DOLAN SPEECH

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP85M00364R001803590023-4
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 25
• Document Creation Date: December 20, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 14, 2008
• Sequence Number: 23
• Publication Date: July 20, 1983
• Content Type: REPORT

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(Dolan)
July 20, 1983
10:00 a.m.
The American experience with the British aristocracy has
been somewhat limited -- at least since the latter part of the
18th century. I think you can understand what it means to an
American to be here in this building to address a group of this
stature. And this is not even to mention the awe with which many
of my countrymen regard all.things British, not the least of
which is your accent. The publisher of National Review, William
Rusher, has over the years brought together a compendium of
personal wit and wisdom known amongst his admirers'as "Rusher's
Laws". One of the laws says if you want an American to believe.
something get an Englishman to tell him it's so.
But here I am today in, as the social scientists would put
it -- albeit badly -- a role reversal. But I take heart. You
may remember that when the President addressed the Parliament
last June he said he was fearful on just this count; but added
that he was encouraged by the tolerance you usually show your
younger if somewhat less-tutored cousins. He stressed the
"usually" because he recollected Winston Churchill's famous loss
of patience with his American counterpart, one of our most
distinguished diplomats, John Foster Dulles. At a press
conference no less, Churchill said of Dulles, "He is the only
case I know of a bull carrying his own china closet with him."
I readily admit we Americans have earned a reputation for a
certain roughness around the edges, a kind of distruptive
naivete, a certain lack of Old World learning.
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The American tourist is held largely responsible. The
husband and wife, for example, who got off the tour bus at the
art gallery in Florence. As they entered the first room of
masterpieces, husband said to wife: "O.K., Rose, you. take this
side, I'11 take that."
And then, of course, there was the American couple gazing on
the Mona Lisa in the Louvre. Wife to husband: "Fred wouldn't
that look nice next to the picture window in the living room."
My friend, Rev. Bernard Bassett of Oxford, is unrelenting on
this subject: He likes to amuse his American retreatants with
some of the scandalous things you used to say about our GIs when
they were stationed here in World War II.
"What is the difference," one story went, "between an
American chewing gum and a cow chewing his cud." British
answer: "The look of intelligence on the cow's Lace."
Shortly before his visit here to you last June the President
talked to some of us on these matters. In one conference on his
speaking schedule he mentioned. that just after the war when he
was in England making a wonderful film called the Hasty Heart a
British army officer explained to him the essential difference
between the English and the Americans with this story.
One day during the war this officer was standing in a pub
with another group of British servicemen. A group of American
airmen entered nosily, set up a round or two, got a bit rowdy and
started making some toasts that were less than complimentary to
Great Britain -- and especially to British leadership, as a
matter of fact, royal leadership.
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To heck (and I'm not quoting their words exactly) " . . . to
heck with . . . a prominent member of British royalty," the Yanks
shouted.
Properly offended and not to be outdone -- the British
officer'and his friends responded with a toast of their own:
"(and here the quotation is more exact) . . . to hell with
the President of the United States."
Whereupon all the Americans hastily grabbed their glasses,
hoisted them high and shouted, "By God, we'll. drink to that."
So, I would like to think we Americans take our rough
reputation with some good humor and perhaps even with a little
pride. A certain rambunctiousness after all, is the privilege of
youth -- we have been a Nation for only a little over two
centuries, fully on the world stage, for only a generation or
two. During Watergate Harold MacMillian was generous enough to
note that the British should be understanding towards America's
troubles: Your own early history, he pointed out, was more than a
little uproarious. My personal favorite is about one of your
early kings -- one of the Henrys as I recall -- who demanded
angrily of the Duke of Dublin whether it was true he had burned
down the local cathedral. Yes, the duke replied, but only
because I thought the Archbishop was inside.
Enough of this, because I am here today to talk about the
business of speechwriting'in the Reagan White House.
First, the process. I am always amazed at the interest in
this; the questions never seem to stop. The President gives a
fair number of speeches, not to mention the remarks he makes
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almost daily at Rose Garden or East Room ceremonies; all of these
texts travel the usual White House channels and the whole
business seems a matter of very unremarkable routine.
