Evil Empire speech

Evil Empire speech

Reagan in the Citrus Crown Ballroom
Date	March 8, 1983 (1983-03-08)
Venue	Sheraton Twin Towers Hotel
Location	Orlando, Florida, US
Participants	Ronald Reagan
The full text of the speech at Wikisource

The "Evil Empire" speech was a speech delivered by US President Ronald Reagan to the National Association of Evangelicals on March 8, 1983, at the height of the Cold War and the Soviet–Afghan War. In that speech, Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as an "evil empire" and as "the focus of evil in the modern world". Reagan explicitly rejected the notion that the United States and the Soviet Union were equally responsible for the Cold War and the ongoing nuclear arms race between the two nations; rather, he asserted that the conflict was a battle between good and evil.

Background

Reagan's chief speechwriter at the time, Anthony R. Dolan, coined the phrase "evil empire" for Reagan's use. Dolan included similar language in a draft for Reagan's June 1982 speech before the British House of Commons in London, but reviewers flagged and struck the phrasing. Dolan included the phrase "evil empire" in drafts for Reagan's speech at the National Association of Evangelicals' 41st annual convention. White House staffers who saw drafts of the speech, including David Gergen, repeatedly struck the "evil empire" portion; the speech eventually reached Reagan with the "evil empire" portion included, staffer critics concluding the event would be minor and unlikely to attract attention.

When Reagan reviewed and edited the draft himself, he extended the material on domestic matters. Dolan had included a reference to "abortion on demand" as a "great moral evil"; Reagan cut the line and added a remark asserting that "until it can be proven that the unborn child is not a living entity" its "right to life, liberty & the pursuit of happiness must be protected". Regan left the "evil empire" phrase and did not substantially alter the draft's strongly anti-communist tone.

Speech

Reagan spoke at the 41st annual convention of the National Association of Evangelicals on March 8, 1983, in the Citrus Crown Ballroom of the Sheraton Twin Towers Hotel in Orlando, Florida. The speech, marking his first recorded use of the phrase "evil empire" to refer to the Soviet Union, has become known as the "Evil Empire" speech. In that speech, Reagan said:

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 applauded Reagan's speech.

In the "Evil Empire" speech, which also dealt with domestic issues, Reagan made the case for deploying NATO nuclear-armed intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Western Europe as a response to the Soviets installing new nuclear-armed missiles in Eastern Europe. Eventually, the NATO missiles were set up and used as bargaining chips in arms talks with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who took office two years and three days after Reagan's speech, on 11 March 1985. At the Washington Summit in 1987, Reagan and Gorbachev agreed to go further than a nuclear freeze. In an Atomic Age first, they signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, agreeing to reduce nuclear arsenals. Intermediate- and shorter-range nuclear missiles were eliminated.

Historian John Lewis Gaddis called the speech the "complet[ion of] a rhetorical offensive designed to expose what Reagan saw as the central error of détente: the idea that the Soviet Union had earned geopolitical, ideological, economic, and moral legitimacy" and argued that it "could not have been better calculated to feed the anxieties" afflicting Soviet leadership at the time.

Global reaction and aftermath

During a 1984 presidential debate, Reagan reiterated the phrase by saying "I have said on a number of occasions exactly what I believe about the Soviet Union, I retract nothing that I have said, I believe that many of the things that they have done are evil in any concept of morality that we have."

In 1987, American conservative Michael Johns compiled a list of Soviet crimes, echoing Reagan by saying "what we face today in Soviet Communism is, indeed, an evil empire".

The Soviet Union, for its part, alleged that the United States was an imperialist superpower seeking to dominate the entire world, and that the Soviet Union was fighting against it "in the name of humanity". In Moscow, the Soviet state-run press agency TASS said the "evil empire" words demonstrated that the Reagan administration "can think only in terms of confrontation and bellicose, lunatic anti-communism".

During his second term in office, in May–June 1988, more than five years after using the term "evil empire", Reagan visited the new reformist General Secretary of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, in Moscow. When asked by a reporter whether he still thought the Soviet Union was an evil empire, Reagan responded that he no longer did, and that when he used the term it was "another time, another era".

The term has also been alluded to in reference to the domestic politics of the United States itself. American conservative journalist Pat Buchanan argued that Russia's President Vladimir Putin implied that the United States under the Obama administration deserved the title in the 21st century, and furthermore argued that Putin had a good case for doing so because of American views on abortion and same-sex marriage (that was criminalized in the Soviet Union), pornography, promiscuity and the general panoply of Hollywood values. Buchanan served as White House Communications Director for President Reagan from 1985 to 1987.

According to G. Thomas Goodnight, the "evil empire" speech, along with the "Zero Option" and "Star Wars" speeches, was part of the rhetorical side of the Cold War and reshaped public perceptions of nuclear warfare. In the former, Reagan depicted nuclear warfare as an extension of an "age old struggle between good and evil" By characterizing the Soviet Union as an "evil empire" and therefore irrational and untrustworthy, the speech justified demurrals on peace proposals.

See also

• Tear down this wall!
• Speeches and debates of Ronald Reagan
• Chicken Kiev speech
• Axis of evil

Sources

• Gaddis, John Lewsi (2005). The Cold War: A New History. Penguin Books. ISBN 1-59420-062-9.
• Goodnight, G. Thomas (1986). "Ronald Reagan's re-formulation of the rhetoric of war: Analysis of the 'zero option,' 'evil empire,' and 'star wars' addresses". Quarterly Journal of Speech. 72 (4): 390–414. doi:10.1080/00335638609383784.
• Jones, Seth G. (2018). A Covert Action: Reagan, the CIA, and the Cold War Struggle in Poland. W. W. Norton. ISBN 978-0393247008.
• Peterson, Jon Richard (June 2010). "An Evil Empire": The Rhetorical Rearmament of Ronald Reagan (PhD thesis). Ohio University.
• Rowland, Robert C.; Jones, John M. (October 2016). "Reagan's Strategy for the Cold War and the Evil Empire Address". Rhetoric & Public Affairs. 19 (3): 427–463. doi:10.14321/rhetpublaffa.19.3.0427. S2CID 151775200.
• Schlesinger, Robert (2008). White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-0743291699.

External links

• Video of Ronald Reagan's Evil Empire speech
• Audio of Ronald Reagan's Evil Empire speech
• Text of Ronald Reagan's Evil Empire speech
• Text of Ronald Reagan's Evil Empire speech (British House of Commons speech) Archived August 6, 2020, at the Wayback Machine