by Bret Baier
psychological optimism. The idea that communism was a passing phase was the truly revolutionary point. It took us from containment and at a time when it was a question of whether containment itself could be sustained and began speaking about rollback. That was revolutionary, that was shocking, and it spoke not only of rollback in the periphery, not only of rollback as understood in the Dulles years, meaning Eastern Europe, but Reagan essentially was saying that the rollback would go all the way to Moscow and it would end in Moscow itself.
It was a sophisticated argument, and many people failed to expand their minds beyond the simple, more familiar debate about nuclear weaponry. On the streets, the cry for a nuclear freeze was growing louder as the president’s position remained firm. Only days after Reagan’s Westminster speech, one million people gathered in Central Park in New York City in an antinuclear rally (the largest protest in US history), and similar demonstrations spread across Europe. They were opposed to Reagan’s program of strategic nuclear arms buildup. The movement leaders were arguing persuasively that the world already had so many nuclear weapons that it would be immoral to deploy more.
Reagan was not opposed to a nuclear freeze. Like his predecessors, he believed that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” But as long as the United States remained in an inferior position in the arms race, he thought it would be madness to withdraw further.
Then, in November, Reagan faced a shift in the tectonic plates of global diplomacy with the death of Leonid Brezhnev and the elevation of the former KGB head Yuri Andropov to Soviet premier. Brezhnev had been in power since the beginning of Reagan’s political career; he was the only Soviet leader most modern statesmen had ever known. But in spite of the excessive overtures that US presidents had made to Brezhnev (Nixon had even invited him to Camp David and given him a Cadillac as a gift), little had been accomplished.
Anatoly Dobrynin, the longtime Soviet ambassador, informed National Security Advisor Bill Clark that they expected the president to attend Brezhnev’s funeral in Moscow. But Reagan balked. “Bill, I never met the man. It would be hypocritical to fly to Moscow for his funeral, never having been there before.”
Clark explained that Shultz, Weinberger, and Kirkpatrick all thought he should go, but Reagan held firm. “No, I’ve thought about it. When I meet my first Soviet leader, I want it to be for something other than death. We’ll send George.”
However, Reagan arranged to visit the Soviet Embassy in Washington and sign the condolence book. After signing, he leaned over to whisper to Clark and Nancy, “Do you think these people in here would mind if we just said a little prayer for the man?” He smiled when he said it, but he wasn’t joking, and he did say a prayer.
There was a great deal of discussion about whether Reagan should immediately set up a summit meeting with Andropov. His instinct was to wait, especially after he received a very convincing letter from Richard Nixon to that point. “I strongly feel that you should avoid a quickie get-acquainted meeting,” Nixon wrote. “The first time the two of you meet will be the major news event of your first term, dwarfing everything else that has happened before or since.” Nixon went on to caution Reagan that such feel-good meetings could reassure people and create briefly positive headlines, but without substantive results, the positive feelings would not last—“Where a summit produces spirit, not substance, the spirit evaporates very fast.”
Reagan appreciated Nixon’s advice and was intent on avoiding the appearance of anything short of a strong position. The summit could wait a year or so. He was certain that the Soviet Union was directly involved in efforts to undermine his goals by cynically encouraging the nuclear freeze movement and even infiltrating peace groups in the United States and Europe. A classified congressional hearing found no direct evidence of this from the FBI or CIA, but Reagan was unconvinced. In a November 1982 press conference, which he opened by speaking of the death of Brezhnev, he accused the Soviet Union of trying to manipulate the American peace movement for its own purposes. “There was no question but that the Soviet Union saw an advantage in a peace movement built around the idea of a nuclear freeze, since they are out ahead,” he said. “And I want to emphasize again that the overwhelming majority of the people involved in that, I am sure, are sincere and well intentioned and, as a matter of fact, are saying the same thing I’m saying. And that is, we must have a reduction of those nuclear weapons, and that’s what we’re trying to negotiate now in Geneva. But to put the freeze first and then believe that we have not weakened our [case] for getting a reduction, when the other side is so far ahead, doesn’t make sense.”