Still, there seems to be an unquenchable thirst for the
behind-the-scenes story. So unspectacular though I find it, here
it is. A request for a presidential appearance is sent to us by
a public group or member of Congress; it goes on to scheduling,
the domain of Presidential Assistant, Michael Deaver. There are
certain constants in deciding what invitations are accepted:
does it fit the schedule, can the occasion be used to emphasize
the President's personal concern about a problem or a :policy
decision that is imminent? All of you are sophisticated about
this
over
sort of thing, there is a kind of weird symbiosis that takes
-- time, event, people and policy all curiously intermix,
somehow
address
tuition
a national event is born as the Presiden
makes plans to
the NAACP on social justice or the, Catholic educators on
tax credits or homebuilders on. our tax and spending
Obviously the message is to.he aimed not just at
audience but to the media, the Congress, to the
theI
American public.
After the decision is made to go with an appearance -- a
writer and researcher is assigned; we talk to the President, look
at what he's said in the past to this group or on that issue and
come up with a draft. It will get a circulation among the: senior
staff and the interested cabinet departments -- it will then go,
with suggested changes, to the President. Almost always, this
will happen after his normal working day. He will sit there in
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his shirtsleeves, as I have seen him do, in his upstairs office
in the residence. He will take the draft and, as he likes to
say, "go to work."
I think those words are the most. important aspect of
speechwfiting at the Reagan White House. I'm going to do
startle you now and become one of the few people you will ever
meet from Washington, D.C. who will freely admit the title he
holds is entirely: fraudulent.
Ronald Reagan is his own chief speechwriter -- always has
been, always will be. He is also the best speechwriter. And
certainly the most prolific.
The President is one of those people journeymen writers find
distressing. It's easy for him, he can write out in long hand on
a yellow legal pad in a matter of hours the. full text of an
address. I think back to one of the broadcasts on budget matters
last year -- the Gang of 17 speech it was called after. the 17
participants involved in White House-congressional negotiations.
The President wasn't comfortable with any of the drafts that had
been sent to him so on the day of the speech, he simply sat down
(with, by the way, a visit and lunch with the Prime Minister of
someplace squeezed in between) and produced the text. And it was
much the same with the President's recent Central American
address to the Congress. The President knew exactly what he
wanted; didn't get it from the resident geniuses, sat down and
produced it himself in a matter of hours. I doubt many
professional writers are capable of that kind of performance even
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in our illustrious press corps. Certainly no one else in the
government is.
What is important here is not just Ronald Reagan the
speechmaker . . . but Ronald Reagan the.speechwriter. He has
remarkable analytical and descriptive powers, an instinctive
grasp of rhetorical devices (you remember the things
schoolmasters used to point out about Cicero's speeches:
parallelism, the use of repetition, dramatic build -- :look at the
Reagan speeches over the last few decades). There is an
wonderful cadence to his sentences; and his sense of outline, of
structure to a speech -- there is a beginning, middle and an
end -- is highly developed..
As I say it comes natural. The other day, in the Oval
Office, the President told a story about welcoming home -- as
California's Governor -- our P.O.W.s from Vietnam. He related it
vividly, in rich detail. It was a remarkable display of
spur-of-the-moment eloquence about an event long ago; it was
moving and unprepared.
Yet for all of this I would take issue with those who label
him simply the great communicator. I say this because a
successful political speech is more than mellifluous words, more
than just a performance. There are plenty of people who speak
words well. Ronald Reagan does that -- his voice and presence
are engaging. But there is far more to his rhetorical success
than that.
His speeches are imbued with firmly held principles,
principles he has spent years thinking about, carfully arguing
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and explaining -- and writing about. And writing after all is a
syllogistic enterprise. It is precisely that experience which
forces people to focus their thoughts, to line up their
arguments, to discover what they know, to develop the broad
perspective. Over the years Ronald Reagan's speeches have borne
a personal stamp of syntax, logic and insight, all brought to
bear for a personal political philosophy that has been developed
through three decades. Indeed, this is a most unusual. point
about him, his own years in public life have been-dominated not
so much by a lust for high office or great power as by a
conscious effort to write, to think, to reflect, to gain that
broad perspective -- to make if you will public statements that
made sense.
