“There is no reason why people in any part of the world should have to live in permanent fear of war or its specter,” Reagan said. “I believe the time has come for all nations to act in a responsible spirit that doesn’t threaten other states. I believe the time is right to move forward on arms control and the resolution of critical regional disputes at the conference table. Nothing will have a higher priority for me and for the American people over the coming months and years.”
“Today was the big day—the speech to the world at the Nat. press club,” Reagan wrote in his diary. “Funny—I was talking peace but wearing a bullet proof vest. It seems Kadaffi put a contract on me & some person named Jack was going to try for me at the speech. Security was very tight.” “West Europeans Are Enthusiastic; Soviet Accuses President of ‘Ploy,’” The New York Times reported the next day.
On November 17, the day before Reagan’s speech at the Press Club, the White House press office put out two press releases, one announcing that Bakshian had been appointed director of the speechwriting office and the other saying that Anthony Dolan had been made chief speech-writer. The latter was a title without authority, designed to mollify Dolan and his friends in the conservative movement. Bakshian assigned writers and edited speeches. Years later Dolan explained the setup at a meeting of the Judson Welliver Society of former presidential speech-writers: “In the Reagan administration we have an enlightened view,” he quipped. “When we have staff conflicts we don’t fight them out, we institutionalize them.”
In addition to Dolan, the toughest of the firebrands—and one of the biggest characters in the shop—was Dana Rohrabacher. A Californian, he had been a student volunteer on Reagan’s 1966 gubernatorial campaign and had worked as a press aide in the 1976 presidential bid. He would walk around the speechwriters’ offices in cutoff jeans and flip-flops, a suit and tie hanging on the back of his office door in case of an Oval Office summons. On one such occasion, he realized that he had not brought dress shoes into the office, and scrambled around the Executive Office Building looking for appropriate footwear. He showed up at the Oval Office, much to his colleagues’ amusement, wearing wing-tipped shoes that were several sizes too big. Another time he brought his guitar onto Air Force One—the buttoned-down senior staff took a dim view of that. He was, Dolan recalled, “very much a flower child manqué.”
Rohrabacher was a skilled and florid writer, though an inept speller. “He once merged destiny and Greek cheese when he referred to something being a ‘feta accompli,’ by which he meant fait accompli,” Bakshian recounted. “There were other instances—oh, the Hollywood Bowel, which must have been part of the UCLA medical school.”
Rohrabacher befriended an amazing array of anti-Communist fighters from places like Afghanistan and Nicaragua, whom he would take to the White House mess for lunch. “The amusing thing was watching these guys get cleared into the building because they’d have two knives down this sock and [bandoliers] and a gun,” said Peter Robinson, who joined the speechwriting staff later in the first term. “Then we’d go off to the White House mess and try to make polite conversation. You’d say something like, ‘How are things going?’ He’d say: ‘Very well: Last week I personally killed twelve Soviets.’ ‘Oh. And would you like the tuna salad?’”
Rohrabacher would be elected to the U.S. Congress in 1988. Another conservative on the speechwriting staff was a former television writer and producer for CBS named Bentley Elliott. “He was central casting’s idea of the typical English professor: tweed coat, thinning blond hair, debonair, equally capable of the bon mot and caustic remark, an insouciant surface that covered a pleasant vulnerability and genuine concern for his colleagues,” wrote William Muir, a speech-writer for Vice President George Bush. Elliott described himself as a “bleeding heart conservative.” Pat Buchanan, who would be White House communications director in the second term, described Elliott as a “Green Beret in the Reagan Revolution.” An ardent proponent of supply-side economics, he could translate complicated economic concepts into easily understood prose.
Mari Maseng had been a reporter at the Evening Post in Charleston, South Carolina, when, in 1978, she joined Senator Strom Thurmond’s reelection campaign as press secretary. She moved to Washington the following year, working for Senator Robert Dole’s presidential campaign, and then joined the Reagan campaign as a media strategist. Upon receiving back a particularly bland rewrite of a speech from a State Department functionary, she once said with glee: “You know what I think? I think we can do without State’s edits. I think we can stick with our draft!”