He could read the skepticism in reporters’ eyes. “The d—n media has propagandized our defense plans more than the Russians have,” he wrote in his diary.
THE STEADY CADENCE OF thousands of nuclear freeze supporters rallying at the Capitol and a chill rain were the backdrop of the morning as Ronald Reagan prepared to leave the White House for a trip to Orlando, Florida, on March 8, 1983.
It would be only a one-day trip, but it was the kind of respite presidents treasure: a quick visit with foreign exchange students at Epcot Center followed by a speech to an adoring “base” audience, in this case a gathering of the National Association of Evangelicals.
It wasn’t supposed to be a major speech; Reagan’s staff viewed it as strictly B-list, not A-list. In the third year of his administration, it was just one of many domestic outings, only to be noted in passing. Robert P. Dugan, Jr., the director of the National Association of Evangelicals, who sent the request to Reagan, was thrilled when Reagan accepted, expecting the president to please the crowd with a moral boilerplate, hitting all the favorite themes of evangelicals. But members of the association also hoped that Reagan would address a topic very much on his mind: the fight against communism. Some of the more pacifist members of the NAE had recently been wandering outside the fold, joining the nuclear freeze movement, and this had raised some concerns among the conservative members. Reagan could be counted on to use his seasoned mix of warmth and fire to persuade the doubters.
In preparing for the event, the White House director of speechwriting, Aram Bakshian, assigned Dolan to work on the speech. Dolan labored away at the evangelical speech, crafting it around important themes for the audience—an attack on abortion on demand, the need for prayer in schools, and the ongoing battle against modern-day secularism—rising to a crescendo to pose the question of sin and evil in the world, as characterized by the Soviet Union. Here Dolan saw a chance to repurpose some lines that had been deleted from his Westminster speech draft the previous year. Recycling was a habit of Dolan’s. As Bakshian would recall later, “Long after I left, I remember an ending which I thought was rather hokey that had been rejected several times, including by the president, in some State of the Union drafts and other items. Well, it finally showed up in a speech. I guess the lesson was, if you wait long enough you can recycle your rejects. Tony must have kept this thing in a refrigerator, in a freezer or something, for years.”
Among the lines excised as too inflammatory for the Westminster speech but repurposed by Dolan for the evangelicals: a reference to the Soviet Union as a “militaristic empire” whose ideology justified any wrongdoing; the line that “Communism is another sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages even now are being written”; and a scathing quote from C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters: “The greatest evil is not done now in those sordid ‘dens of crime’ that Dickens loved to paint. It is not even done in concentration camps and labor camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered . . . in clear, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.”
The rhetoric of good and evil, deemed too incendiary for Parliament, found its way into Dolan’s Orlando draft and included some dramatic embellishments.
When Bakshian saw the draft, his eyes lit on one phrase in particular:
“Evil Empire.” He paused and considered it, already hearing the protests of the pragmatists in his head. He thought, Now, if I flag this in any way, it’s going to get pulled. But he didn’t want it pulled because, simply, he thought it was true. So, he decided to leave it. “First of all, it is an evil empire, what the hell, and if someone up there disagrees or is nervous about it, it’s up to them to notice it.”
Communications director David Gergen wasn’t so sanguine. In Eyewitness to Power he wrote of studying the draft, which attacked the Soviets in “terms so strong it rattled the windows.” He began to slice with his editing pen, then called in Robert “Bud” McFarlane, the deputy national security advisor, to take a stab at it as well. By the time the draft got back to Dolan, it was covered with green ink, and the “Evil Empire” reference and surrounding text had been crossed out.
