Anthony Dolan, speechwriter who gave Reagan ‘evil empire,' dies at 76

Boston Globe

19-03-2025

Mr. Dolan was one of the youngest winners of a Pulitzer Prize in journalism. As a reporter for The Advocate in Stamford, Conn., he was 29 when he was awarded the prize in 1978 for local investigative specialized reporting, for a series of exposés of corruption in that city's municipal government and organized crime's infiltration of its police department.
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After serving for eight years as a speechwriter in the Reagan White House, he was a special adviser to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and a senior adviser to Secretary of State Colin Powell during the administration of President George W. Bush. He was a White House special assistant during Donald Trump's first term, and in January was recruited as a special assistant by the president's Domestic Policy Council.
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Mr. Dolan began his political career as a teenage volunteer in Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign. He went on to take jobs in three Republican administrations and was for a time a singer and lyricist of conservative folk songs. (His 'The New York Times Blues' parodies the paper as containing 'all the news that's fit to print, unless, of course, its anti-communist.')
In the White House, he was a dogged defender of Reagan's blunt war of words against what Mr. Dolan saw as the ungodly Soviets. He resisted pressure from presidential advisers who, subscribing to realpolitik, wanted him to tone down his verbal assaults — including his hope that 'the march of freedom and democracy' would 'leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history.'
'Evil empire' and 'ash heap,' both derived from earlier iterations ('Star Wars' and Leon Trotsky among them) survived into final drafts thanks to Mr. Dolan. He also oversaw the speech his assistant, Peter Robinson, wrote in which Reagan, at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin in 1987, challenged the Soviet leader: 'Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.'
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In a video tribute to Mr. Dolan, Robinson recalled a tug of war between 'the true believers vs. the pragmatists — and the true believers were the speechwriters and Ronald Reagan.'
Several mentions of 'evil' were deleted from drafts of the 'ash heap' speech that Mr. Dolan wrote for delivery to the British Parliament in 1982. But he persisted in using the word, and he triumphed the following year when, in March, Reagan addressed the National Association of Evangelicals, who were divided between antiwar Quakers and anti-communist conservatives.
Reagan urged his audience to "beware the temptation of pride, the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all," which, he warned, would be "to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire."
'With some nifty footwork, Dolan finally managed to get Reagan to deliver the speech he wanted,' Simon Lancaster, a British speechwriter, recalled in 'You Are Not Human: How Words Kill' (2018), 'deploying that age-old speechwriter tactic of circulating the draft at the very last minute, so no one has any time to comment.'
Natan Sharansky, who was imprisoned at the time, later wrote that he and fellow Soviet dissidents were ecstatic. "Finally," he wrote in The Washington Post in 2000, "the leader of the free world had spoken the truth — a truth that burned inside the heart of each and every one of us."
David Gergen, who was Reagan's communications director, wrote in his book 'Eyewitness to Power': 'I hate to admit it, but it's true: History has shown that Tony Dolan was right and I was wrong. That phrase, the evil empire, allowed Reagan to speak truth to totalitarianism.'
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And Vince Haley, the director of Trump's Domestic Policy Council, and several other speechwriters wrote in Real Clear Politics this week, 'Dolan channeled Reagan's moral and intellectual arguments that framed the U.S.S.R. not simply as a competitor but as an aggressive force of evil in the world.'
Anthony Rossi Dolan was born on July 7, 1948, in Norwalk, Conn., to Joseph and Margaret (Kelley) Dolan. His father was a store manager.
Mr. Dolan was a Roman Catholic who attended Mass daily and a fierce anti-communist. In a eulogy for his sister, Maiselle Shortley, last year, he told a story from when he was 6 years old:
"My mother took a course on communism downtown at St. Mary's Church from Louis Budenz, former Soviet operative and editor of The Daily Worker, who had become a Catholic and Fordham professor. She took Budenz's talks to heart about communism's global menace. 'I used to wonder if you kids would even have a country to grow up in,' she would say."
Mr. Dolan kept a book that Budenz had inscribed to his mother.
Haley said in an interview, "Tony didn't just condemn communism in the speeches he helped craft; he rallied souls to a positive conception of freedom of God with man."
After graduating from Fairfield College Preparatory School in Connecticut, where he was class president, Mr. Dolan majored in philosophy and history at Yale University and graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1970. He served in the US Army as a specialist 4.
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Mr. Dolan was the deputy press secretary in James L. Buckley's 1970 campaign for the US Senate in New York, worked for F. Clifton White & Associates as a political consultant, and was a reporter for The Advocate from 1974 to 1980.
He was a protégé of William F. Buckley Jr., the founder and editor-in-chief of The National Review, who importuned William J. Casey, manager of the Reagan-Bush campaign in 1980, to hire Mr. Dolan as a speechwriter and a research director. He joined the White House staff in March 1981, becoming chief speechwriter and an assistant to the president.
He played a role in drafting the administration's crackdown on organized crime and was an adviser to US delegations to UNESCO in 1984 and the United Nations disarmament conference in 1988.
Mr. Dolan advised the campaigns of Fred Thompson, Newt Gingrich, and Ted Cruz for the Republican presidential nominations of 2008, 2012, and 2016. He had a communications strategy firm and was an essayist on political affairs. In Washington, he was a frequent customer of Cafe Milano and Martin's Tavern, favorite political hangouts.
His closest survivor is a nephew, Robert A. Shortley. In addition to his sister, Maiselle Shortley, a brother, John Terrence Dolan, known as Terry, a founder and chairman of the National Conservative Political Action Committee, died in 1986.
Mr. Dolan paid tribute to Reagan long after his presidency ended and well after his death in 2004. In 2023, speaking at the Victims of Communism Museum in Washington on the 40th anniversary of the 'evil empire' speech, Mr. Dolan said, 'Freedom had triumphed over tyranny due in large measure to President Ronald Reagan, who summed up his strategy with four simple words: 'We win, they lose.''
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