Rounding out the speechwriting team—and giving it an element of ideological balance—was Landon Parvin, who had done some volunteer speechwriting for the campaign while working in public relations. He had a background in comedy, having written for Rich Little in 1976 and 1977. He did most of the writing when Reagan had to deliver humorous remarks at events like the Gridiron Dinner. Parvin also did some writing for Nancy Reagan and developed a friendship with her. He was orderly and precise—he liked to be in to work by eight in the morning so that he could leave by five thirty and get out to a friend’s farm to go horseback riding. The word that was most frequently used to describe him was “facile.”
Like Parvin, Bakshian was not a movement conservative. He had his idiosyncrasies: while the rest of the speechwriters were learning to use word processors, Bakshian refused to give up his typewriter. He “spiced his words with wit, virtually everything he ate with Tabasco sauce, and wrote à la Mozart, fluidly and effortlessly, sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph with nary a pause of hesitation,” Elliot recalled. Perhaps most important, Bakshian had good relations with the senior staff, and was able to act as an intermediary between them and the Reaganites on the speechwriting staff.
And Bakshian was favorably impressed with Reagan. “That was a pleasant discovery in comparison to the two other presidents I worked with—Nixon and Ford—in a speechwriting capacity: that he’s quite a craftsman in this field and heavily involved in the process, especially the important speeches,” he said.
A dense blizzard, the worst in two years, engulfed Washington on January 13, 1982, leaving up to six inches of snow on the city. In his office in the Old Executive Office Building, Aram Bakshian was contemplating Dolan’s draft of the State of the Union address, which Reagan was scheduled to give in thirteen days, when he saw a disaster unfolding on television. An Air Florida 737 taking off from National Airport failed to get enough altitude because of the icy conditions and clipped the 14th Street Bridge, causing a thirty-five-foot gash in the railing, before slamming onto the ice-covered Potomac and slowly sinking.
Reaction was swift, but hampered by the weather. As Bakshian watched, a bystander dove into the frosty river, fishing out a woman who had lost her grip on a rescue rope. His name was Lenny Skutnik, and his moment of heroism gave Bakshian an idea. “It just made sense,” he recalled. “It so fitted what Reagan believed and what was in character for him to say. Plus, he had been a life guard. He would clearly understand and appreciate it, and it would come out well.” “It” was a peroration for the address that Reagan employed to great effect.
“We don’t have to turn to our history books for heroes. They’re all around us,” Reagan said on January 26, gesturing to Skutnik, who was sitting with Nancy Reagan in the House spectator’s gallery. “Just two weeks ago, in the midst of a terrible tragedy on the Potomac, we saw again the spirit of American heroism at its finest—the heroism of dedicated rescue workers saving crash victims from icy waters. And we saw the heroism of one of our young government employees, Lenny Skutnik, who, when he saw a woman lose her grip on the helicopter line, dived into the water and dragged her to safety.”
Reagan and Bakshian had created a tradition: the guests in the first lady’s box during the State of the Union. Years later, someone asked Bakshian what innovations as a White House speechwriter he was most and least proud of. “The best thing I think was Lenny Skutnik, in and of its
elf,” Bakshian said. “The worst thing was that gimmick—which wasn’t a gimmick doing it once…. [But it] got so milked to death and then diluted too.”
Reagan was pleased with the speech. “I wonder if I’ll ever get used to addressing the joint sessions of Cong?” he wrote in his diary before heading over to the Capitol. “I’ve made a mil. speeches in every kind of place to every kind of audience. Somehow there’s a thing about entering that chamber—goose bumps & a quiver.” Afterward he added: “But it turned out fine—I was well received & I think the speech was a 4 base hit.”
In early June, Reagan would become the first U.S. president to address a joint session of the British Parliament. By mid-May, National Security Council staffers had written a draft that Bakshian “tried to return…to the mother tongue,” as he told Reagan in a May 14 memo. He succeeded in translating the bureaucratese into English, but not into the Reagan idiom—the president was unhappy with the speech.