And so in an age that puts so much emphasis on style and
with a president renown for his speaking style, the Reagan
speeches have relied in large part on something else for their
success. The great communicator has also been the great
"rhetorician" in the classical sense of that word. He knows a
good speech must provide information and close argument and the
speaker must be willing to let the text do much of the work.
That's why the Reagan speeches work, they'go somewhere, they say
something. I think they are evidence even in modern politics
that substance counts; that ideas really do matter.
This is important to the United States and to your
understanding of our country; in the past, a lack of coherence in
our political leaders has led to failed presidencies and failed
administrations. One former Attorney General noted in a recent
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book that the administration he was part of lost totally its
sense of direction because it was swayed by so many political
pressures and cause celebres. For that administration, the lack
of a fixed body of thought or a theoretical and rhetorical
framework into which policy' decisions could be fitted was fatal.
This I think could be traced to the pre-Reagan decline in
the value placed on speechwriting in American politics -- the
easiest vehicle for conveying the best thinking of an
administration. Indeed, to many Washington operatives saying
something in public -- the speech -- had become something a
candidate or public official also does, a sort of addendum to his
real duties. Those real duties were supposed to be something
called managing the bureaucracy -- which actually meant getting
bogged down in the minutiae of public office, the day to day
staff work, the attempt to answer this complaint, to put out that
'brushfire, pacify this special interest -- ultimately, to be all
things. to all people.
The irony is, of course, that by not making this sort of
concern his first priority, Ronald Reagan has been more
successful at running the bureaucracy and mollifying the special
interests than his predecessors. Besides'setting out the agenda
for the Nation and the Congress, the President has used his
speeches as a'managerial tool. Rather than issuing executive
orders itemized to the nth degree in a fruitless attempt to
control every last aspect of an impossibly large bureaucracy, the
President has chosen the far more effective course of setting
directions and parameters for the middle managers in Government
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through mood and tone and general guidelines. (A recent
bestseller, In Search of Excellence, a study of successful
American corporations, finds that shared values and a sense of
mission are far more important to successful management than
corporate structures or manipulated rewards.)
And by not backing off his principles, by sticking to them
and publicly arguing their importance, he has also had
considerable success with the special interests.. Even members of
.the electorate who do not agree with his positions, derive a
sense of well being from a public leader whose general. policy
thrust they understand, whose views are manifestly coherent and
consistent. (Even if they disagree. It does seem that
electorates in modern democracies will tolerate negatives about
their leaders but not incomprehensibles.) in any case, it is
this sense of well being that stabilizes the vital signs of the
body politic and makes surgery on our national problems possible.
As the President once put it, consensus flows in public life from
coherence and consistency, not vice versa.
It is by bringing about this consensus on issues where
consensus was said to be impossible, Ronald Reagan has arguably
had the most successful first term since Franklin Roosevelt.
Witness the success of the Reagan legislative agenda. In
achieving this, I think the President has suggested that the key
to successful leadership in a modern democracy lies not nearly so
much as we think in looking good or sounding good as in. saying
something comprehensible, something intelligible.
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The President sees his addresses as the vehicle for
accomplishing this. For him the speeches are at the core of what
a president does, particularly in a system where his national
mandate must be frequently replenished, a very different sort of
system from your own where a prime minister retains the
confidence of a parliamentary majority and retains the option of
calling new elections.
And in this way, Ronald Reagan has transformed the modern
American presidency, he has used his speeches not as an
ex-post-facto description of the policy process, an afterthought,
but as the culmination of that process.
I think that is why for the most part the Reagan
administration has been intelligible. It has a leader who has a
sense of how he wishes to have history view his presidency, he
has his eye on his broad agenda.
