Welcome back to The Deep Dive. Today we are unpacking
two words, just two words. Just two. Yeah. But
these two words arguably defined the entire latter
half of the Cold War. They terrified some people,
thrilled others, and, you know, completely reshaped
the way the world looked at the standoff between
the United States and the Soviet Union. It really
is a fascinating case study in the power of rhetoric.
We're talking, of course, about the phrase The
evil empire. The evil empire. I mean, it sounds
like something from a movie poster, right? Like
Star Wars. Exactly. Sounds like Star Wars. But
this wasn't George Lucas. This was geopolitical
strategy. And what I love about this story and
what we're going to really dig into today is
where this geopolitical thunderclap actually
happened. Because you'd imagine a moment this
heavy taking place at the United Nations or maybe
the Oval Office. Or standing in front of the
Berlin Wall. Right. But it didn't. No, it really
didn't. It happened in Orlando, Florida, specifically
at the Sheraton Twin Towers Hotel in the Citrus
Crown Ballroom. Which is such a juxtaposition.
I mean, you have this heavy, almost apocalyptic
language about totalitarian darkness being delivered
in a hotel ballroom usually reserved for wedding
receptions and trade shows. It's wild. So here
is our mission for this deep dive. We're going
back to March 8th, 1983. the Cold War is at its
absolute height. We're going to look at how this
speech to a religious convention rewrote the
rulebook on nuclear diplomacy, why Ronald Reagan's
own staff desperately tried to kill the phrase
before he ever said it, and then and this is
my absolute favorite part, the massive plot twist
that happened five years later. And just to be
clear for you listening, we are pulling all of
this from the historical record, specifically
the Wikipedia entry for the evil empire speech,
alongside analysis from historians like John
Lewis Gaddis. We aren't taking sides on the politics
here, just impartially reporting on the arguments
from the sources. Right. Just laying out the
history. Exactly. So let's set the scene. It's
1983. Tensions are incredibly high. The Soviet
Union is in Afghanistan. The nuclear arms race
is spiraling. And Reagan walks onto that stage
in Orlando. And he doesn't mince words right
off the bat. He describes the Soviet Union as
the focus of evil in the modern world. He urges
the audience to pray for the salvation of those
living in totalitarian darkness. It's incredibly
biblical language for a foreign policy speech.
It is. And that wasn't an accident. To understand
why this speech was so shocking and so effective,
depending on your view, you really have to understand
the argument Reagan was making. It wasn't just
name -calling. Right. He wasn't just shouting
insults across the Iron Curtain. He was constructing
a specific philosophical argument against something
called moral equivalence. OK, let's unpack that
for a second. Moral equivalence. What was he
actually arguing against there? Well, at the
time, there was a growing movement. especially
among Western intellectuals and some diplomats,
to treat the Cold War as a giant misunderstanding.
Oh, like they're both just to blame. Exactly.
The idea was that both superpowers were just
two scorpions in a bottle, both equally paranoid,
both equally at fault for the arms race. Reagan
hated that idea. He didn't see it as two scorpions.
He saw it as a sheriff and a bandit. Precisely.
In the speech, he specifically warns the audience
against the temptation of pride. He tells them
not to blithely declare themselves above it all
and label both sides equally at fault. He was
framing the conflict not as a political dispute
over territory or economics, but as a literal
spiritual struggle between right and wrong, and
good and evil. And there was a very specific
policy he was attacking here, right? It wasn't
just abstract philosophy about good and evil.
He was talking about the nuclear freeze. That's
right. The nuclear freeze proposals. This was
a very popular movement at the time to just stop
building weapons right where everyone stood.
Just freeze the arsenals. Hit pause. Right. But
Reagan's argument was that if you ignore the
aggressive impulses of an evil empire just to
get a quiet life or to get a freeze, you are
actually removing yourself from the moral struggle.
You're ignoring the facts of history. And looking
at the source material, The Room, which was the
National Association of Evangelicals, they absolutely
ate this up. Oh, they loved it. They applauded.
And the details from the sources are so cinematic.
After he finishes this speech about spiritual
warfare and the struggle against darkness, a
band plays him off the stage with onward Christian
soldiers. That is just, wow. That really paints
a picture of the room. OK, so that's the speech.
That's the thunderclap. But here is where it
gets really interesting to me. The origin story
of this phrase. Because you'd think Evil Empire
was something Reagan had just been saying his
whole life. You would think that. But it turns
out the phrase had a very specific author and
a very surprising inspiration. Right. The speechwriter
was a man named Anthony R. Dolan. He was the
chief speechwriter at the time. But the concept.
