Tony Dolan’s Plan to Defeat the Soviets

In celebrating the life of Tony Dolan, President Reagan’s chief speechwriter, the most remarkable fact is that he was executing a strategy he conceived to defeat the Soviet Union.

In numerous conversations in the speechwriting office—long before any foreign policy experts dared to predict the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Warsaw Pact, and the Soviet Union itself, Tony said that he knew how to defeat the Soviets.

As a young journalist in his hometown of Stamford, Connecticut, he had exposed organized crime that, he said, had entirely corrupted the city. Tony was relentless, ultimately breaking the mob’s power and becoming one of the youngest journalists to win the Pulitzer Prize. He said that the same method would bring down the Soviets, an entirely corrupt system, another form of organized crime. Tell the truth about them; expose them as evil; let everyone—especially those in power—hear them described as what they are. It was his conviction that President Reagan, by speaking with moral clarity about the Soviets, could hasten their collapse.

In his essay How the United States Won the Cold War, Warren Norquist identifies the rhetorical moral battle, “demoralizing the Soviets and generating pressure for change,” as one of seven crucial components in the US victory over the USSR.

Tony later wrote in the Wall Street Journal that for criminal regimes, there is “one weapon they fear more than military or economic sanction: the publicly-spoken truth about their moral absurdity, their ontological weakness.”

Tony was fascinated with strategy. Tony would talk about the air combat strategist Colonel John Boyd. According to Tony, in a dogfight, the victor was the pilot who got inside the head (“the OODA loop”) of the other. He described a method he developed for when he or his family were attacked. He would buy a full page in the newspaper and write a long, detailed, scathing, persuasive open letter exposing the dishonor and absurdity of his tormentor. What matters, he told me, is that your antagonist will read every word and know that it is in the public square for everyone to see.

The Reagan administration, internally, was a battlefield of competing visions that came to a head over presidential speeches. Once the president said something, it became the official policy—which made speechwriting a critical front in these internal struggles. The battle cry of conservatives in the administration was, “Let Reagan be Reagan.” In that struggle, Tony was unwavering. He would not wobble when West Wing power players tried to intimidate him. He was himself an exceptionally skilled political infighter—usually scheming, always charming, and with a spine of coiled steel.

From the outset of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, Tony helped to chisel out the rhetorical space in which the speechwriters could give voice to President Reagan’s resolve that the outcome of the Cold War would be, “We win, they lose.”

And it was not only combative phrases. At times it was subversive speech, as in Reagan’s 1981 Univ. of Notre Dame speech drafted by Tony: “The West won’t contain communism; it will transcend communism. … it will dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.”

Or his 1982 speech in London, the Westminster address, “… one of the simple but overwhelming facts of our time is this: of all the millions of refugees we’ve seen in the modern world, their flight is always away from, not toward, the Communist world. Today, on the NATO line, our military forces face east to prevent a possible invasion. On the other side of the line, the Soviet forces also face east—to prevent their people from leaving. … What I am describing now is a plan and a hope for the long term—the march of freedom and democracy, which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.”

Tony’s legacy extends beyond the powerful speeches that he wrote. He established a framework of strategic rhetoric that became the collective mission of the speechwriting team. His profound understanding of President Reagan’s own anti-communist vision and his resolve in the internal policy battle, together with his writing, defined the space in which others could make important contributions.

Tony helped to create the context in which Peter Robinson would draft the unforgettable words, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” And in which Clark Judge would draft President Reagan’s speech to Soviet artists and writers, celebrating artistic freedom to a communist party audience in Moscow, challenging them that he hoped to see Solzhenitsyn published in Russia and Baryshnikov perform again in the Russian capital. And at Moscow State University, addressing the children of the Soviet elites, in a speech drafted by Josh Gilder, giving a master class on the potency of freedom and the American way of life, describing a world in which the Soviets couldn’t possibly keep up, much less compete, while inviting them to join in. These and others were downstream from Tony.

