President's Commission on the HIV Epidemic

The President's Commission on the HIV Epidemic was a commission formed by President Ronald Reagan in 1987 to investigate the AIDS pandemic. It is also known as the Watkins Commission for James D. Watkins, its chairman when the commission issued its final report in 1988.

President Reagan issued Executive Order creating the President's Commission on the HIV Epidemic on June 24, 1987. On June 26, he appointed Dr. W. Eugene Mayberry, CEO of the Mayo Clinic, to chair the commission. Jeff Levi, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force objected to the appointment of someone with no experience with the disease, but others praised Mayberry's experience in both medical research and clinical services. Administration officials said it would resist pressure from gay rights activists to include a representative of the gay community on the commission. Gary L. Bauer, the assistant to the President for policy development who would soon become head of the Family Research Council, said: "I would be very surprised if an administration opposed to making appointments on the basis of race or sex would agree to make an appointment based on bedroom habits". The commission was charged with producing a preliminary report in 3 months and a final report within a year.

The president named the other commission members on July 23. Saying AIDS needed to go "the way of smallpox and polio", President Reagan announced the appointments at the commission's first meeting. They included:

At the commission's first meeting, Lilly and O'Connor, seated side by side, "chatted cordially", the New York Times reported. When the meeting ended, reporters and television cameras surrounded Lilly leaving him, he said, "shell-shocked" and "scared to death". Senator Gordon Humphrey, a New Hampshire Republican, attacked Lilly's appointment, said the President "should strive at all costs to avoid sending the message to society—especially to impressionable youth—that homosexuality is simply an alternative lifestyle" and said the President should have named heterosexual experts to the commission.

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