In the foreign policy section, Reagan wrote in and then scratched out a line about continuing to pray that the Communists would one day learn “the joy there is in knowing & serving God Him.” The strong anti-Communist language remained untouched.
The speech, delivered on March 8, 1983, drew numerous cheering interruptions. And it quickly garnered national attention, with The New York Times giving it front-page coverage under the headline, “Reagan Denounces Ideology of Soviet as ‘Focus of Evil.’” This was not mere good luck: Dolan had called Times reporter Francis X. Clines the previous evening, tipping him off as to what was coming and giving him a sense of the key points. Dolan knew that the Times set the news agenda, so that the speech and its assertions of an “evil empire” would get widespread discussion.
It drew swift and broad denunciations. “What is the world to think when the greatest of powers is led by a man who applies to the most difficult human problem a simplistic theology—one in fact rejected by most theologians?” asked the liberal New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis. “The president has every right to oppose a nuclear freeze, but he has no right to stigmatize those who disagree with his brand of ‘civil religion,’” Rabbi Walter S. Wurzburger told The Washington Post. Rick Hertzberg, now writing for The New Republic, said the speech was “not presidential, it’s not something a president should say…. If the Russians are infinitely evil and we are infinitely good, then the logical first step is a nuclear first strike. Words like that frighten the American public and antagonize the Soviets. What good is that?”
Gergen, who had questioned the speech, had to defend it in public. “The President knows what he is doing with his speeches,” he told The Washington Post. “He knew when he gave the speech it would draw fire from the left and some sophisticated observers. The president feels it’s very important from time to time for him to talk in terms of fundamentals and base, core beliefs so that everyone can understand reality as it is seen by the White House.”
“I hate to admit it, but it’s true: history has shown that Tony Dolan was right and I was wrong,” Gergen later wrote. “That phrase, the Evil Empire, allowed Reagan to speak truth to totalitarianism…. In retrospect, I’m glad Tony won. The conservatives knew their boss and served him well.”
The president’s next national address was scheduled for March 23, when he would pitch his national defense program and try to shoot down budgetary assaults on it as the federal deficit rocketed out of sight. But he had a surprise ending for the speech that only a few of his closest aides knew about.
Reagan had had a long lunch with the Joint Chiefs of Staff on February 11, their regular quarterly meeting to report to the commander in chief. “Out of it came a super idea,” Reagan wrote in his diary that night. “So far the only policy worldwide on nuclear weapons is to have a deterrent. What if we tell the world we want to protect our people, not avenge them; that we’re going to embark on a program of research to come up with a defensive weapon that could make nuclear weapons obsolete? I would call upon the scientific community to volunteer in bringing such a thing about.” It was the Strategic Defense Initiative, also called SDI, or, as it would come to be popularly called, “Star Wars,” after the 1977 science fiction film.*
Reagan had long dreamed of a world no longer threatened by the “hail of fiery atoms” he had mentioned at Westminster. Some friends dated the wish to a role he had played—that of Brass Bancroft—in the 1940 science fiction film Murder in the Air, which had featured a device that could shoot rockets and airplanes out of the sky. More recent, McFarlane, the deputy national security adviser, had conceived of the idea of a national missile defense shield as a useful bargaining chip against the Soviets: handled properly, the United States could trade the mere notion of such a program for actual arms concessions from the Soviets. He called the idea “The Sting.” McFarlane had arranged for the Chief of Naval Operations to broach the subject of missile defense at the Joint Chiefs’ February luncheon with the president, and Reagan had run with it, taking an unusually proactive approach to the issue. He wanted to announce the program as soon as possible. When national security adviser William Clark told him that the White House had arranged for television time on March 23, Reagan replied: “Let’s do it.”
On March 19, McFarlane drafted “MX Plus,” the surprise ending to the speech.* Secretary of State George Shultz only found out about the plan on the morning of March 21, and thought it “lunacy.” Vice President Bush found out when his chief of staff, Admiral Daniel Murphy, burst into his office and said, “We’ve got to take this out! If we go off half-cocked on this idea, we’re going to bring on the biggest arms race that the world has ever seen!” Bush thought Murphy was correct, but did not do anything. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger was at a NATO conference in Portugal when he found out about the plan, and tried to get the address delayed for twenty-four hours so that he could brief the European allies, but was told no on the grounds that television network time had already been scheduled.
Reagan edited the main body of the speech on March 22. “Much of it was to change bureaucratic into people talk,” he wrote in his diary that night. “What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?”
Reagan told the nation:
I know this is a formidable, technical task, one that may not be accomplished before the end of this century. Yet, current technology has attained a level of sophistication where it’s reasonable for us to begin this effort. It will take years, probably decades of effort on many fronts. There will be failures and setbacks, just as there will be successes and breakthroughs. And as we proceed, we must remain constant in preserving the nuclear deterrent and maintaining a solid capability for flexible response. But isn’t it worth every investment necessary to free the world from the threat of nuclear war? We know it is.
