It's Tuesday, March 8, 2022, the 39th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's "evil empire" speech. This address is a historic landmark in presidential communications, and one I've written about several times on this date. But with Russian tanks, war planes, and artillery shelling schools and apartment buildings while trying to depopulate Ukraine, Reagan's speech seems highly relevant again. (While we're reminiscing, it was 10 years ago that Mitt Romney identified Russia as America's "No. 1 political foe" and Barack Obama responded with sneering sarcasm -- to which the media largely acquiesced. How clueless does that look now? But I digress.)
Today, the former KGB functionary running the Kremlin is hellbent on reestablishing a Russian empire. And he's willing to commit war crimes -- and implies that he's willing to deploy nuclear weapons -- to attain it. When Reagan's dream of tearing down the Berlin Wall was finally achieved, the world rejoiced. Not Vladimir Putin, then a Soviet apparatchik based in East Germany. Putin seethed, and apparently began plotting Russia's revenge.
I sometimes wonder what Reagan would have made of modern Russia, a one-man dictatorship run by a once-committed Communist who has deployed Russia's extensive natural resources, a perverted form of capitalism, and police-state tactics to roll back personal freedoms at home, while extending Russia's borders and control into vast parts of the old Soviet Union.
Maybe the answer is not that complicated, and is contained by the words Reagan spoke on March 8, 1983 in Orlando, Florida.
On March 8, 1983, President Reagan went to Florida to give two speeches. The audience for the first one, at Disney World's EPCOT Center, was a group of outstanding math and science students from central Florida. No one remembers that speech, which was vintage Reagan: It opened with a self-deprecating tip o' the cap to Floridians for their weather, which that March was better than California's. Reagan tossed a bogus Lincoln quote into his remarks, along with an authentic Thomas Wolfe quote -- though why he thought science and math nerds would even know Wolfe's name was a mystery -- all while building an uplifting homily about our country.
"This sounds like something you'll hear at graduation, but you really do have a wonderful future ahead of you," he told them. "Don't be afraid of it. The future is what America has always represented."
Reagan headed next to the National Association of Evangelicals, where he was the keynote speaker. Inside the White House, there had been some tension about what should be in that address, which everyone simply called "the Orlando speech." As soon as Reagan delivered it, however, it was known globally as "the evil empire speech." The Soviet Union, Reagan told the assembled evangelicals, was "the focus of evil in the modern world."
Democrats panned it. With few exceptions, editorial boards hated it. Even some of Reagan's fellow Republicans found it too provocative. Reagan anticipated this reaction. "Although a lot of liberal pundits jumped on my speech at Orlando and said it showed I was a rhetorical hip-shooter who was recklessly and unconsciously provoking the Soviets into war," he wrote in his autobiography, "I made the ‘Evil Empire' speech, and others like it, with malice aforethought."
This was the second time President Reagan had employed such verbiage. Nine months earlier, while appearing before members of the UK's Parliament at the Palace of Westminster, Reagan outlined his vision of the status of the Cold War. The Soviet Union and the bloc of nations under its control, he said, were in the throes of "a revolutionary crisis" within their own borders. Their system, he added, was nearly bankrupt.
"It is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of human history in denying human freedom and human dignity to its citizens," Reagan proclaimed. "It is also in deep economic difficulty."
Reagan's quip in his diary revealed that the president wasn't simply emoting when discussing America's great adversary. He was thinking. For starters, he had been clear even while running for president that he foresaw the U.S. military buildup he accelerated as strategic more than tactical: The Soviets, he believed (and Mikhail Gorbachev later confirmed), couldn't keep pace economically with the United States.
And on March 8, 1983, Reagan had two primary audiences in mind. The first was the evangelical pastors seated in front of him, many of whom were being pressured to endorse a nuclear freeze movement sweeping this country. Reagan saw this not only as unhelpful, but also as an example of false equivalency.
"So, in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals," he said, "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."
For Reagan, the second audience he had in mind was even more important than the first: Soviet leader Yuri Andropov and other Kremlin officials. While Reagan thought the nuclear freeze movement was counterproductive, he shared with his critics a desire to scale down the world's nuclear arsenal. Reagan wanted the Soviets to know that his vision for the future included nuclear arms reductions, yes, but also the destruction of the Berlin Wall, a rolling back of the Iron Curtain, and free elections across Eastern Europe.
Reagan's vision was attained shortly after he left office. The question before the world today is: Will it survive?
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
