In addition to discussing his plans for foreign policy, Reagan’s State of the Union also touched on the domestic front, making it clear that the economic turnaround he had desired in 1981 as his first priority was now underway, setting the stage for the strength he and his country needed to take on the Russians: “[O]ur strategy for peace with freedom must also be based on strength—economic strength and military strength,” said the president. “A strong American economy is essential to the well-being and security of our friends and allies. The restoration of a strong, healthy American economy has been and remains one of the central pillars of our foreign policy.”
This feeling of success continued beyond the State of the Union, and a month later, on February 22, he began heralding a full economic recovery. In a foreign-policy speech to the American Legion, in which he spoke of the need to rebuild defenses and take on the Soviets, he reminded, “Our first and highest priority was to restore a sound economic base here at home.”19 It was the beginning of a surge in prosperity on the home front, and Reagan enthusiastically welcomed the shift with open arms. The domestic foundation of his foreign policy was indeed becoming stronger by the day.
Feeling that such had been achieved, he was ready to move on to the larger battle, a fact made evident in another line in the speech: “History is not a darkening path twisting inevitably toward tyranny, as the forces of totalitarianism would have us believe. Indeed, the one clear pattern in world events—a pattern that’s grown with each passing year of this century—is in the opposite direction.”20
The sum total of these events was that Pravda now really had something to crow about. “The anticommunist ‘crusade’ program outlined by the President has begun to acquire concrete form,” said the party organ. The “Washington ‘Crusaders,’” declared Pravda, were “on the march.”21 Now more than ever, “Crusade” was the operative word in the Soviet press.22 The Reagan administration, said TASS, the official Soviet news agency, was “bent on pushing forward its ‘crusade against communism.’”23
MARCH 8, 1983: “EVIL EMPIRE”
Just when it seemed that the Soviets could not be more apoplectic over what they had been hearing from the Oval Office, on March 8, 1983 Ronald Reagan stepped before a group of evangelical Christians at the Sheraton Twin Towers Hotel in Orlando, Florida and made quite a claim. The USSR, the president told the National Association of Evangelicals, was the “focus of evil in the modern world”; it was an “evil empire.” The speech was polarizing, as was its intention: to draw a line of demarcation between the two superpowers. Said the Crusader to his fellow Christian soldiers:
I urge you to speak out against those who would place the United States in a position of military and moral inferiority…. I urge you to beware 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.
To suggest the United States and USSR were morally equal, judged Reagan, was “rubbish.” Some observers might try to declare themselves “above it all,” haughtily asserting that “both sides are wrong.” To do so, said Reagan, would be to ignore the facts. In his eyes, this Cold War battle was a struggle between good and evil, and there was no doubt over which side was which. By making this bold proclamation in this speech, Reagan hoped that others would likewise connect the dots.24
From the start of the speech, it was clear that the language was atypical; it was also evident that Reagan, who was always keenly aware of his audience, was playing up the religious imagery, as he spoke to the Christian listeners about the sinful, fallen nature of man: “We know that living in this world means dealing with what philosophers would call the phenomenology of evil or, as theologians would put it, the doctrine of sin.” He then clarified his motivations for saying what he was saying: “There is sin and evil in the world,” said the president of the United States, “and we’re enjoined by Scripture and the Lord Jesus to oppose it with all our might.”
There was certainly a largesse of sin and evil in one part of the world: in Moscow. Now, Reagan wanted to announce the fact loud and clear, lest onlookers had any confusion regarding what the Cold War was all about—ditto its origins. Unlike America’s founders, said Reagan, the godfather of the Bolshevik state had a twisted conception of morality:
[A]s good Marxist-Leninists, the Soviet leaders have openly and publicly declared that the only morality they recognize is that which will further their cause, which is world revolution. Lenin… said in 1920 that they repudiate all morality that proceeds from supernatural ideas—that’s their name for religion—or ideas that are outside class conceptions. Morality is entirely subordinate to the interests of class war. And everything is moral that is necessary for the annihilation of the old, exploiting social order and for uniting the proletariat.
Yet, to think that this address was all fire and brimstone would be a mistake. Immediately after dubbing the USSR evil, Reagan, employing a line he inserted into the text himself, served up a plea for prayer for the USSR: “[L]et us pray for the salvation of all of those who live in that totalitarian darkness—pray they will discover the joy of knowing God.” However, “until they do,” said Reagan, “let us be aware that while they preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the Earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world.”
Then, in a moment that has been almost completely neglected by history, Reagan drew similar parallels to his own country, turning the spotlight on the manifold sins of which the United States had been guilty since its inception. “Our nation, too, has a legacy of evil with which it must deal,” he said, citing slavery, racism, bigotry, ethnic hatred, anti-Semitism, and the “long struggle of minority citizens for equal rights.” America had also betrayed God, particularly the commandment, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”
While America was hardly exempt from sin and did not escape criticism in this address, the thrust of Reagan’s message was that America was facing not simply any old enemy; it was facing an evil enemy, an Evil Empire. And that empire, said Reagan, with some good news, was doomed: “I believe that communism is another sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages even now are being written,” he said again.25
Because of these dramatic pronouncements, certain Reagan staff loved the speech. Bill Clark called it “probably his greatest speech.”26 Fred Ikle, Reagan’s undersecretary of defense for policy, appreciated the underlying logic and strategy in such bombastic statements. Ikle admired Reagan for having the “courage” to articulate what was then an “incendiary idea” but is now a “hackneyed truth”; namely, “that we had a Cold War because of the evil empire, and could not end the Cold War without undoing that empire.”