It is precisely this capacity for the overview that I think
says something terribly important.about.the_man, Ronald Reagan.--
something I think is especially important for Europeans -- who
rarely see him in other than a formal setting -- to know.
He is at ease with himself. One catches glances of this
close-up; if there is anything more pleasant in this world than a
speech meeting with the current occupant of the White House, I
don't know it. Even with the enormous cares on his shoulders, he
is prodigiously witty, full of jokes and, if it does not sound
disrespectful, plain fun. You may remember it was so even,on the
day he took a bullet in the chest. (I saw something of this
myself shortly after he returned to his routine following his
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convalescence. We were in a meeting on a speech he was about to
give on federalism -- his program to decentralize government in
America by returning more power to the States and local
communities. One of the very serious minded young aides kept
insisting that he had seen an earlier draft of the federalism
speech. The President who remembers what he has seen and hasn't
seen, insisted that he had not. "Oh, yes sir, you did," said the
young aide, "In fact, you had the text in your papers the day you
were shot."
"Oh, now I remember," the President responded, his eyes
beginning to twinkle, "that was the night I neglected my
homework.")
There is a peace about him. He lacks all the strange
inhibitions and drives -- the demons, the wild creatures -- that
so frequently take up residence in the personas of public men.
Sanity is something to be valued in public men. I think
Ronald Reagan'.s stems.from his origins. Hugh Sidney,- who writes-
a column on the American presidency for Time magazine, once
described Ronald Reagan -- in the shrewdest remark ever made
about him -- as "a small town romantic". Ronald Reagan is from
America's small town culture, once nostalgically described by Ray
Bradbury as "the clapboard houses, the boys playing baseball on
summer nights, the families sitting on porches." He really
believes in the values exemplfied in the homey scenes of Norman
Rockwell for the old Saturday Evening Post: the good cheer, the
horse sense, the gift for dreaming. (Forgive a personal note
here but I spent 6 years as a newspaper reporter in a mid-sized
American city and I covered the Middle Americans: their Kiwanis
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clubs, their church suppers, their city council meetings, their
fights with City Hall. I think I can report that those people
out there in the shopping centers and bowling alleys are sound
and good; that their America still does exist and that. Ronald
Reagan embodies their strengths. Indeed, I think it is
interesting that at least one of his potential opponents in the
next presidential race is. now placing talk about "traditional
values" at the center of his campaign -- those themes of work,
family, neighborhood, country and religion that the President so
skillfully emphasized during the 1980 contest.)
I am not here to try and suggest that the story of Ronald
Reagan is that of bare-virtue triumphant, a sort of Will Rogers
goes to Washington. Obviously, he is a man of ambition and
accomplishment. He made it in Hollywood, he was a successful
president of an important union, he was the two Eerm governor of
a State that were it a country would be the 7th largest nation in
the world -- and he now holds the office of the presidency.
I sometimes reach for my shootin iron when I hear people say
the President is not that incisive or that attentive to matters
of detail. I see the speech drafts he sends back -- the sense of
what will work and will not work in a public address, the
astonishingly accurate recall of statistics or anecdotes of long
ago, the ability to persuade.
His mind is piercing; I would say first rate. "I see Mr.
President," I said at the end of that speech conference on the
federalism speech, "you want to suggest that federalism
promotes creativity . . .
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"No," he responded in a retort that would have pleased
Jefferson, "it permits creativity."
Ronald Reagan is unusually brainy. But that is not his most
remarkable quality -- his clarity of vision and his virture are.
(And a good thing too.) But these are qualities that invite to
some rather silly minds, many of them in the media,
condescension. They dislike small town America; and their
distaste blinds them to the current president's high
intelligence.