Dolan didn’t sit still for that. He fought back, urging them to let the president weigh in. “Just send him the draft as it is,” he insisted. “Let him decide.” Gergen was torn, feeling that the draft was strong even without the inflammatory prose. “I kept wondering: Was it okay to leave in that phrase calling the Soviets the Evil Empire? Were we going to upset U.S. diplomacy?” He finally relented.
Just returned from a five-day trip to California during which he had met with Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, Reagan received the draft on March 5 with most of the disputed text intact. Over the next couple of days he did his usual editing, crossing out some passages and adding several paragraphs of his own.
Reagan tinkered, the pragmatists worried, and Dolan waited nervously for the president’s verdict. When Reagan’s version arrived, Dolan was elated to find the rescued gems of his recycling bin restored. The Evil Empire was back. The Soviet Union as “the focus of evil” was back. C. S. Lewis’s stirring challenge was back.
No one protested. “Once he [the president] saw it and signed off on it, it proved impossible to back up on,” Bakshian said. “The media wasn’t looking for anything though, because as far as they were concerned, ‘Oh, this is one of these dumb right-wing things and who cares about preachers.’ ”
But Reagan knew exactly what he was doing—sending a message to Andropov: I know what you are, and I’m going to make sure the American people know it, too. The handwringers at the White House who were so afraid of upsetting the delicate diplomatic balance with strong words would have to step aside on this one. There are times, he believed, when the truth has to be starkly stated. Later, some of those who had feared that the speech was too confrontational would admit that Dolan had been right to lobby for it and Reagan had been right to give it. As Gergen wrote, “I hate to admit it, but it’s true: history has shown that Tony Dolan was right and I was wrong. That phrase, the Evil Empire, allowed Reagan to speak truth to totalitarianism.” But in the moment, that outcome was far from clear. It was the president’s call, and he didn’t hesitate.
A crowd of 1,200 evangelicals welcomed Reagan enthusiastically when he stepped up to the podium in the Citrus Crown Ballroom at the Sheraton Twin Towers Hotel in Orlando at 3:00 P.M. on March 8. Flanked by the beaming leadership and standing in front of a royal-blue backdrop, he began to speak in a conversational tone about prayer.
“The other day in the East Room of the White House at a meeting there, someone asked me whether I was aware of all the people out there who were praying for the President,” he told the crowd. “And I had to say, ‘Yes, I am. I’ve felt it. I believe in intercessionary prayer.’ But I couldn’t help but say to that questioner after he’d asked the question that . . . if sometimes when he was praying he got a busy signal, it was just me in there ahead of him.”
There were laughs and some cheers. He went on through the script and finally came to the centerpiece. He told the crowd that some years earlier he’d heard a young father, who happened to be very prominent in the entertainment world, tell a large gathering, “I would rather see my little girls die now, still believing in God, than have them grow up under communism and one day die no longer believing in God.” He recalled that the thousands of young people in the audience “came to their feet with shouts of joy.”
He went on:
Yes, let us pray for the salvation of all of those who live in that totalitarian darkness—pray they will discover the joy of knowing God. But until they do, let us be aware that while they preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the Earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world. . . .
So, in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride—the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.
The audience interrupted Reagan thirty-two times with applause and calls of “Amen.” Although not everyone present supported Reagan’s nuclear policy, they cheered his moral clarity. Meanwhile, outside the hotel, a group of about 150 protesters chanted, “Hey, hey, Uncle Ron, we don’t want your neutron bomb” and “Ronald Reagan, he’s no good. Send him back to Hollywood.”
What Bakshian called a “stealth” speech shot out into the atmosphere like a flare. Reagan’s fighting words thrilled some and shocked others. Nancy Reagan, who frequently urged her husband to tone down the rhetoric so that people would stop calling him a warmonger, didn’t think it was particularly helpful to say that the Soviet Union was an Evil Empire. In the New York Times, Anthony Lewis judged the speech “dangerous,” and worried about a Soviet response. There was so much fear of upsetting diplomatic efforts that we had forgotten how to define the terms, or so Reagan thought.
