THATCHER SPENT THAT SPRING OF 1983 drawing daggers on the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Reagan was similarly focused like a laser on the United States’s potent nuclear freeze movement. It had to be stopped. It could jeopardize Europe’s support for the Pershing and GLCM deployments. Its momentum might even cost him his re-election.1
Richard Cizik watched it all with dismay. He was a young associate at the National Association of Evangelicals, the largest group of unaligned churches in the United States, but still a small fish in the sea of hardline Christian political groups. A graduate of Denver Seminary, he had voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976 and fell behind Reagan in 1980 after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and Cizik found Carter’s response to be lacking. He thought Soviet expansionism needed a response, a moral response. He had watched the massive peace marches and worried that his fellow Christians had lost their compass. But he did not think the president was making the right case. “There was too much of a vacuum,” he said. He drafted a letter to the White House inviting Reagan to speak at the NAE’s next convention, the first week of March. It went out under the name of Cizik’s boss, Robert P. Dugan.
A month later, he received a call from Anthony Dolan, a Reagan speechwriter and his team’s in-house conservative whisperer. Cizik flew to Washington and met with Dolan over coffee. Cizik hoped the speech would address the fundamental differences between the two political systems in a way that helped opponents of a nuclear freeze keep the faith. The speech should frame the debate as a response to evil, Cizik told Dolan.
Politically, the White House thought the timing was right. When Reagan had addressed Parliament in June 1982, the State Department had cut out words calling the Soviets evil and stripped out sections equating the freeze movement with appeasement. What was left of that speech was well-received but laundered too much, and bleached, and failed to attract much attention domestically. Dolan flipped back through his files and found those phrases.2 Many went in word for word to the NAE address. Communism “is another sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages even now are being written.” Appeasement—a word that was especially sensitive in Britain—was easier on the ears at the NAE convention in Orlando.
Dolan and Cizik would joke that the drafting of the speech went unnoticed by the White House. “The State Department ignored it. They assumed it was just a speech to a bunch of Christians,” Cizik said. Dolan, who was Catholic, joked that as “house conservative,” he was given the speech, like a dog given some red meat to chew on.
The first draft that Reagan saw had the word evil in it seven times.3 Dolan’s boss, Aram Bakshian Jr., loved it. He knew it would make news. One line jumped out:
“So, in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals I urge you to beware the temptation of pride—the temptation to blithely declare 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.”
At once, Reagan was beating back on moral equivalence, calling Communism what it was, signaling to Christians that they had a moral duty to work against the evil of the Soviet Union. He raised the twin specters of appeasement and weakness. Dolan had crafted a gem.
“Senior foreign policy people were not paying attention,” Bakshian said later.4 “I recall reading the speech draft before I sent it on and getting to the ‘Evil Empire’ reference and thinking, Now, if I flag this in any way, it’s going to get pulled. But 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.” As soon as Reagan saw the passage, he approved it. It proved impossible to excise after that.5 Reagan shaved the edges off of some of Dolan’s conservative dog whistles and trimmed some of the allegory. He added a passage about birth control and deleted one about organized crime.6
On March 8, Cizik wasn’t allowed in the room at the Sheraton Hotel and Conference Center in Orlando. He was too junior, even though the speech was his idea. He found a seat in the press room, next to ABC News’s Sam Donaldson. Cizik counted the applause lines—sixteen of them, “thunderous, just thunderous.” When Reagan called the Soviet Union the “focus of evil in the modern world,” he saw Donaldson’s eyebrow shoot up. “That’s not in here,” the ABC newsman said. Reagan had added the line two days before. That was Cizik’s first clue that the president had modified the speech.7 Reagan had added another line that struck Cizik. Calling the Soviets evil “does not mean we ought to isolate ourselves and refuse to seek an understanding with them. I intend to do everything I can to persuade them of our peaceful intent,” Reagan said.8
Cizik cringed when the Marine Band struck up “Onward, Christian Soldiers” as soon as the speech ended. He wondered if reporters would interpret it as a subtle call for a religious crusade, which was not at all his intention.
It was “the worst presidential speech in American history,” thundered historian Henry Steele Commager. The New York Times’ Anthony Lewis, a guardian of Washington’s liberal consensus, termed it “outrageous” and even “primitive.” The official Soviet response came through Tass. The speech suggested Reagan “can think only in terms of confrontation and bellicose, lunatic anti-Communism.”9
In unexpected quarters it was received with joy. Gary L. Mathews, a senior analyst on the State Department’s Soviet desk, had long been accustomed to presidents cowering in the face of the banal sins of the USSR: its detention of religious minorities, its harassment of dissidents, its invasion of Afghanistan. The perception that the Soviets were an evil empire was not foreign to the national security bureaucracy, and predated Reagan’s coining of the phrase. But even Zbig Brzezinski, Carter’s Polish-born Secretary of State, could not bring himself to call the Soviets evil, even as the Soviets persecuted his direct relatives. Thomas Hutson, the consul general in Moscow during Carter’s presidency, had seen “so many people adversely affected by this system and said he agreed with Reagan. Arthur Hartman, the ambassador to Moscow in 1983, accepted the premise, but “what I could not accept was that this would be the sort of language of our discourse with the Soviet Union, I just didn’t think as a practical matter that it was going to get us anywhere.” Robert E. McCarthy, the press officer at the US embassy, said of the phrase: “It was true, though, one might have picked other words. I don’t recall it as a big issue; let me put it that way.”10
Geoffrey Chapman, a political officer in Moscow, would come across Russians in the provinces who would mention the phrase. “People would ask me about this or that Reagan administration policy and challenge me to justify it. But it was not unusual to come across people who had a certain admiration for the United States. There was a dichotomy in many ordinary Soviets’ minds between the American people and the American government: an admiration of and respect for Americans, for our way of life, for our entertainment industry, for the resilience and output of our economy, but a lack of understanding of—indeed outright opposition to—what the Reagan administration was up to.”11
At dinner shortly after the speech, Nancy Reagan complained to her husband that she thought he had gone too far. “They are an evil empire,” Reagan replied. “It’s time to shut it down.”12