A note here on the media. They really do perform a daily
miracle in transferring so much information so rapidly and with
so much accuracy. Yet too often the media forgets that the very
vehicle that makes possible this miracle -- their proximity to
events -- is the major obstacle to any consistent kind of
historical perspective. This is why the press tends to
underestimate people like Ronald Reagan-who change past patterns
on them. (My favorite headline from Civil'War journalism is
about Stonewall Jackson that brilliant hit and run general of the
confederacy, following a thrashing he had given some Union
forces. It reads: "He declines to fight and runs away." And
this is not even to mention Lincoln's press -- who was so
frequently criticized for his anecdotes and folksy stories, so
rich with wisdom but so misunderstood by the self important and
all too serious people in the Nation's capital. Sound familiar?)
Ronald Reagan's political success is derived precisely from
his refreshing conviction that there is room for a clear vision,
for straight talk, his belief that the democratic process is
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essentially a sound and healthy one. He does not believe that
success in politics and in governing derives from a
lot of inside moves or Machiavellian maneuvers or crude displays
to the electorate of what's in it for them -- (this "pragmatism"
is espedially characteristic of American politicians as they
announce what will turn out to be unsuccessful bids for the
presidency or of European diplomats as they are about to blunder
into another world war). His faith instead lies with the simple
attempt to choose the right course and then go explain
yourself -- as often and as clearly as necessary -- to the
people.
Now all of this is a prelude to speaking directly to the
concerns of those of you here today. You have devoted. yourself
to the defense of the alliance, to the defense of our freedom, to
the defense of the civilized ideas that were nourished. here in
Great Britain: individual liberty, representative government,
the rule of law under-God.:.
And I think that with his gift for simple truths (in the
sense that all real insight in art, literature or philosophy
relies on simplicity) the President has laid out for us the
essentials of a foreign policy. Let-me mention a few points
quickly.
First, from his very first press conference when he pointed
out that Marxist/Leninist ideology justifies any form of deceit
or mayhem when utilized to further the revolution, the President
has made it plain that he does not accept the Soviet formulation
that utterances of truth about its empire are acts of aggression
or belligerence. From that press conference -- to his Parliament
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speech, to his U.N. speech, to his Orlando speech -- the
President has made a point of being frank about the Soviets.
If I may, I would like to offer a few observations, strictly
personal, on why I believe this to be a crucial development.
First, in view of the wildly intemperate but official and
frequent attacks of the Soviet government on Western statesmen
(the President, for example, is "lunatic", responsible for a
"cesspool") I think the feeling is growing among Western leaders
that they are entitled to an occasional lapse into the truth as a
form of response. Second, there is another growing perception:
the realization that the most powerful weapon in the Western
arsenal quite simply is candor. Few of us in the West have
really understood this power -- the Soviets always have. Witness
the money they spend on jamming. And I remember Secretary Haig
expressing astonishment after his first meeting with one Soviet
diplomat who spent most of his-time complaining about the
President's remarks and speeches. Secretary Haig should have
understood the fear totalitarian leaders have of rhetorical
candor from their adversaries -- power illegitimately accrued and
shared by a tiny oligarchy makes for an enormously fragile (if
highly dangerous) regime. No one understands this better than
those at the top of this sort of shaky structure. They also know
nothing does more to undermine the mythology or their own power
than evidence that there are those still brave enough to tend to
the seeds of truth.
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Indeed, Victor Buckovsky makes just this fascinating point
when he explains that the Soviet leaders must always be
challenging the West precisely because they must always be
sending a message to those they fear most: their own people.
The Soviets, Bukovsky says,'are riding a tiger, a tiger who can
easily go wild. So the message behind their compulsive
expansionism is a simple one and directed at their own
countrymen: "even the West will not stand up to us, don't you
even think about it."
That is why the Soviets fear Ronald Reagan's candor: When
the West appears not to be accepting a fate supposedly determined
by the scientific laws of history, the reverberations are felt
within the empire itself, indeed the whole rationale of the
Soviet state is called into question. Hopes of freedom are relit
everywhere and internal dissidence is encouraged.. The sudden
blooming of Solidarity in Poland is the most recent example of
how quickly man's aspirations to truth-and-freedom can-get--out of--
control (even in the most repressive of police states) once the
truth gets a little growing room. Totalitarian states, like most
evil enterprises, are at root fragile and I think the President
senses this.