Caspar Weinberger recalled one of the critics saying to Reagan “ ‘You’ve destroyed twenty years of patient diplomatic effort.’ And he said, ‘But what did patient diplomatic effort for twenty years get us? It got us an expanding Soviet Union and a continual expansion of their ability to enslave peoples and deny freedom. And it left us so vulnerable we couldn’t do anything when Afghanistan was invaded. That’s not much of an accomplishment.’ ”
Weinberger, who was a Soviet hard-liner in Reagan’s mold, agreed that Reagan’s policy signaled a dramatic change from “a passive containment, get-along, two-systems-that-can-work-together and all that, to the determination that you couldn’t work with them. They were not just two systems. They were diametrically and antithetically opposed to each other in every way.”
There was also the symbolism of choosing a religious venue and including remarks about faith and prayer in the speech. In the Wall Street Journal, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., no fan of Reagan, complained that the speech “marks a revival of the Cold War as a holy war. . . . This conception of the Cold War, unless the president is kidding, raises problems.” Kidding? A strange suggestion. Reagan could not have been more clear.
Reagan was a man of faith who did not hesitate to talk about God’s role in the world and the nation or the power of prayer. Even though he rarely attended church as president, not wanting to disrupt the services, he was very religious and prayerful. One of his favorite quotes about prayer and the presidency was purported to have been said by Abraham Lincoln: “I’m driven to my knees today in the overwhelming conviction that I don’t have any place else to go.”
The religious tone of his Orlando speech made many people uneasy. But others were more supportive. The Richmond Times-Dispatch called the speech “the unadorned truth,” and the Washington Times approved of the president’s fiery rhetoric. In a letter to William Willoughby of the Washington Times, thanking him for his positive article, Reagan expressed frustration that some people didn’t think it was proper or acceptable for the president to talk about faith.
Dear Mr. Willoughby,
I want you to know how deeply I appreciate your article about my recent sp
eech in Orlando. You do put things in perspective, and that is reassuring. I get the idea from reading some of the other comments that there are a lot of people in the media who are very “broad-minded” except when it comes to tolerating people with religious convictions.
I wonder what Teddy Roosevelt would think if he could survey the current scene. He called the Presidency a “bully pulpit,” but nowadays if one uses words like God and Prayer from the “pulpit” the alarm bells go off.
Reagan had a firm belief that the existential difference between the United States and the Soviet Union went well beyond political philosophy to the very ground of their moral being. He often wondered how a nation could be great or a social system could endure without faith in God and respect for religious freedom. He’d return to that theme again and again.
The Orlando speech was only the first act of a larger drama. Weeks later, in a televised speech to the nation, Reagan introduced the Strategic Defense Initiative, an antimissile defense system designed to neutralize an attack by strategic nuclear weapons. It was to be a defensive, not an offensive, system. He wanted to underscore the fact that he was focused on peace, not angling for war.
Even Reagan’s advisors were stunned by that bold new notion. “He didn’t share that with anybody before that,” Adelman said. “I know that Shultz was kind of blindsided by it. . . . Weinberger . . . may have had two days’ notice. But it was stunning, stunning.” Adelman’s own reaction was “Oh, my God, this is really something new and terrific. It’s going to be a whole new ball game. I didn’t realize the extent of how new it was going to be. I didn’t realize that the Soviets were going to go ape shit about it. I didn’t realize how big a deal it was.”
In truth, Reagan had been thinking about it for years. As he told Edward Rowny, an arms control expert, in 1979, the idea that “we’ve got a pistol at the Soviets’ head, and they’ve got a pistol at our head”—in other words, mutual assured destruction, was, to use the apt acronym, MAD. “Why don’t we put on a helmet and protect ourselves?” he asked. Rowny warned him that the science was a long way away. But Reagan wasn’t deterred. Strategic defense, he felt, was just common sense.
