Praying For Time...

On this day, 82 years ago, on June 6, 1944, Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr., age 56, landed with the first wave of infantry on Utah Beach during the Allied invasion of Normandy.

Roosevelt was the assistant division commander of the 4th Infantry Division. He suffered from arthritis and had a heart condition. He walked with a cane. Despite this, he personally requested to go ashore with the first wave of troops. His request was approved.

When Roosevelt landed, he immediately realized that the landing craft had drifted nearly 2,000 yards south of their assigned beach. The units were scattered. The beach was under fire. Shells landed nearby. German machine guns swept the shoreline. Officers and men were disoriented. Command structure was breaking down.

Roosevelt made a decision. He walked up and down the beach under fire. He located commanders. He assessed the terrain. He determined the new location could still support the mission. He ordered the troops to press forward from that point. He said, “We’ll start the war from right here.”

Throughout the morning and afternoon, Roosevelt moved across the sand and the sea wall, personally directing units, grouping scattered soldiers, and assigning objectives. He organized columns and pointed them toward exits from the beach. He made contact with naval gunfire units and adjusted fire on enemy positions inland.

He repeatedly exposed himself to enemy fire while moving between positions. He brought up reinforcements and guided them through minefields and along cleared paths. At multiple points, he led troops directly through enemy zones to ensure progress inland. His leadership stabilized the beachhead and enabled the division to achieve its initial objectives with fewer casualties than expected.

Roosevelt remained on the beach all day. He never sought cover. He refused to rest. He coordinated with both division staff and regimental units as they established a foothold in enemy territory.

One month later, on July 12, 1944, while serving in France, Roosevelt died of a heart attack. He was buried at the Normandy American Cemetery. His grave lies next to that of his younger brother Quentin Roosevelt, a pilot killed in World War I.

From the article:

LINKS: https://www.unaids.org/en/impact-US-funding-cut https://www.kff.org/global-health-policy/is-the-u-s-stepping-up-in-the-fight-against-ebola/

According to The Report of the Presidential AIDS Commission (2022):

U.S. president Ronald Reagan appointed the Presidential Commission on the Human Immunodeficiency Virus Epidemic (later named the Watkins Commission) on June 24, 1987, which was late in his second term and at least six years into the HIV-AIDS epidemic. His delayed response likely stemmed from his political ideology and practice. The conservative philosophy of the 1980’s delegated domestic issues to the states and localities: the federal government was considered by conservatives to be the problem, not the solution. Thus, for too long, the Reagan administration assumed that states, localities, and charities would shoulder the burdens of HIV-AIDS.

Most critical in retarding any federal action, however, was the evangelical Christian view that HIV-AIDS is a providential punishment for the alleged “sins” of male homosexuality, “sins” that had become openly practiced and destigmatized in the previous decade. Evangelical Christians began to make up an increasing share of likely voters, and Reagan’s appeals to traditional values had made evangelicals desert fellow evangelical Jimmy Carter (U.S. president, 1977-1981, and a Democrat) in 1980. Although Reagan himself was not a born-again Christian and did not personally share the more extreme homophobia and hatred of gays and lesbians of the Christian Right, his administration pandered to evangelicals by ignoring the epidemic, largely because of its “sinful” nature, which should never be mentioned among or to Christians.

Yet as much as the White House pretended that the epidemic was not serious, several factors undermined the opportunistic stance of governmental indifference. Personal friends of the Reagans, including actor Rock Hudson and entertainer Liberace, had died from AIDS complications. Their deaths started to change the president’s mind about the disease. There were growing public pressures to do something, even within the Republican Party, Representative Stewart McKinney of Connecticut, the second-ranking Republican on the House Banking Committee and a married father of five, had died of AIDS in May of 1987, belying the myth that the disease affected the politically marginal constituencies of promiscuous gay men, drug addicts, and Haitian refugees; this changed public opinion about the people who could be impacted by the epidemic. Suddenly, the door opened to a handful of open-minded pragmatists, who then laid the groundwork for the restrained and moderate federal responses of presidents George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush.

When the scope of the catastrophe could no longer be denied, appointees of Reagan, such as Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and Admiral James D. Watkins, pushed the administration and that of his successor, George H. W. Bush, to be proactive in combating HIV-AIDS, that is, to be more active than conventional conservative wisdom had envisioned. Rejecting rigid right-wing ideology, Koop issued a 1986 report that advocated for a greater federal role in both patient treatment and preventive education. Shocking cultural conservatives, he urged the ubiquitous use of condoms in addition to abstinence, and the U.S. Public Health Service promptly sent out a mass mailing with that commonsense message. Koop preferred a constructive rather than a punitive federal role, rejecting the quarantine of those with AIDS—as was being done in Cuba—or any nationwide list of those who were HIV-positive. Quarantines and lists facilitated what some thought would be necessary segregation or discrimination.

As surgeon general, Koop wielded little actual power, but his recommendations (as well as the predictable conservative chorus in opposition to them) led Reagan and his advisers to appoint the commission with Executive Order 12601 in the summer of 1987. The president’s choice for chair was Watkins, who later admitted to knowing nothing about HIV-AIDS before his appointment. Most of the rest of the commission’s members consisted of scientists and physicians involved in AIDS research and treatment, with a few ideologues thrown in to appease cultural conservatives worried about Koop’s embrace of the use of condoms. Presidential commissions usually are convenient vehicles to table issues until after a term in office has ended, and they rarely lead to radical changes. The Watkins Commission, as this body would come to be known, started out similarly and predictably, and its initial composition offered little comfort to HIV-AIDS activists clamoring for a real, comprehensive effort. The independent and no-nonsense personality of the commission’s chair, nevertheless, came back to haunt those in the administration hoping to prolong the era of malign neglect.