(Forgive one other personal note. In the town I worked in
as a reporter, an old political machine has become tied into an
organized crime family and word was spread far and wide about
their invulnerability and their enormous capacity for crushing
those who challenged them. But when a newspaper and a, few dedicated
citizens spoke out -- and finally when hints of the bad guy's
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imminent doom at the the hands of federal investigators were
dropped -- the whole multi-million dollar monstrosity collapsed.
"Like the Mafia, only worse," former Ambassador Chip Bohlen is
reputed to have said about the Soviets. He was talking about
their strengths. The weaknesses are also the same.)
There is a third reason why the President's candor is
important. We should not forget that the greatest danger of
silence about the nature of the Soviets is to ourselves, our own
integrity. This is the great moral price we paid during the
years of detente. If we do not give voice to our most. cherished
beliefs, if we do not make -- in public -- the crucial. moral
distinctions about the world we live in, we lose our grip on
those beliefs, on those distinctions. If such values are not
nourished through public expression, a kind of moral atrophy sets
in and at moments of crisis we find ourselves without the stamina
to resist the rhetorical or physical aggressions of our
adversaries. Without the exercise of our rhetorical muscles, our
moral and intellectual sinews grow lifeless.
Fourth and finally, the President's candor shows us a way
out of this dilemma of detente. The problem with the advocates
of detente was that they wanted a modus vivideni so badly with
the Soviets that they were willing to sacrifice our moral capital
(Solzhenitsyn was not welcome at the White House) in order to
achieve it. And yet-they would then bitterly complain when
Congress or the American people did not support their seemingly
sudden decisions to reverse course and respond firmly to some
inevitable Soviet provocation. The truth is, of course, that in
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democracies the electorate will not mount the ramparts or even
stand long by their government for the sake of the nuances of
some Harvard dean's theory of how to conduct war in Southeast
Asia or some professor's theory on the balance of power in the -
1970's.' A foreign policy based on the esoteric permutations of a
strategic doctrine understood by only a few leaders and diplomats
is a foreign policy that doesn't work, at least in a democracy.
Our foreign policies must have public support; and so they must
be explained. And to the common people they become
intelligible -- and this brings us to the sixth point --only
when explained within a framework of right and wrong, in moral
terms. This does not mean that on every possible occasion we
must vocalize at the top of our lungs about every Soviet
transgression but it does mean a long-term commitment to the
essential truths about those transgressions. If you will forgive
me, too many professional diplomats especially in Europe spend a
great deal of energy counseling America to be practical, or
machiavellian. They miss the most important point-- that a
foreign policy must have a moral center or else it is not a
foreign policy at all. That is the point of "public diplomacy."
We need to remind ourselves that the world is not the
diplomat's turkey to be carved at will according to the
expediencies of the moment. Nor is the struggle now going on in
the world a chess game for foreign service types: a few moves, a
stalemate, a brandy, handshakes all around and home to bed_ All
of this is the path to disaster; two world wars in this century
should have established that. Always in our memory there
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must be the sight of the poor Czechs at the so-called peace
conference in Munich trying to discover what the men of affairs
had done to seal their fate. Today the freedom of the people of
Eastern Europe or the Baltic nations or the republics of the
Soviet Union.is important. No one has given us the right to be
silent on these matters, to barter away their rights.
To our first observation (the President's candor about the
Soviet empire) should be added a second: it has generally been
skillful candor. In his first press conference, he did not boldy
denounce the Soviets as liars and thieves as some have reported,
he made the more sophisticated point that their ideology
justified such illicit activities and that the West would do well
to remember this. Or,a s some of you may remember, in. his
address to the Parliament, the President took note of a
fascinating point made by professor Richard Pipes: that Marx was
right; that demands.of the economic order are leading to
inevitable clashes with the demands of the political - order in_
many modern countries -- except that this is happening not in the
capitalistic but in the communist nations. Or look closely at
the Orlando speech. The President spoke of America's legacy of
evil -- racism, anti-semitism -- and devoted several paragraphs
to injunctions against these problems. But he went on to note
that the greatest human suffering in this century has been done
by those who use the state-to totally subserviate the
individual -- and that the exponents of this theory make
themselves the focus of evil in the modern world as long as they
hold to it.
