March 8: the anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s famous “evil empire” speech

On March 8, 1983, President Ronald Reagan gave a speech in which he called the Soviet Union “an evil empire.”

This came near the end of that strange period between the years when the Soviet Union was our ally in World War II and the period since the dissolution of the USSR in the early 1990s. That period called “The Cold War.”

I was born in 1950 and lived through the Cold War era. I remember the fallout shelter craze, doing “duck and cover” drills in elementary school to practice what to do if atomic bombs started dropping in the middle of a school day, and being truly worried that a nuclear war would start.

Those childhood traumas tended to make me a supporter of nuclear disarmament and a fan of “The Bomb Song” by the legendary Hippie-era band, Country Joe & the Fish. The one with the chorus that goes: “Please don’t drop, don’t drop that H-bomb on me...”

When Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States in 1980, the Cold War was still ongoing. And, I basically thought Reagan might be crazy when he took positions that seemed to escalate the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union and basically sneered at suggestions about reducing or even just “freezing” the levels of nuclear weapons.

He was not only against a nuclear freeze, he was in favor of putting more NATO (read American) nuclear missiles in Western Europe, claiming that it was a necessary response to the Soviets’ deployment of nuclear missiles in Eastern Europe.

President Reagan decided to drop his word bomb — “evil empire” — on the Soviet Union at a convention of Christians, the annual meeting of the National Association of Evangelicals held on March 8, 1983 in Orlando, Florida.

Among other things, Reagan told them this:

“I urge you to speak out against those who would place the United States in a position of military and moral inferiority...In your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride, the temptation blithely to declare 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, good and evil.”

It wasn’t the first use of the term “evil empire.” Those words had previously been used in pulp magazines, movies, cartoons and political propaganda dating back to the early 20th Century.

But Reagan’s use of it to describe the Soviet Union was new and notable in American political rhetoric. And, it was quickly analyzed, repeated, praised, mocked and ultimately made famous.

When I read the news about that speech in 1983, I was sure Reagan was crazy.

Then, in the late 1980s, the Soviet Union, under General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, started changing, going broke and splitting apart. And, in the 1990s the Cold War faded away due to a lack of sufficient cash and, I guess, a lack of sufficiently evil ambitions on the part of what was left of the USSR.

In recent years, some historians have credited Reagan’s hard line stance on nuclear weapons — and even his use of the term “evil empire” — as reasons for the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. (There’s a write-up about this in Wikipedia, and a video of and commentary about Reagan’s “evil empire” speech on the Voices of Democracy website.)

So, was I wrong about Reagan being crazy? Maybe.

But I still sing along whenever I listen to the 1967 album I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die and hear Country Joe sing “The Bomb Song.”

It’s one of my favorites.

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