Contact The Editor
Articles By This Author
Anthony R. Dolan, a onetime folk singer and Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who crafted some of Ronald Reagan's most memorable lines, drafting speeches in which the president referred to the Soviet Union as an "evil empire" and envisioned a future that would "leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history," died March 11 at a hospital in Alexandria, Virginia. He was 76.
A funeral director at Money & King, which was handling arrangements, confirmed the death but did not cite a cause.
As a speechwriter, Mr. Dolan said, his job "was to be something of a mind reader," channeling Reagan's conservative political philosophy in speeches that were meant to inspire, challenge, intimidate or inform.
Among White House insiders, Mr. Dolan was known as an anti-communist hard-liner, leading a group of "true believers" - as fellow speechwriter Peter Robinson put it in a video tribute - against "the pragmatists," who favored a gentler, less antagonistic approach to the Kremlin. A colleague once described him to The Washington Post as "the wild-eyed, mean dog you use when you don't want them wondering what you said."
"Tony's ability to distill complex ideas into powerful, memorable speeches helped define the Reagan presidency and shaped the course of the Cold War," former Post publisher Fred Ryan, the chairman of the Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, said in a statement.
A wry and voluble figure with a fondness for cowboy boots and cigars, Mr. Dolan was initially known for songs, not speeches. As a sophomore at Yale University, he released an album of conservative folk tunes, "Cry, the Beloved Country" (1967), that landed him an agent in New York and an appearance on "The Merv Griffin Show."
The album included cheeky singles such as "Abolish, Abolish!," a defense of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and "New York Times Blues," which satirized the newspaper as a house organ of the left: "All the news that fits, we print / Embellished with a pinkish tint."
Mr. Dolan later turned to journalism, becoming one of the youngest Pulitzer Prize winners in history, at 29, when he received the 1978 award for local investigative specialized reporting. His series at the Stamford Advocate in Connecticut revealed municipal corruption, exposed organized crime's infiltration of the police department, and led to a wave of government resignations and dismissals.
According to the Advocate, his investigations led to threats. "After one story that alleged a local prominent resident was linked to the Carlo Gambino crime family, his car windshield was smashed and he got a note that ‘this is the least that can happen,'" the newspaper reported in 1978.
Mr. Dolan's experience covering the mob informed his subsequent work in the White House, where he helped support anti-crime initiatives in addition to writing speeches. He was the rare adviser to serve in all eight years of the administration - he was officially a special assistant to the president and chief speechwriter - and began to gain wider recognition after working on Reagan's first major speech abroad, a 1982 address to the British Parliament.
The president called on Britain to join "a crusade for freedom," a term associated with President Dwight D. Eisenhower, while strengthening NATO and negotiating arms treaties with the Soviets. "What I am describing now," Reagan said, "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."
Mr. Dolan echoed remarks from Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, who had once consigned his rivals to "the dustbin of history." Reagan "quite deliberately was using it to throw it back in the communists' faces," Mr. Dolan told the Associated Press.
The next year, Reagan used a draft from Mr. Dolan to deliver his "evil empire" speech before the National Association of Evangelicals. The president called on his audience to join him in opposing a nuclear freeze, championing the buildup of American armaments and promoting "a great spiritual awakening."
"I urge you to beware the temptation of pride," he added, "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."
The address, which was nicknamed "the Darth Vader speech" because of its Star Wars overtones, generated immediate criticism, especially among liberals. New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis called it "outrageous" and "primitive," lambasting Reagan for using "sectarian religiosity to sell a political program." Historian Henry Steele Commager declared that "it was the worst presidential speech in American history" and "a gross appeal to religious prejudice."
Yet behind the Iron Curtain, the speech was hailed by dissidents including Natan Sharansky, a Soviet Jew - later an Israeli politician - who learned about the address while imprisoned in the gulag. He later wrote that "President Reagan had from that moment made it impossible for anyone in the West to continue closing their eyes to the real nature of the Soviet Union. It was one of the most important, freedom-affirming declarations, and we all instantly knew it."
Mr. Dolan had tried for about a year to get the phrase "evil empire" into a speech, only to see it repeatedly scratched out, criticized by colleagues as overly strident. He had similar trouble with his "ash heap" language, according to Robinson, who said in the tribute that rival staffers had fought "tooth and nail" to take it out.
Yet Mr. Dolan proved adept at fighting for rhetorical flourishes, including another famous Reagan line - "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" - that was part of a 1987 speech drafted by Robinson.
The line was "in all kinds of ways a Tony Dolan production," Robinson said. Mr. Dolan "erected a kind of shield over me," he said, guarding him from criticism delivered by State Department and National Security Council officials who wanted him to tone down the language.
According to Mr. Dolan, the pressure continued until the morning Reagan delivered the line while standing at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin. Mr. Dolan recalled in a Wall Street Journal essay that for him and the other "true believers," the address "was the quintessential chance - in front of Communism's most evocative monument - to enunciate the anti-Soviet counterstrategy that Reagan had been putting in place since his first weeks in office."
The second of three children, Anthony Rossi Dolan was born in Norwalk, Connecticut, on July 7, 1948. His father was a Sears department store manager, Knights of Columbus member and retail executive at the Warnaco clothing business. His mother looked after the home and served on the Republican town committee.
Mr. Dolan graduated from Fairfield College Preparatory School in Connecticut and studied philosophy and history at Yale, where he wrote for the student newspaper. After receiving a bachelor's degree in 1970, he joined the successful U.S. Senate campaign of James L. Buckley, serving as a deputy press secretary for the New York conservative.
He later worked as a consultant for political strategist F. Clifton White and was a reporter at the Advocate from 1974 to 1980.
By then, he had found a mentor in William F. Buckley Jr., James's younger brother, who encouraged him to write for his magazine, the National Review, and recommended Mr. Dolan to the Reagan campaign.
Mr. Dolan later worked on presidential campaigns for Fred Thompson, Newt Gingrich and Ted Cruz. During the George W. Bush administration, he was a senior adviser to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and a special adviser to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. He returned to the White House under the first Trump administration, as special assistant to the president and adviser for planning, and in January he was named special assistant for domestic policy.
He was predeceased by his siblings, who also worked in conservative politics: John T. Dolan, who co-founded the National Conservative Political Action Committee, and Maiselle Shortley, who served in the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations. Mr. Dolan leaves no immediate survivors.
During the Reagan administration, Mr. Dolan said, "staying out of the paper" was a key part of his job. When he did sit for interviews, he was quick to note where he thought credit was due. "Speechwriting in the White House is plagiarizing Ronald Reagan," he told the New York Times in 1986. "He is the informing and sustaining intelligence behind all speechwriters."