“I guess it was O.K.,” Reagan wrote in his diary after the speech. He had hosted for dinner a group that included the Joint Chiefs, several former secretaries of state, and distinguished nuclear scientists. “They all praised to the sky & seemed to think it would be a source of debate for some time to come. I did the bulk of the speech on why our arms build up was necessary & then finished with a call to the Science community to join me in research starting now to develop a defensive weapon that would render nuclear missiles obsolete. I made no optimistic forecasts—said it might take 20 yrs. or more but we had to do it. I felt good.”
Mari Maseng was up most of the night of August 2, 1983, writing. That afternoon, a group from the Annual Convention of the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs had been turned away from a tour of the White House because of a scheduling mix-up. It was the kind of publicity that the Reagan administration—which had a reputation for being insensitive toward women—did not need. An incensed Reagan arranged to appear before the convention on August 3 to apologize.
“The Reagan White House was a little sexist,” Maseng said later. “It was a lot sexist. It was back in the eighties, times were different…. There weren’t any women there to speak of.” It got better as the administration went on, she recalled, but at the start, the director of the Office of Public Liaison was the “woman’s slot.” Elizabeth Dole was the first to fill that position, “and she did not have a necessarily happy time with the West Wing boys,” Maseng said. She later filled the public liaison slot herself and recalled her own problems. “Just getting access to meetings sometimes was hard. Sort of beating down the doors, so it was a different time and some dinosaurs from an earlier generation…still roamed the earth.”
Maseng never felt that Reagan was sexist. He would always greet her with a big smile. Once, toward the end of his tenure in the White House, when she was communications director, she and another female staffer, the director of public liaison, were ru
nning to Air Force One—running because Reagan was already aboard. As it was later told to Maseng, the president looked out the window and with obvious delight said, “There’s going to be girls on board!” But, she added, “the fact that the two of us would change the mix on the airplane tells you a lot.”
On the morning of August 3, Reagan was “just so sorry that this had happened,” Maseng recalled, “and wanted them to know that he didn’t hate women.” He ignored the speech Maseng had prepared and spoke extemporaneously. Usually when he spoke on the topic of women and his administration, the president cited statistics about his appointments, tax law changes that helped women, and discrimination lawsuits that the Justice Department was pursuing. But this time he skipped the list. “I believe that it’s not enough just to say, ‘I’m sorry,’ so I intend to do penance,” he told the crowd. “And we have been doing a number of things here with regard to the thing of great interest to you, and that is the recognition of women’s place. I want you to know I’ve always recognized it, because I happen to be one who believes if it wasn’t for women, us men would still be walking around in skin suits carrying clubs.”
The joke drew some moans from the crowd, while on stage, standing off to the side, Maseng reminded herself not to change her expression or otherwise react. Reagan was a master of delivering a text that he had absorbed, but speaking off the cuff could be problematic.
The national president of the association told reporters that she thought Reagan’s quip was “very degrading…inappropriate, and I was offended.” In his diary that night, Reagan noted that he thought the businesswomen were “wonderful. I was warmly received & left to quite an ovation…. The TV evenings news played up the episode of myapology but refused to show the applause I received & played it as a great embarrassment for me.” The next day he added, “The morning papers were worse than the TV news. I reached the boiling point.” He was mollified, however, by a telegram from the woman who had introduced him, apologizing for the national president’s comments.
By the end of August 1983, Aram Bakshian was leaving. He did not want to be on the staff through the grind of a reelection campaign, so when he was offered a regular newspaper column he took the job, leaving at the start of September. It was a time of turnover for speechwriting: Maseng left around the same time to work for Elizabeth Dole at the Department of Transportation, while Parvin would leave at the end of November to become executive assistant for the new U.S. ambassador to Great Britain. Gergen would leave at the end of the year as well, his duties supervising the speechwriters taken up by Richard Darman, another pragmatist.
A successor to Bakshian was chosen quickly: Ben Elliott, the committed supply-sider and former CBS newsman, took the director spot, with Dolan remaining the chief writer. Elliott was no less of a true believer than Dolan, and probably more of one than Bakshian, but he understood the necessity for compromise in getting a speech completed. “There were many tussles on the margin, and sometimes we went to the mat, but I’m not as willing to condemn them as some. I think we worked well together,” Elliott said later. “We were more fervent than they, but we believed that we managed to provide the president a consistent and compelling product.”
“When Aram Bakshian left, we stopped having the Friday meetings of the speechwriters with the President,” Gergen wrote in an October 18 memo to Mike Deaver and Jim Baker. “Now that Ben Elliott has taken charge of that shop, I would like to request that we reinstitute them on as many Fridays as possible. They made a good deal of difference in the quality of the writing (not to mention the morale of the shop) and the President seemed to enjoy them.”