Dolan’s ongoing feuds with the pragmatists had left him off the speechwriting schedule for several months, so he had used the spare time to work up his own version of the address. He wrote a twenty-three-page draft that had a rich sense of history and philosophy and a heavier emphasis on themes of individual liberty versus statism and, ultimately, good versus evil than were in the other drafts. Historians looking back from the future would find “in the councils of those who preached the supremacy of the state, who declared its omnipotence over individual man, who predicted its eventual domination of all peoples of the earth, surely historians will see there…the focus of evil,” he wrote. (Reagan edited this down to read that historians would “find in the councils of those who preached the supremacy of the state the focus of evil.”) Dolan’s draft also included a reference to the Soviet Union as “a militaristic empire whose ideology justifies any wrongdoing or use of violence if done in the name of the state” and “a sad, bizarre, dreadfully evil episode in history, but an episode that is dying.”
William Clark, the national security adviser, mentioned Dolan’s draft to Reagan, who asked for it. This was what the president had been looking for. “The reason Reagan had warmed to my draft was it was all the stuff he’d been saying for thirty years,” Dolan recollected. He viewed the job of speechwriters as plagiarizing the president’s old speeches and giving them back to him.
Reagan did his usual editing job: tightening, crossing out whole paragraphs, inserting pages in his own hand. He eliminated the references to the Soviet Union as a militaristic empire and an evil episode in history. His moderate advisers toned down some of the speech’s other hot rhetoric. Reagan had retained the assertion that in the supremacy of the state lay the “focus of evil” in the world—a paraphrase of Whittaker Chambers in Witness that “I see in communism the focus of concentrated evil of our time”—but it was expunged before the president addressed the gathered legislators at Westminster.
The NSC staffers were appalled by the tone of his draft. They pleaded with Dolan to change the speech: Do what we want, one NSC staffer told him, and then we’ll really leave the Soviets on the “ash heap of history.” Oh, replied Dolan, what an interesting phrase. Can you say that again? He inserted into the next draft of the speech a line about democracy leaving Marxism-Leninism “on the ash heap of history.” He described it as an NSC contribution.
Others contributed as well. The conservative columnist George Will, who years later would marry speechwriter Mari Maseng, provided the opening about Westminster being one of “democracy’s shrines,” as well as a line that “regimes planted by bayonets do not take root.”
Reagan’s speech marked a rhetorical and philosophical high point for the president. He asked whether civilization must “perish in a hail of fiery atoms? Must freedom wither in a quiet, deadening accommodation with totalitarian evil?” Citing former Prime Minister Winston Churchill, he said war was not inevitable. “In an ironic sense, Karl Marx was right,” Reagan said. “We are witnessing today a great revolutionary crisis, a crisis where the demands of the economic system are conflicting directly with those of the political order. But the crisis is happening not in the free, non-Marxist West, but in the home of Marxist-Leninism, the Soviet Union. It is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of history by denying human freedom and human dignity to its citizens.”
His Westminster speech and its analysis of the Communist system were prescient. He said that the Eastern bloc was in “decay,” as evidenced not only by the abject economic failure of the Soviet Union but by the resistance of Poland’s Solidarity labor movement and that country’s “being magnificently unreconciled to oppression.” He called upon other democratic nations to join the United States in fostering “the infrastructure of democracy, the system of free press, unions, political parties, universities, which allow a people to choose their own way to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means.”
He described his proposal as “a plan and a hope for the long term—the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.”
“Soviet Says Crusade by Reagan May Risk Global Catastrophe,” The New York Times reported in a “news analysis.” “It was a bad week for relations between Moscow and Washington,” Time added. Reading the “indignant cables from Moscow” a few days after the speech, Dolan recalled, “I can assure you we were giggling like schoolboys.”
