James Mann - The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

His worship of heroes was not confined to speeches. Frederick Ryan, who handled the president’s appointments and scheduling, recalled that every week or two, Reagan would hand his aides some news story with a name circled—someone who had done something Reagan considered heroic, perhaps a fireman who had pulled someone out of a burning building. “I’d like to meet this person,” Reagan would say, and the aides would scramble to bring the person to the White House. 7In the speeches, however, the heroes and other ordinary Americans usually served a purpose. They were cited on behalf of the ideas Reagan wanted to convey: his hostility to big government, taxes, and communism, and his belief in a continually rising America. “Don’t let anyone tell you that America’s best days are behind her, that the American spirit has been vanquished,” he said as he pointed to Skutnik during his first State of the Union address in 1982. “We’ve seen it triumph too often in our lives to stop believing in it now.” 8

Early in his career, Reagan wrote many of his own speeches. His work can be seen in the texts he crafted in his own handwriting, such as the radio commentaries he prepared on his own during the 1970s, between being governor and being president. 9At the White House, Reagan, like other presidents, had a team of speechwriters to draft his remarks at his public appearances. On important speeches, Reagan would take part in an early meeting with top aides and the speechwriters to talk about what he should say. Later on, after a speechwriter had come up with a text, Reagan would edit the draft, crossing out paragraphs, adding additional thoughts. He liked particularly to do this on Wednesday afternoons, which he often took off from the Oval Office, or at Camp David on weekends. 10

The speechwriting team served a number of functions. They helped come up with some of Reagan’s one-liners for events such as the annual dinners of the Gridiron Club and the White House Correspondents’ Association, two groups of Washington reporters. They were also responsible for making sure what the president didn’t say, by screening and checking out the anecdotes that were passed on to him—because it was assumed that once Reagan got hold of a story he liked, he would tell it over and over again.

Dana Rohrabacher, who worked as a Reagan speechwriter, was once told a secondhand, unconfirmed story about an ailing veteran who had been on disability and then, against all expectations, had recovered. The man had called the Veterans Administration to say he didn’t need his disability payments anymore, only to discover that it took many days because—so the story went—nobody knew how to stop a government payment. Rohrabacher mentioned this story to the president, not in a speech draft but in casual conversation. Reagan, who loved the tale, immediately began to use it. Rohrabacher was reprimanded. “Dana, just be aware—any time during this presidency that you say something [to Reagan], you’d better make sure that it’s been checked out,” a White House aide told him. “Because he assumes that you’re telling the truth.” 11

The speechwriters didn’t need to be experts on specific areas of policy. Some of them weren’t even good at spelling. Rohrabacher was famous among the speechwriters for having once rendered “Hollywood Bowl” as “Hollywood Bowel” and for having turned the phrase “fait accompli” into a kind of Greek cheese: “feta compli.” 12What counted for a speechwriter was an ability to render ideas in simple ways and in Reagan’s own idiom. Several of the speechwriters came out of the conservative movement, recommended to the Reagan administration by figures such as William F. Buckley, Jr., the editor of National Review . They had worked on conservative political campaigns, read magazines such as Human Events , and were steeped in books such as Whittaker Chambers’s Witness , his memoir about the nature of communism after working for years as a Soviet agent.

The driving force in the speechwriting office was a figure named Anthony R. (Tony) Dolan. He had been a passionate conservative since the early 1960s, when, as a parochial school student in his early teens, he had joined the Citizens Anti-Communist Committee of Connecticut. He had been a journalist, first for the Yale Daily News and then at the Stamford Advocate , where, in 1978, he won a Pulitzer Price for an investigation of organized crime in Connecticut. He had written for National Review and gotten to know Buckley, who served as a mentor. 13

Dolan had watched and admired Reagan ever since the early 1960s, when he read one of Reagan’s speeches for General Electric. When Reagan announced he was running for president in 1980, Dolan sought a job in the campaign. At first nothing opened up, but eventually Buckley wrote to William Casey, who was at the time managing Reagan’s campaign. After Reagan won the election, Casey recommended Dolan to the White House as a speechwriter. The result was an interesting and continuing connection: Casey, the head of the CIA who fought secret wars with the Soviets around the world, and Dolan, the speechwriter who drafted some of Reagan’s most important speeches about the Soviet Union.

The combative Dolan saw the Soviet leadership as akin to the mob he had investigated in small-town Connecticut: a gang of leaders ruling primarily through fear, who might topple from power if someone called their bluff and if ordinary citizens were no longer afraid. To Dolan, dealing with the Soviet Union thus amounted to a remake of the 1950s movie On the Water-front . That was simplistic, but it also reflected a view that others in the Reagan administration more restrained by their jobs than Dolan, up to and including Secretary of State George Shultz, had harbored at one time or another. “Shultz’s interpretation of the Soviet Union was that it was the Mafia,” observed Thomas Simons, a Soviet specialist who served as deputy assistant secretary of state for Soviet affairs in the Reagan administration. “It was very personalized. He thought they were kind of thugs.” 14

It was Dolan who had drafted Reagan’s Westminster speech of 1982, saying that Marxism-Leninism would someday be left on “the ash heap of history.” Dolan, again, was the principal speechwriter for Reagan’s 1983 speech branding the Soviet Union the “evil empire.” The process of drafting these speeches and others brought Dolan and the speechwriting team into frequent conflict with centrist, nonconservative officials in the Reagan White House—notably David Gergen, who served as Reagan’s communications adviser, and Richard Darman, the top aide to White House chief of staff James Baker. The battles had been particularly intense before the Westminster speech about the Soviet Union; Gergen himself had written several drafts, Dolan had submitted competing versions, and Reagan had even quietly sent drafts to conservative columnist George Will for his suggestions. The battles continued from Washington to London until the hours before the speech was delivered; in the end, Reagan gave the speech Dolan had drafted, but with substantial deletions. Dolan, undeterred, reinserted some of the deleted passages into Reagan’s “evil empire” speech nine months later.

The battles were more complicated when Reagan was speaking overseas. In those cases, the drafts would have to be sent to the State Department and National Security Council for comments on the foreign-policy implications. When Reagan was appearing at an event inside the United States, these foreign-policy agencies played a lesser role, and sometimes the speechwriters could slip in lines that would have been vetoed if Reagan had been speaking abroad.

Reagan’s speech calling the Soviet Union an “evil empire” was delivered inside the United States, to the National Association of Evangelicals in Florida, an audience before whom Reagan could be expected to deliver a talk with conservative themes. From the start, that address was viewed more as domestic politics than as foreign policy, and thus the line about the “evil empire” was given considerably less scrutiny than if Reagan had been appearing in London or Moscow. By contrast, officials at the State Department and the National Security Council would review the drafts of Reagan’s 1987 “tear down this wall” speech over and over, phrase by phrase, word by word.