That actually didn't come from an American. This
completely blew my mind when I saw it. The big
aha moment for me in the research was the Singapore
connection. Yes, Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father
and prime minister of Singapore. So back in 1981,
which is two years before the speech, Lee Kuan
Yew is meeting with Reagan. And Lee refers to
the Soviet Union as an empire, which extended
across Eurasia. And the sources say Reagan's
ears just pricked up at that word. He loved the
word empire because it implied domination. It
implied expansion. It wasn't just a nation or
a union of states. According to Lee Kuan Yew's
memoirs, Reagan immediately turned to his national
security adviser, Richard Allen, and told him
to use that word more frequently. So you have
the empire part coming from Singapore, and then
Anthony Dolan adds the evil part later. But here's
the drama. The White House staff hated it. They
absolutely hated it. This is a classic example
of the tension between a president's political
instincts and the diplomatic caution of his staff.
Anthony Dolan had actually tried to sneak the
phrase evil empire into a text a year earlier
in 1982 for a speech to the British House of
Commons. And the reviewers just crossed it out.
Red pen everywhere. They cut it completely. They
thought it was way too provocative for the British
Parliament. So fast forward to the Orlando speech
in 83. Dolan tries again. He puts evil empire
in the draft. And again, the State Department
and White House staffers, people like David Gergen,
they repeatedly struck it from the drafts. They
kept deleting it. So how did it survive? Did
Reagan just sneak it back in at the last second
or something? Well, partly. But also the staff
made a pretty massive miscalculation. They looked
at the schedule and saw National Association
of Evangelicals, Orlando, Florida. And they thought,
well, this is a minor event. Oh, wow. They concluded
it was unlikely to attract much attention. They
let their guard down because they literally didn't
think anyone on the world stage would be listening.
That is hilarious in hindsight. Probably the
most famous phrase of his entire presidency.
And the staff let it slide because they thought
it's just a ballroom in Orlando. Who cares? Exactly.
But there's another layer to this drafting process
that tells us a lot about Reagan himself. He
reviewed the draft personally. And he didn't
just passively accept Dolan's work. He made his
own edits. And one of the edits is really revealing
about his mindset at the time. Oh, I saw this
in the notes. This is about the domestic section
of the speech, right? Yes. Because the speech
wasn't just about the Soviets. It was about morality
in general. Dolan had written a line about abortion
on demand being a great moral evil. But Reagan
actually crossed that out. Wait, he softened
the language. He changed the fundamental argument.
He rewrote it to be much more legalistic, more
rooted in American constitutional tradition.
He wrote that, until it could be proven that
the unborn child is not a living entity, its
right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness
must be protected. So he's directly invoking
the Declaration of Independence there. Right.
But the key takeaway here is that he was very
hands -on with this text. He softened the abortion
line, but he looked at the evil empire phrase,
the exact one his staff had been trying to kill
for a year, and he left it right there. He wanted
that specific confrontation. And confrontation
is exactly what he got. Let's talk about the
fallout from this, because today we look back
and say, oh sure, the evil empire speech, classic
Reagan. But at the time, people freaked out.
Freaked out is a very fair assessment. The domestic
press criticism was immediate. They called it
inflammatory. The Christian Science Monitor,
which is a very respected publication, argued
that this kind of rhetoric was downright dangerous.
They said it would encourage an arms race and
that in logic, it pointed toward war. Basically,
the logic is you don't call the guy with his
finger on the nuclear button evil unless you're
actually planning to fight him. Exactly. And
if you think the American press was harsh, you
should see what Moscow had to say about it. Oh,
I can only imagine. What was the official line
from the Kremlin? The Soviet press agency. TSS
went on the counter -attack immediately. They
said this speech proved that the Reagan administration
could only think in terms of confrontation and
bellicose. Lunatic anti -communism. Lunatic anti
-communism. They weren't holding back either.
Not at all. And they tried to completely flip
the script. They claimed that the United States
was the actual imperialist superpower trying
to dominate the world and that the Soviet Union
was just fighting in the name of humanity. It's
the classic, I know you are, but what am I, defense?