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I would argue that in all of these remarks about the Soviets
there has been present something more than harsh ananthema or
hurled thunderbolt. As Hannah Arendt suggested in a book some
years ago on the Eichman trail, evil at its root is banal. Naked
denunciations tend only to glamorize it and make it more
important than it is. Ronald Reagan, as a matter of instinct,
avoids that course; for more than 25.years his reflections on
communism have been pointed rather than harsh.
On a third point, and consistent with what has gone before,
the President has also suggested that the old policies of
containment, detente and brinkmanship are inadequate - that they
are essentially defensive postures. I think the President
believes that we in the West for too long have expressed our
foreign policy goals in the negative: i.e. resistance: to Soviet
expansionism. More is needed to rally the,world than a negative
formulation. This the President has given us. It was his
personal decision. last year to speak to you about democracy on
the march, of a day when all the people of the world will enjoy
freedom. Indeed, he has used the term a "forward strategy for
freedom" as a goal of the Western democracies. (I was asked in
Paris by Andre Fontaine the editor of Le Monde, if this was not
more of John Foster Dulles' "rollback" theory. I said no. I
said it because, as the President has suggested, the direction of
history and the aspirations of mankind are towards democracy,
towards a recognition of human rights. So it is the totalitarian
states who are the obstructionists; it is they not we -- who
are for "rollbacks".)
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A fourth key element in the President's foreign policy
remarks has been an unrelenting concern with the danger of
nuclear war and an unswerving commitment to negotiations with the
Soviets, especially in the nuclear arms. area but also on a broad
range of issues. Some may find here -- in view of the
President's candor about the Soviet system -- a contradiction. I
think not. Those who are candid with themselves about. our Soviet
adversaries are also the most apt to make progress in
negotiations with them. I would remind you an administration
that began its foreign policy initiatives with a declaration
renouncing "an inordinate fear of communism" and rushed to Moscow
with new SALT proposals was the administration that ended with
headlines proclaiming the worst state of East/West relations in
decades: the years of the Afghanistan invasion, the Olympic
boycott, the grain embargo, the actual talk of war before a joint
session of Congress by a president deeply concerned about Soviet
intrusions in Southwest Asia. It is self-delusion that brings us
to the brink, to confrontations, not honesty.
The Soviet regime is totalitarian, and the evil of
totalitarianism lies in its irresistible impulse to justify
itself at home and abroad by ever increasing attempts to acquire
more real estate. Every publicly expressed self-delusion or
spontaneously proferred concession by the other side is viewed by
them as a weakness to exploited. The Soviets negotiate seriously
only when they know their interlocutors are serious people, who
know what they are about, who are not afraid to say so and say so
publicly and who cannot be intimidated or exploited.
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I think the problem lies with those of us in the West who
tend to "mirror image" the Soviets -- to think their minds work
like our own. We forget or underestimate the burdens carried by
those at the top of illegitimate, totalitarian regimes. Such
enterprises are by nature expansionist; their rulers -'- far from
taking offense when confronted -- only become manageable when
their designs are understood and exposed -- in full public view.
The West has not lacked a foreign policy or a strategic doctrine
nearly so much as it has a phenomenology of evil. Much of the
Western cognescenti has trouble grasping this. I sometimes think
a more careful attention to MacBeth, or a study of the reign of
Henry VIII or a rereading of Shirer's history of the Third Reich
would do more for Western diplomats or statesmen than all of the
technical or scholarly works on the Soviets in Foreign Affairs
Magazine. Evil expands unless it is brought to book. The
President's candor about the Soviets helps us along the path
towards negotiations, it does not obstruct it.
Finally, I think there has been something daring and
altogether new in the President's. foreign policy pronouncements.
