Ronald Reagan vs. The Evil Empire (Part 4)

Are you better off than you were four years ago?

After experiencing the worst economic recession, the economy starts to bounce back.

1983 was a banner year for America.

He has that famous line against Walter Mondale.

I am not going to exploit my opponent's youth and inexperience.

He wins another landslide victory.

It wasn't until 1985 that Reagan first addressed AIDS.

Reagan wasn't just trying to contain the Soviet Union, he wanted to end it.

They are the focus of evil in the modern world.

He launched the Strategic Defense Initiative.

I call upon the scientific community in our country to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.

Only one man has the proven experience we need.

Together, we'll make America great again.

Thank you very much.

Hello, and welcome to the Rest is Politics U.S.

and to our fourth episode of our mini-series, all about Ronald Reagan.

So let's go back in time.

It's 1983.

The American economy is roaring back.

The president is heading towards one of the biggest landslide victories in American history.

But behind all of that kind of sunny optimism of mourning in America, there are definitely darker currents that are flowing.

That's right, Caddy.

There's some rough stuff happening at home.

The AIDS crisis grows into a deadly epidemic, ignored by the White House for years.

Abroad, the Cold War is heating up.

Reagan calls the Soviet Union an evil empire.

He unveils his Star Wars missile defense plan and pushes the superpower rivalry to its most dangerous point since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

And this is what I think is so interesting in the context of today's America, because you have a very different leader in Ronald Reagan.

Even as those tensions are rising, you get this new face in Moscow.

Mikhail Gorbachev becomes the head of the Politburo and he opens the door to dialogue.

And for the first time, Reagan, who's been this staunch anti-communist, realizes he has somebody who can work with and he is prepared to work with him.

He shows real leadership, I think, at this moment.

And he imagines a world without nuclear weapons.

So was it just the triumph of vision?

Was it an image?

Was it showmanship?

What we're discussing in the clip that you're about to hear is Reagan's greatest legacy internationally.

It's a conflict that defined the second half of the 20th century.

Of course, it nearly brought the world to the brink of nuclear Armageddon.

And I think in some ways, it still defines international relations between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.

Reagan helped bring it to an end and bring about an era of relative stability and hope for the world.

You can sign up at therestispoliticsus.com to hear the full series, but here's a little clip we wanted to give you.

Beyond America's borders, there's an even bigger test of Reagan's vision, of his image that is playing out.

The Cold War was entering one of its most dangerous phases.

And Reagan wasn't just trying to contain the Soviet Union.

He wanted to end it.

He wanted to win.

From his Hollywood days to the governor's mansion, he'd always been a fierce anti-communist.

And now, as president, he was willing to push the standoff harder than any American leader in decades.

It's pretty clear what he thinks about the Soviet Union.

I mean, in March of 1983, he has given that famous speech, which comes to be known as the Evil Empire speech, which

ratchets up the rhetoric.

against the Soviet Union and becomes very controversial.

On the left, people are calling it reckless.

It's even described as the worst presidential speech in history.

But

it does indicate how Ronald Reagan is framing this battle, and he's convinced that the Soviet Union wants to take a much more aggressive posture towards the West.

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.

So critics have been outraged by what he said,

especially because Reagan had also spoken about wanting to have an understanding with Moscow, that there was this slightly conflicted messages.

And there was even hesitation within the White House about the use of that kind of language.

I asked Reagan's chief speechwriter how the phrase had made it into the final draft of the evil empire speech.

And he spoke about

people who had objections to it, including the head of communications, David Gergen.

Objections were raised, and I think the issue was brought to him.

And I think he decided to leave it in, as he did with the Berlin Wall speech.

As I recall, Dave Gergen said just something like, We can't say that.

I mean, that's just so, you know, that's so far out.

I said, Dave, you know that he believes that.

He said it in so many words, and that's really nothing new for the president.

It's just a little bit more punctuated.

To the Kremlin, though, of course, that was very confrontational.