The regular meetings would not return, though the speechwriters were not shut out entirely during the first term: They saw the president but not as much as they would like—they often complained that their lack of access made their jobs harder, partly because seeing him helped them understand his thinking and also get the sound of his voice.* Access was also important for more ephemeral reasons. “Everyone in the White House counts who gets to go through the door, and the fact that we got to go through the door made us at least on the sheet of who was a player,” Maseng recalled. “It was important for that and it was important for our psyche because we got a lot of charge out of being with the president and felt the personal bond. I’m not sure the president got a lot out of those meetings.”
Despite being increasingly remote from the president, the speech-writers felt that they could still effectively capture his speaking style. Over his decades in the public eye, Reagan had left a long trail of speeches, remarks, and articles, which the writers plundered. They were also aided by a backchannel they had to Anne Higgins, who handled Reagan’s personal correspondence. She would send over copies of letters that he wrote to people around the country explaining how he felt about different issues. The speechwriters could see the language and arguments he used.
Peggy Noonan was at work at CBS Radio in early 1984 when she picked up the pink message slip that said a Ben Elliott had called from the White House. He probably runs speechwriting, Noonan thought, and he’s probably going to offer me a job; my life is about to change. A partisan stuck in a journalist’s job, Noonan admired Reagan and yearned to write for him, but doubted her chances of making it happen. She had no political connections and few friends who shared her ideology. She had told everyone who might help that she wanted to write for Reagan, and then one day she got the pink message slip. She would keep it for years as a memento.
“I guess everyone gets a president, one president in their adult life who’s the one who moved them,” she told Elliott in her job interview. “For me, it’s Reagan.” Her next interview was with Darman. “I’m sure you’ve heard all about this White House,” he told her. “That there’s a great deal of infighting, and we’re split into separate warring groups which leak unpleasant things about each other to the amusement and delight of the media, which are not slow in passing it on.” She nodded. It was terrible that the media traded in such scurrilous rumors. “It’s all true of course,” he said.
Bush speechwriter William Muir described Noonan as “tall and blonde, a reincarnated Carole Lombard, with a tart wit that could protect her even in the most captious of literary circles.” A Brooklyn native, she had grown up on Long Island and in New Jersey and lived in New York before joining the administration. She stood out: She dressed with more flair than the others and, recalled Maseng, whom Noonan replaced, she had “a personality that’s larger than life sometimes.”
On February 23, Elliott sent Reagan a memo letting him know that he was interviewing Noonan for a speechwriting job. “The rub is that she is Dan Rather’s radio writer,” Elliott explained. “I’ve read through his scripts and can assure you that the radio Dan Rather bears little resemblance to his left-wing TV twin. I’ve also talked to Peggy twice for a total of 4 hours and am convinced she yearns deeply to defect, and to write for you with all the dedication and Irish spirit she can muster.” The president sent the memo back with the notation: “OK. RR” Noonan got the formal offer that month while covering the Democratic presidential primary in Manchester, New Hampshire.
Nevertheless, there were some lingering questions among the White House staff about the hire. “I wasn’t sure why you requested Peggy Noonan’s resume,” Elliott wrote to Michael Deaver on March 16, “but I want you to know she is the most distinguished writer among a very large number of candidates…. Peggy is well-known—and sometimes ridiculed—for being the in-house conservative at CBS.” Deaver had a good relationship with Nancy Reagan, often serving as the staff conduit to her, and she had opposed Noonan’s hiring.
Noonan started at the White House on April 2. She would roll into work around 9:30 or 9:45 am—wildly tardy by the standards of the workaholic White House, but she was sleepy and muddle-headed at eight in the morning, she figured, so why get in then? She worked better at night and stayed late anyway. Writing made her nervous. She would sometimes need to down a couple of cups of coffee and get
a pack of smokes and force herself to plunge in. Or she would pretend that she was not writing a speech at all, but a letter to someone. “Dear Peggy…” she would write.
Reagan left Washington on June 1, 1984, for a ten-day European trip that included a visit to Ireland, the commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of D-Day in Normandy, and an economic summit in London. After a Deaver-produced pilgrimage to Ballyporeen in County Tipperary, the small town from which Reagan’s great-grandfather had emigrated, the president addressed Ireland’s national legislature. Dolan had drafted the speech, with the usual resistance from senior staff: It started with a conciliatory review of various U.S. peace initiatives during Reagan’s term and ended on a tough note about the march of freedom around the world.
Dolan was delighted at the notion of the Soviets fulminating about the back-end tough talk while the world media focused on the peace side of it. “It was a wonderful paradox,” he said. But he was worried that once he was no longer around to protect the speech, the moderates would water down the hard-hitting section. So he booked a flight to Ireland on his own dime. He huddled with Ben Elliott and Darman in Ashford Castle, where the traveling party was staying, and made final revisions to the speech. Dolan had a White House staff pin which allowed him access to the castle without a problem. Deaver was incredulous when he saw Dolan. “After that, Deaver revoked all the staff pins,” Dolan recalled.
White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters Page 38