Tony’s resolve in policy fights helped define the White House speechwriting office as the ideological center of the Reagan revolution. Dana Rohrabacher was the indispensable champion of the freedom fighters pushing back against the Soviet empire in Nicaragua, Afghanistan, and Angola—and not just in his speeches; he went personally to Afghanistan and brought to the speechwriting office reports from the field. There were also the powerful pro-growth, pro-technology, and pro-entrepreneurship economic policy speeches. These were all components of the strategy to defeat the Soviets.

Peter Robinson, who wrote President Reagan’s call to tear down the Berlin Wall, has described how Tony Dolan made it possible for the legendary challenge to be delivered by beating back the repeated attempts to excise that phrase.

I witnessed Tony’s resolve firsthand in 1988. He asked me to write President Reagan’s speech at NASA Houston, before the launching of the space shuttle Discovery, which, after the 1986 Challenger disaster, would mark America’s return to space. The space program was essential to Reagan’s Cold War strategy. As Gorbachev put it, “The U.S. wants to exhaust the Soviet Union economically through a race in the most up-to-date and expensive space weapons.”

However, it turned out that a senior West Wing official had commissioned Peggy Noonan to write a competing speech draft for the event. Peggy was no longer on the White House staff; however, outsourcing speeches wasn’t rare. After Ken Khachigian had left the White House, he was repeatedly called to write speeches, and Tony himself had had me write speeches for President Reagan before I joined the speechwriting staff.

Probably, the West Wing official saw the NASA speech as a follow-on to the Challenger speech for which Peggy was justifiably celebrated. But Tony’s mission was to defeat the Soviets. He had assigned me the speech so that I would drive forward Reagan’s strategic message and leave the Soviets with no doubt that the US resolve to dominate the future in space was unbreakable.

When Tony learned of the competing draft, he didn’t give an inch, and neither did Mari Maseng Will, the communications director. But Peggy’s powerful advocate also refused to yield. Finally, both speech drafts went to President Reagan. It was another win for Tony when the speech that he had assigned to me was the one chosen by the president.

The Soviets, struggling with their sclerotic, socialist, rusted-out economy, would hear the leader of the Free World declare, “Somewhere in America, there is alive today a small child who one day may be the first man or woman to ever set foot on the planet Mars … plant the Stars and Stripes on a distant planet.  … It is mankind’s manifest destiny to bring our humanity into space; to colonize this galaxy, and as a nation, we have the power to determine whether America will lead or will follow. I say that America must lead.” One can imagine Tony smiling when President Trump, in his second inaugural address, echoed Reagan’s call, pledging to “pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars.”

Tony is not the most famous of the Reagan speechwriters, though he could have been. He carried out his plan to bring down “the evil empire,” and it happened. Yet, the tradition had been that the presidential speechwriter was a ghost; he would remain unseen. Tony told the New York Times, “Staying out of the paper is one of the key parts of our job.”

For Tony, the words, the speeches, all belonged to Reagan. Tony once said that the job of a Reagan speechwriter was to plagiarize Ronald Reagan. In truth, throughout Reagan’s political career and continuing in his presidency, a large part of the Reagan message was written by him in his own hand.

A man of remarkable talents and not entirely free of vanity, Tony was more interested in impact than in celebrity. Tony could have chosen fame and a public career, leveraging his historically important work for Reagan. Instead, he remained on the inside as a high-level advisor in Washington and campaign strategist. He was an early supporter of Donald Trump, served in his first administration and his three presidential campaigns, and at the time of his death was Special Assistant to President Trump on the Domestic Policy Council.

Tony was a delightful man. He would often be seen with his celebrity friends: Bo Derek, Plácido Domingo, and, if I recall correctly, one night it was Tim Curry who was performing in Washington. After the show, we went to dinner. When the check came, the celebrity insisted on paying. Tony objected and immediately wrote a check for the tab, which he slammed onto the table. The celebrity said, “Absolutely not,” pushed away Tony’s check, and slammed his own onto the table. Tony smiled, his eyes twinkled, and he said, “The problem is that your check is no good here,” at which point he picked up the other fellow’s check, tore it in half, and then again, and again, until it was confetti, laughing as he did it.

Rest in peace, Tony.

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Mark Klugmann was a speechwriter for US presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.