It didn't speak of reconciliation.

And I think it led to this sense of paranoia on both sides

with Reagan

building up massively this 600-ship navy to fight a land power like the Soviet Union.

I mean, why did they need so many ships?

He built a non-stealth bomber that could easily have been targeted by the Soviet air defenses.

He spends an awful lot of money.

And he is convinced, interestingly, at this point, that the Soviet Union's military is very powerful and potentially more powerful than the United States's military, even though Jimmy Carter's outgoing CIA chief had tried to tell him back in 1981 that the USSR didn't have a military advantage over America.

Reagan just wouldn't listen, I think, because it ran counter to his own views.

He had very fixed ideas when it came to the Soviet threat.

You saw it not just with...

reference to the Soviet Union itself, but of course with all of the things that Reagan became obsessed with in Latin America, this idea of what he called a red lake of communism creeping through the Caribbean and through Latin America as well.

Do you think that

he was clear-eyed, Anthony, about the Soviet threat?

He wasn't clear-eyed about the Soviet Union.

So that assessment is correct.

What he got right was the magnificence of the American economy to absorb the greatest peacetime defense spending in our history.

He got that right because it was overwhelming to the Russians.

And so when he gave the SDI speech.

Tell us what the SDI speech is.

So basically, he gives a speech in March of 1983.

I was on spring break in Fort Lauderdale, observing wet t-shirt contests at that time.

So I know that's inappropriate to bring up, but I am going to bring it up because I was in the 7-Eleven getting a Slurpee.

And on the cover of Time magazine was Ronald Reagan with the Star Wars speech.

I said, okay, I I got to buy this.

I got that.

I had my Big Mac and my Slurpee, and I read the article, never forget this.

And it was about Reagan saying that we were going to have anti-ballistic missile technology that would use lasers, et cetera, and shoot down the ICBMs that were coming from Russia.

And so this technology was going to be such that the mutual assured destruction, that whole theory in the 1950s, wasn't going to hold anymore because we could launch our missiles, wipe out the Soviet Union.

They would launch their missiles and we would neutralize them in outer space.

And so it was far-fetched at the time and people didn't think it was going to work.

But the Russians believed it.

The Russians were very afraid of it.

And I think he did something that you got to give him credit for.

This escalation led to some level of the Russians saying, hey, man, our economy's faltering.

We got to get to the table with the Americans and we got to end our own personal arms buildup.

By the way, I just want people to know that are listening to this, that you can't see the eye rolls and the facial expressions of Caddy Kay as I talk about the ignorance and immaturity of my youth.

But I just want to point out

only the wet t-shirt competition that was getting an eye roll.

I was okay with the slurpee.

I could even handle the hot dog.

That was at the wet t-shirt competition.

That was at the button bar on the strip in Fort Lauderdale.

I'm just trying to provide facts here.

And what's so interesting about SDI, as Max Boot, Reagan's biographer, explained to me, was that Reagan was so

it didn't look like it could work, but Reagan was so obsessed with it.

And as we'll hear, it later goes on to almost derail the talks between the two sides.

He launched the Strategic Defense Initiative with the goal of protecting the United States from nuclear missile attack, even though the consensus of scientists at the time and subsequently was that this was not a realistic objective, but Reagan believed in it.

He went ahead with it.

And he also engaged in

very hardline rhetoric against what he called the evil empire

and talked about how communism was going to be consigned to the ash heap of history in his famous 1982 Westminster address.

And so that led to a lot of people to fear that he was a warmonger, that he was leading the world to the brink of nuclear Armageddon.

What people didn't realize at the time was Ronald Reagan himself had that very concern that even though he was very anti-communist, he was also a very anti-nuclear weapon.

And in fact, in many ways, his opposition to a nuclear freeze did not come about because he was a warmonger.

It really came about because he thought a nuclear freeze did not go far enough.

Katie, and I hope that you enjoyed that clip.

If you want to hear the full series, head to the restispoliticsus.com.