By March 1983, Reagan and his aides were increasingly concerned that the nuclear freeze movement—which advocated halting production of nuclear weapons and freezing stockpiles at their current levels—was gaining support among religious activists. Various protestant denominations and organizations, including the National Council of Churches, had endorsed it, while the Synagogue Council of America had declared the United States “morally bound” to reduce the danger of nuclear war. The National Conference of Catholic Bishops was scheduled to vote in May on a pastoral letter that was expected to endorse a nuclear freeze.
Reagan’s scheduled speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, meeting in Orlando, Florida, seemed a logical place to tackle the issue. It was a routine speech venue—“on the B-list,” Bakshian recalled—that did not merit nationally televised coverage, but it would reach the targeted audience.
Dolan and Rohrabacher went to a steakhouse near the White House with officials of the religious group. “The freezeniks” were making inroads into the evangelical heartland, Richard Cizik, one of the officials, told the speechwriters.
It was the kind of speech that Tony Dolan relished: an opportunity to discuss issues in the sort of black and white moral language that Reagan had long employed and that drove the moderates crazy. Dolan’s belief in the importance of speaking the truth about wickedness had been reinforced by his days reporting on the mafia in Connecticut. “The human conscience is such that evil acts bother people, and I’ve found that if you let the bad guys talk, they’ll get preoccupied with trying to rebut [accusations of wrongdoing], and in the end they concede it,” he said. “That’s why they have coined phrases like Wars of National Liberation and the People’s Republics.”
Dolan borrowed from the early drafts of the Westminster speech. Back came the Soviet Union as the “focus of evil in the modern world”; back came a lengthy quotation from C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters that the greatest evil in the world is done by cold, quiet bureaucrats who never have to raise their voices; back came the reference to communism as “sad” and “bizarre,” a “chapter in human history whose last pages even now are being written”; and, most important, back came the “empire” concept, couched this time in terms that were more arch: the nuclear freeze movement, the speech said, incorrectly labeled both sides in the Cold War equally at fault, ignoring “the fact of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire.”
The Orlando speech was not considered a foreign policy speech, however, and mostly fo
cused on domestic issues: the anti-Soviet language came in the final third, after sections on prayer in school, abortion, and family values. Dolan’s draft included several barbs at liberals and secular humanists whose alleged depredations threatened the country.
When Bakshian read the speech, he understood the reaction it was likely to elicit: “the State Department would have conniption fits,” he said. “So I made a point of not flagging it.” He called Sven Kraemer, a National Security Council staffer who was frequently responsible for clearing speech drafts. Obviously there are going to be some people who don’t like this, Bakshian said, but we both know that what it says is true and it’s not going to lead to World War III, so I don’t see any reason to start screaming from the rooftops about it. If anyone wants to bitch about it, he added, let them find it—let’s let it through to the president. He called it the “stealth speech.” Because it was a routine domestic policy speech and not flagged by the NSC, the text was not widely circulated or noticed in the Defense and State departments.
One senior staffer who did notice it was David Gergen, who worried that it was too strident. It was true that this was Reaganesque rhetoric, but in the practical world the president was also trying to negotiate nuclear arms reductions with the Soviets, and such harsh language could spoil the efforts. He pulled Robert “Bud” McFarlane, the deputy national security adviser, out of a meeting. “Bud, we’ve got to go over this,” he said. The speech kept coming back to Dolan, he recalled, with the entire “evil empire” section crossed out in green ink, “on orders of the West Wing,” where the pragmatists were housed.
The speech, tough language mostly intact, eventually got through to Reagan. The pragmatists figured that it was a minor speech, not likely to garner much attention, so there would be little harm in rallying the faithful. The president inserted two pages of handwritten material in the domestic section, eliminated a reference to “abortion on demand” as “a great moral evil,” and added a statement that “Unless & until it can be proven that the unborn child is not a living entity, then it’s [sic] right to life, liberty & the pursuit of happiness must be protected.” He also toned down some of the gibes at the “liberal secularists” and elite “glitter set.” He eliminated a section decrying the mafia, writing a note to Dolan on the first page saying that if the speech came in too short, they could put it back in. (They did not.)
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