Anthony R. “Tony” Dolan died last Monday. He was a gifted writer—and a cherished friend. He graduated from Yale in 1970, his talent already having been recognized by a fellow Yalie, William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of the modern Conservative Movement. He went immediately to work on James L. Buckley’s successful campaign for the U.S. Senate from New York, and then spent a lifetime in politics, with a foray into journalism, writing for the Stamford Advocate in Connecticut, and winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1978.
Dolan joined the speech-writing team of President Reagan having, undoubtedly, been highly recommended by Buckley, a close friend of the president. Dolan, and his cowboy boots, hung out in the White House all eight years of the Reagan administration, not dressed at all like the few pictures you can find on the internet of him (in a three-piece suit with a watch chain and collar pin) shaking Reagan’s hand.
He drafted Reagan’s “Ash Heap of History” speech (also referred to as the Westminster Speech because Reagan gave it at the Palace of Westminster in London, where the British Parliament meets) in 1982 and the “Evil Empire” speech in 1983, two of the most important, and famous, speeches in American history. Although it was not Dolan but his protégé, Peter Robinson, who wrote the text of Reagan’s most famous speech—“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”—Dolan was responsible for assigning the speech to Robinson. He also sneaked the draft of the speech directly to the president, outfoxing a hundred and one lily-livered White House and State Department apparatchiks, many of whom probably haven’t yet recovered from the experience. Without Dolan, it would have been the speech that ended up on the ash heap of history. Details of that history-changing operation can be found here.
For those who think the troubles President Donald Trump is having with the Washington swamp are unprecedented, a speech Dolan gave at the Heritage Foundation in June 2022 is illuminating. He referenced Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington, who said (Dolan’s paraphrase): “True believers come into town, riding a sort of flood tide of that creedal passion. And they encounter a capital class that is manning the dykes of convention, trying to uphold, as it were, the old established protocols of Washington thought and action.”
Sound familiar?
“So,” Dolan continued, “capital elites versus heartland populists. Possibly the single most consistent dynamic in American politics.” Echoes of the late Angelo Codevilla’s formulation: the ruling class versus the country class.
And then Dolan said this about Reagan’s Westminster speech: “Westminster was like no other. It was important. It represented a first, an early, and a nearly decisive escape from that enormously powerful undertow of Washington talk and action that had been established. Indeed, with Westminster, this new populism had established the internationalization, if you will, of its creed. And it swept away perhaps the single most revered protocol of all—that any Cold War president’s highest priority must be arranging an accommodation with the Soviets, and that any persistent candor about what the Soviets were and what they were up to was an insurmountable obstacle to such diplomatic engagement.”
Reagan said (Dolan had drafted it): “The march of freedom and democracy […] 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.”
People who don’t remember the Cold War and its politics will have a difficult time understanding the courage it took for Reagan to steer the ship of state in a wholly new direction.
Dolan continued: “Now, it’s been said that Cold War strategies of containment or peace through strength worked. And this is really nonsense. Westminster [the speech] shows why. It was bracing. It was a clarion call. It demanded not just peace, but freedom—indeed, world liberation. Reagan often said, ‘We must go beyond containment.’ And Westminster is where he began it. No more playing on just our side of the fifty-yard line. We were going to win.”
And we did. But did we learn the lesson? That as long as the ruling class rules, there will never be change? Never!
Trump was elected by the country class. The danger we face today is not an evil empire; it is ourselves—our own greedy selves and policies, as managed by the ruling class, busily spending our way to bankruptcy and impotence. Dolan understood that, which is why he was working for President Trump when he died.
Tony Dolan was so… casual—cowboy boots and all—that he didn’t seem, at a first meeting, as wise as he was. Now his wisdom and his way with words are gone. They will be missed.
Peter Robinson tells the story of dining with Dolan at Café Milano, a famous watering place for the glitterati in Washington. (Dolan practically lived there.) Dolan had mentioned that he knew, among other famous people, Plácido Domingo (one of the world’s most famous opera singers, for those who have forgotten). Sure, thought Robinson. Whereupon, a few minutes later, the front door to Café Milano opened and in walked… Plácido Domingo. He looked around the dining room, espied Dolan, and cried out in a voice, trained for decades to reach the back of the top gallery, “TONY!”
Last week it was the angels in heaven who, when he sauntered in in his cowboy boots, loudly sang out, “TONY!”
Tony Dolan, Rest in Peace.
Daniel Oliver is Chairman Emeritus of the Board of the Education and Research Institute and a Director of the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy in San Francisco. In addition to serving as Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission under President Reagan, he was Executive Editor and subsequently Chairman of the Board of William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review.
Email Daniel Oliver at Daniel.Oliver@TheCandidAmerican.com.