to be limited to a few “special cases” in the population—male homosexuals and intravenous drug users. It was first identified as a “new” disease in 1980 and 1981 by physicians in Los Angeles and New York City who recognized that all the patients were previously healthy, young homosexual men suffering from otherwise rare forms of cancer and pneumonia. Among the homosexual community, word of a “gay plague” was spreading. Among the most fearful rumors was that someone actually was targeting homosexuals with this new disease. Some doctors first called the ailment GRID (for gay-related immune deficiency) before the Centers for Disease Control settled on the name AIDS (the acronym stands for “acquired immune deficiency syndrome”).

For a variety of reasons—which included shrinking federal medical research budgets, competition among doctors who wanted to be the first to publish, and miscommunication of basic facts to the public—the initial response to the growing epidemic was slow. Then AIDS began to show up among young hemophiliacs and female sex partners of infected men. The sense of alarm started to grow. When the enormity of the problem became more apparent, and people realized that the nation’s blood supply might be tainted, a sense of national panic ensued. Even as the course of the cause and course of the disease became known, the country was gripped by fear. It took some time to learn that AIDS is the final, life-threatening stage of infection with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). The name refers to the fact that the virus severely damages the body’s most important defense against disease, the immune system. After the discovery of the AIDS virus by the Pasteur Institute in Paris in 1983, Dr. Robert Gallo’s team at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, developed a blood test to detect the virus in 1985. The tests to detect evidence of HIV have been used to screen all blood donated in the United States since 1985. These tests were also used to analyze stored tissues from several people who died going back to the late 1950s, and scientists concluded that some of these people had died from AIDS.

In the early days of AIDS, the prevalence of the disease among homosexuals and drug users marginalized the disease, along with stigmatizing those who were suffering. On the community level, small towns were divided over whether to allow students with AIDS to attend schools, an issue brought to life by the poignant story of a young boy named Ryan White. Schools were also debating what role they should play in educating students about AIDS prevention. Condom distribution and “clean needle” exchanges, which were attempts to get infected hypodermics out of the hands of intravenous drug users, were suddenly part of the debate.

The American religious community was split among those who denounced AIDS victims as “immoral,” and other religious groups who responded with greater compassion. But many Americans, though fearful of this new disease that came shrouded in unpleasant realities, felt somewhat removed from AIDS until it started to claim some very visible victims, including film actor Rock Hudson in July 1985. A longtime symbol of American virility and “wholesome” entertainment, Hudson had costarred with Hollywood beauties like Elizabeth Taylor and Jennifer Jones and become a 1960s icon with a series of fluffy romantic comedies with Doris Day. He had moved on to a highly successful television career with
McMillan and Wife
, a detective show that ran for six seasons. Before Hudson’s death, the face of AIDS was a stranger. But America was shocked to see the former matinee idol’s emaciated and sunken image. His death helped open up a new national discussion of the subject. Eventually, other figures from the world of Hollywood, the arts, and sports began to die or announce that they were infected. They included tennis champion Arthur Ashe, who died in 1993, infected during a transfusion while in surgery. Los Angeles Lakers basketball star Magic Johnson announced he was infected with HIV in 1991, quit playing, and then, remarkably, resumed his career temporarily, a testament to the progress made in treating the disease, as well as the change in attitudes.

There was no aspect of American public and private life that the AIDS/HIV epidemic did not touch during the last two decades of the twentieth century. The economy was impacted as enormous amounts of money began to be devoted to keep up with the ill and infected. Budgets of hospitals, medical insurers, the national medical research facilities, public health and private welfare agencies were all strained to the limits.

The AIDS epidemic fundamentally altered the American landscape. By 1992, both political parties’ nominating conventions prominently featured spokespeople for the AIDS community in prime-time network television speeches. Condoms, safe sex, anal sex—words never before uttered in polite society—all became part of American common parlance. In many ways, the AIDS crisis also brought homosexuality out of the American closet. Once taboo or tittered at, homosexuality was now openly discussed, accompanied by a new political activism among gay Americans. The word “gay” itself became a new part of the American lexicon. Even the staid
New York Times
eventually accepted the word. The health care and scientific research became politicized and radicalized. Not simply content with increasing funding for AIDS research, the “gay rights” movement began to press for new legislation that would rid America of institutional discrimination against homosexuals. Of course, these demands were not uniformly accepted. Emboldened by the success of AIDS activists in obtaining funding for medical research, women also spoke out forcefully about the disparity of funds being devoted to breast cancer research. The walls of the entire system of medical research, long an almost exclusive domain of white males, were falling down.

The losses from AIDS can’t be totaled in sheer numbers. Just as an entire generation of America’s young men—its “best and brightest”—were wiped out during the Civil War, millions of people around the world fell to AIDS. Their deaths were not only tragic, but the loss of their industry, ingenuity, invention, and potential is the truly incalculable cost of this disease. Twenty years after its appearance, scientists were still not certain how, when, or where the AIDS virus evolved and first infected people. One widely held suspicion is that HIV evolved from viruses that originally infected monkeys in Africa and was somehow transmitted to people.