Evil Empire speech

• 1. Introduction

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  Ronald Reagan gave the Evil Empire speech on the 8th of March 1983. Speaking before the National Association of Evangelicals, the American president called the Soviet Union 'the focus of evil in the modern world.' The Cold War was grinding on. So was the Soviet-Afghan War. Reagan used the moment to reject a comforting idea. He would not accept that the United States and the Soviet Union shared equal blame for the nuclear arms race between them. He framed the conflict instead as a battle between good and evil. Who put that phrase in his mouth? How did evangelicals, the press, and Moscow itself respond? And did Reagan still stand behind it years later, once a different Soviet leader was in charge?

• 2. Coining The Phrase

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  On the 19th of June 1981, Singapore's prime minister Lee Kuan Yew met with Reagan. Lee described the Soviet Union as 'an empire which extended across Eurasia.' According to Lee's own memoirs, Reagan's ears pricked up at the word 'empire.' Lee wrote that Reagan told Richard Allen to use that word more often when describing the Soviet domain. The phrase that stuck, though, came from a different source: Reagan's chief speechwriter, Anthony R. Dolan. Dolan first tried 'evil empire' in a draft for Reagan's June 1982 address to the British House of Commons in London. Reviewers flagged the phrase and struck it before Reagan delivered that speech. Dolan didn't drop the idea. He worked the phrase back into his drafts for Reagan's appearance before the National Association of Evangelicals. Before it reached the president, that draft would pass through a room full of skeptical White House staffers.

• 3. The Editing Pen

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  David Gergen read an early draft of the speech and crossed out the words 'evil empire.' Other staffers did too, more than once. Dolan kept putting the phrase back in, and eventually a draft reached Reagan with 'evil empire' still there. The people who let it through had judged the National Association of Evangelicals event too minor to draw much attention. Reagan then went through the draft himself and expanded its passages on domestic issues. Dolan's version had called 'abortion on demand' a 'great moral evil'; Reagan cut that line. He added a line of his own: until it could be proven the unborn child was not a living entity, it had to be protected. In his words, its 'right to life, liberty & the pursuit of happiness must be protected.' He left 'evil empire' untouched and made no substantial change to the draft's anti-communist tone. That line was about to be spoken aloud for the first time, in front of a live audience.

• 4. Onstage In Orlando

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  The Citrus Crown Ballroom of the Sheraton Twin Towers Hotel hosted the National Association of Evangelicals' 41st annual convention, and it was there that Reagan spoke the words for the first time on record. Reagan urged the crowd to pray for the salvation of people living under what he called 'totalitarian darkness,' voicing hope they would find the joy of knowing God. He then turned to policy. Speaking about nuclear freeze proposals, he warned the audience against a 'temptation of pride': the habit of declaring both sides equally at fault. To do that, he said, meant ignoring 'the aggressive impulses of an evil empire' and reducing the arms race to 'a giant misunderstanding.' It meant walking away, he argued, from 'the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.' The audience applauded. A band played Reagan off the stage with the hymn 'Onward, Christian Soldiers.' That applause stayed inside the ballroom. Beyond it, reaction to 'evil empire' was far less friendly.

• 5. A Storm Of Criticism

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  The Christian Science Monitor warned that Reagan's rhetoric would fuel the arms race and 'would some day, in logic, point toward war.' Other contemporaneous press coverage called the speech inflammatory, and commentators worried it would poison arms negotiations with the Soviet Union. Reagan didn't back down. During a 1984 presidential debate, he repeated his judgment of the Soviet Union. 'Many of the things that they have done are evil in any concept of morality that we have,' he said. He balanced that with a note of pragmatism. 'I also recognize that as the two great superpowers in the world, we have to live with each other,' he added. Moscow answered in kind. Soviet officials accused the United States of being the real imperialist superpower, one seeking to dominate the world. They cast the Soviet Union as fighting that ambition 'in the name of humanity.' The state news agency TASS was based in Moscow. It said the 'evil empire' remarks proved the Reagan administration 'can think only in terms of confrontation and bellicose, lunatic anti-communism.' Both sides had drawn their lines. Neither yet knew how differently Reagan would describe the Soviet Union just a few years later.

• 6. Another Time, Another Era

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  More than five years after he first used the phrase 'evil empire,' Reagan traveled to Moscow. It was May and June of 1988, during his second term as president. He went to see Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union's General Secretary and a reformist leader. A reporter asked Reagan directly whether he still considered the Soviet Union an evil empire. He said he did not. It was, Reagan told the reporter, 'another time, another era.' Gorbachev addressed the remark in a speech of his own, saying only that the Soviet Union 'took note of that.' The journalist Lou Cannon concluded that Gorbachev had 'listened carefully to the message of peace that Reagan had brought with him to Moscow.' Historians and rhetoric scholars would spend years afterward arguing about what the phrase had actually accomplished.

• 7. Reading The Rhetoric

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  G. Thomas Goodnight grouped the Evil Empire speech with two others: the 'Zero Option' speech and the 'Star Wars' speech. He placed all three within the rhetorical side of the Cold War. Together, he argued, they reshaped how the public understood nuclear warfare. In the Evil Empire speech specifically, Goodnight saw Reagan casting nuclear conflict as an extension of an 'age old struggle between good and evil.' By painting the Soviet Union as irrational and untrustworthy, the speech gave Reagan grounds to dismiss peace proposals he opposed. Historian John Lewis Gaddis read it differently, as the finishing move in a longer campaign. He called the speech the completion of 'a rhetorical offensive designed to expose what Reagan saw as the central error of détente.' That error, in Reagan's view, was the idea that the Soviet Union had earned 'geopolitical, ideological, economic, and moral legitimacy.' Gaddis argued the speech 'could not have been better calculated to feed the anxieties' troubling Soviet leaders at the time. Literature professor Leerom Medovoi pointed to a domestic angle. On top of taking aim at the Soviet Union, he argued, the speech turned the evangelical audience's attention toward American liberals. It framed them as enemies too, in a culture war Reagan called 'a test of moral will and faith.' That framing meant the speech was never only about Moscow. It was also asking evangelical listeners to see their own political opponents at home as part of the same fight.