He has said we are going to win. He holds that inherent strength
of Western values and beliefs in such that they will permit us
not to contain: but "to transcend communism"; that communism,
like most evil enterprises, is compelled to commit greater and
greater outrages until it ultimately self destructs; that
communism, therefore, is an episode, a "sad bizarre chapter in
human history whose last pages even now are being written."
has even suggested on one occasion to Mrs. Thatcher that perhaps
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the time has come for Western leaders to begin planning for the
post-Soviet world.
It is a courageous thing -- in a world so legitimately
concerned with Soviet power and the danger of nuclear war -- to
say suctf things. Partly, of course, there is the innate optimism
of small town America here. And by the way its shrewdness. From
the start, the only really attractive thing the Soviets have had
going for them, especially with the Third World, is their subtle
exploitation of the immensly powerful and perfectly human desire
to be on the side of the winners. Strip away the bogus
humanitarianism and the general silliness and that is the central
appeal of Marxism/Leninism. The President is taking this one
great weapon from the Soviets when he claims it is the Western
democracies who are in the vanguard of history.)
But this is more than a tactic. The President believes
it -- traces of this were emerging in his speeches in the 70's.
And if we think him too optimistic, we should recall that his
daring point is repeated by some of the most celebrated minds of
our century.
"The whole world is drenched with the crude conviction that
might accomplishes all, righteousness nothing," Alexander
Solzhenitsyn observed in suggesting that truth and virtue have
enormous power.
And William Faulkner, a magisterial writer, not exactly
pollyanna, predicted when he received the Nobel Prized that man
in the face of war and totalitarianism would not merely endure,
"he will prevail." He will prevail because he will return to the
old. verities and truths of the heart."
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"He is immortal because the alone among creatures. has a
soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and
endurance."
Recently, a cinematic account.of this human capacity for
compassion and sacrifice and endurance greatly moved Ronald
Reagan. Word tends to get around the White House when the
President is pleased. Let me tell you about it. We Americans do
not much like to lose, particularly at sports, and we are not
wild about seeing films commemorating the event. But,. I can
assure you not just the President but the whole nation was moved
by the wonderful story of your two victorious British athletes in
the 1920 Olympics. You may remember the story of Harold Abrahms,
a young Jew, whose victory -- as his Italian immigrant coach put
it -- was a triumph for all those who have escaped oppression and
.come here to England for refuge and freedom..It was the triumph
too of Eric Liddell a young Scot whose own refusal to sacrifice
his religious convictions for fame. spoke to. the great.her.itage.of..
our civilization.
There is a moving scene when Liddell reads the words of
Isiah: that those who wait upon the Lord shall renew their
strength, that they shall mount up with wings as eagles, they
shall not run and not be weary.
I think this is Ronald Reagan's incredible contribution; he
believes in the enormous strength our civilization derives from
its commitment to a higher law, a greater destiny. As. Jefferson
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pointed out, as your own distinguished historians Sir Kenneth
Clark and Christopher Dawson have noted -- this spiritual insight
is the basis of our civilization, the reason for the flowering of
our arts and philosophies, the seedbed for our ideas about the
dignity 'of man and his right to self-government. The President
believes that we are up to the struggle ahead and that. the
spiritual insight of the West can be the source of incalcuable
strength, our ultra secret.
So what then? Another spring for Prague, this time one that
endures? Solzhenitsyn at the Finland Station? High mass in the
Lubyanka?
This is not so outrageous. We have been this way before.
You remember more than four decades ago, another American
president told his people they faced a rendevous with destiny, a
British prime minister asked his own people for their finest
hour. To our two peoples, Ronald Reagan has been bold. enough to
suggest that once again we have such a rendevous,.such,_an-hour
before us. He believes victory can again be. ours -- but that we
must go forward boldly and together -- if you will, as on
chariots of fire -- to stand-for freedom, to speak for humanity,
to usher in a new age conjoining all the wonders of modern life
with the realization of man's oldest aspirations for peace and
freedom.
The words of Tennyson are fitting, are they not? "Come my
friends and let us seek a newer world."
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