But seriously, this raises a huge strategic question
for you to think about as a listener. If you
are the president of the United States and you
define your enemy as evil, not just a rival,
not just a geopolitical competitor, but inherently
evil, how do you ever negotiate with them? I
mean, you can't compromise with the devil. And
that was precisely the fear among diplomats at
the State Department. If you paint the adversary
as irrational and morally bankrupt, you essentially
define diplomacy as appeasement. It seemed to
just close the door on any kind of meaningful
peace talk. Which makes what happens next so
incredible. Because the door didn't close. In
fact, five years later, the door swung wide open.
Let's fast forward to the plot twist, 1988. The
scene has changed completely. We aren't in a
hotel ballroom in Florida anymore. We are in
Red Square in Moscow. And Reagan is there, walking
around with Mikhail Gorbachev. The general secretary
of the Communist Party. the head of the evil
empire, they are strolling through the Kremlin
grounds, and a reporter yells out a question.
They ask Reagan, do you still think the Soviet
Union is an evil empire? I feel like every staffer
was holding their breath in that exact moment.
What did he say? He said, I no longer do. Just
like that, I no longer do. He followed it up
by saying that was another time, another era.
Another era. It was five years ago. I know, but
in the timeline of the Cold War, those five years
were a lifetime. But think about that recantation.
He stands in the capital of the rival superpower
and just takes back the insult. And Gorbachev
heard this. He did. The sources say Gorbachev
definitely took note of it. The journalist Lou
Canning concluded that Gorbachev listened very
carefully to that message. It was a clear signal
that the relationship had fundamentally shifted.
So this brings us to the big analysis, the so
what of this deep dive. We had the speech, the
massive backlash, and then the recantation in
Red Square. Why did this matter? Was it all just
theater? It was theater. But in the Cold War,
theater was strategy. Historians like G. Thomas
Goodnight and John Louis Gaddis look at this
speech and they call it a rhetorical offensive.
A rhetorical offensive, like attacking with words
instead of missiles. Exactly. Along with the
Star Wars Missile Defense Program and the Zero
Option on Missiles, this speech was designed
to kill detente. It's not being the general idea
of live and let live. Right. The idea that the
Soviet Union had earned a certain legitimacy,
geopolitical, moral, economic legitimacy. Reagan
wanted to strip that away by calling them an
evil empire. He was saying they are illegitimate.
They are historical error. And by doing that,
he justified rejecting any peace proposals he
thought were weak. So by being the bad cop in
1983, he created the leverage he needed to be
the good cop in 1988. That is the charitable
interpretation, yes. Gaddis argues it was calculated
to feed the anxieties of the Soviet leadership.
It made them paranoid. It made them spend more
money on defense. And eventually it forced them
to the negotiating table. There is also a domestic
angle here that we shouldn't overlook. We mentioned
the audience earlier, the evangelicals in Orlando.
Yes. And the scholar Liro Medavoy points this
out in the source material. This speech wasn't
just foreign policy. It was a very calculated
culture war move. By delivering this anti -Soviet
speech to a religious group, Reagan was intentionally
connecting the Cold War to domestic issues. Right,
because he talks about liberalism and secularism
in the exact same breath as totalitarianism.
Exactly. He framed American liberals and the
Soviet Union as sort of two sides of a coin common
enemies in a test of moral will and faith. So
he was rallying his base at home just as much
as he was scaring the Politburo in Moscow. It
really is a master class in multitasking. You
scare the Soviets, you rally the evangelicals,
and you annoy the press all before lunch. And
you do it all from a hotel ballroom in Orlando.
It's wild. So let's recap this journey we've
been on. We started with a draft that the smart
people in the White House tried to delete. They
thought it was too dangerous. They thought the
event was too minor. But Reagan, with an assist
from Lee Kuan Yew and Anthony Dolan, pushed it
through anyway. He drew a line in the sand. You
define the conflict as good versus evil. The
world held its breath. People thought war was
just around the corner. And yet five years later,
the man who said those words is standing in Red
Square saying that was another era. It leaves
us with a really provocative final thought for
you to mull over. And it comes back to that tension
between the 1983 speech and the 1984 presidential
debate. In the debate, Reagan reiterated that
the Soviets were evil. But he also said, we have
to live with each other. Wow, those two ideas
side by side. Right. So the question is, was
the evil empire speech a moment of dangerous
instability that we were just lucky to survive?
Or was it the necessary calculated pressure that
eventually allowed him to stand in Moscow and
say peace? Did he have to almost break the world
in order to fix it? That is the question history
is still debating today. Something for you to
think about the next time you hear a politician
using absolute language. Words shape history,
sometimes in ways we don't understand until years
later. That's it for this deep dive. Thanks for
listening, and we'll catch you next time.