The immortal Reagan speech gutless staffers nearly nixed revealed

A friend in the White House called last week to let me know that Tony Dolan, who had been working with him on President Trump’s Domestic Policy Council, passed away that morning.His name may be unfamiliar, but you know his words: Tony “Evil Empire” Dolan was President Ronald Reagan’s chief speechwriter.It was a title he held throughout all eight years of the Reagan administration, though leadership of the speechwriting team transitioned back and forth between him and the equally stalwart Ben Elliott, depending on which one had most pissed off the functionaries in the West Wing at the time. Probably nothing angered those functionaries more than the speech Tony wrote for Reagan’s appearance in early 1983 at the National Association of Evangelicals.Its invocations of America’s Judeo-Christian heritage, its warning that faith and morality are the foundation of a free society, and its forthright identification of the Soviet Union as the “locus of evil in the modern world” — more pithily, an “Evil Empire” — pushed every West Wing button.As it happens, my first encounter with the speech was when I opened up The New York Times the next day while riding on Amtrak from New York to Washington to meet with Tony for what became, in the course of our lunch, a job interview.I was stunned as I read the speech — in the same way it is stunning today to hear President Trump speak obvious truths whose public utterance has been all but banned by our social arbiters.I was still somewhat dazed as I sat down with Tony in the White House Mess.I mentioned the speech and how extraordinary I’d found it.“Oh, yeah,” said Tony, and proceeded to tell me the backstory. White House staffers, who believed their role was to protect Reagan from his more “conservative instincts,” excised the Evil Empire epithet from Tony’s draft, along with much of the other language they deemed “inflammatory.”But Tony, whose bureaucratic skills would have stood him in good s...