I was saddened last week to learn of the unexpected death of Tony Dolan, who passed away at age 76. Tony was the chief speechwriter to President Ronald Reagan in a “speechwriting shop” (as he called it) that included a terrifically talented group: Peggy Noonan, Peter Robinson, Ken Khachigian, Clark Judge, Josh Gilder, Mari Maseng Will, Dana Rohrabacher, Landon Parvin, and (among others) Aram Bakshian, who wrote for us at The American Spectator from 1972 until his death in September 2022. There was also the unassuming Ben Elliott, a humble and remarkable man who at times shared “chief speechwriter” duties with Dolan.
I think it was one of the best presidential speechwriting teams in American history. And its faithful leader for eight years, hired by President Reagan at age 32 and serving the entirety of the administration — reportedly the only White House senior-staff member to serve all eight years — was Anthony Dolan.
Character, Catholic, Mystic
Tony was a tour de force and quite a character. He was born in Norwalk, Connecticut on July 7, 1948. His full name was Anthony Rossi Dolan, half Irish and half Italian and 100 percent Roman Catholic.
A graduate of Yale, Tony in 1978, at 29 years old, became the youngest winner of the Pulitzer Prize in history for courageous reporting exposing mob and political corruption in Stamford, Connecticut. He received death threats for his bold work, but he was undeterred. His experiences are captured in a book aptly titled, Rogue Town.
When he wasn’t fearlessly taking on organized crime, Tony was rabblerousing against ideological gangsters at home and abroad, often in notably unconventional ways. He was a conservative folk singer. Yes, you read that right. Tony penned and crooned some amusing folk tunes that, well, never quite rivaled in popularity anything by Bob Dylan or Pete Seeger or Woody Guthrie. But unlike Seeger and Guthrie, or a screwball like Joan Baez, Tony Dolan wasn’t a left-winger. He was the anti-Seeger. He reveled in taking shots at leftist ideas, whether through music or politics.
In his initial “evil empire” draft, Dolan had included the word “evil” a number of times, as high as seven (by my count).
All along, Anthony R. Dolan’s rudder was his devout Catholicism. Those who knew Tony knew that, and those who carefully studied the speeches that he wrote could discern that. But there were also manifestations of that Catholicism that were very much unseen. Tony told me about one episode that he asked me not to write about at the time, but I think I should share it now, given its special meaning at the time of his death, when our thoughts about him should be lifted upward to things eternal.
The pious Catholic had a strong devotion to the Blessed Mother. That was so much so that when Tony in the 1980s heard reports that the Virgin Mary was appearing in the small village of Medjugorje in communist Yugoslavia, the full-time presidential speechwriter took the reports seriously enough to hop a plane to make a spiritual pilgrimage and seek a special request for a loved one. I tugged that information out of Tony while he was explaining to me Ronald Reagan’s personal interest in the alleged apparitions in Medjugorje, which itself was quite a revelation to me.
“Well, Paul, you know that The Gipper had this strong mystical side,” Tony noted in his deep voice.
As did Tony Dolan.
What he thereupon revealed to me about Ronald Reagan (which I published in my book on Reagan and Pope John Paul II) also revealed much about Tony Dolan. I pressed him: “This is fascinating stuff, Tony. But how and why did you get to this small farming village in Yugoslavia during this incredibly busy time?” He shyly, almost embarrassingly, said, “Well, Paul, I had a dying brother … ”
Tony explained that in the fall of 1986 he had gone to Medjugorje for help — heavenly hope, a miracle, divine intervention, the Blessed Mother’s intercession — for a very sick brother, his only brother, who was dying of AIDS.
As Tony divulged this, he urged, “But please, I prefer that you not put that part of the story in your book.” I didn’t. I share it now here. It tells much about Tony Dolan. Much that was good.
Most Memorable Speeches
That devout Catholicism — and more generally, an intense sense of good vs. evil — was evident in defining speeches that Tony had written for Ronald Reagan.
One of them was the superb Reagan commencement address at the University of Notre Dame on May 17, 1981. Of course, that’s the university of Our Lady, which had made the speech extra important to Tony. It was one of Reagan’s very best orations. It was also his first major address after he had been shot by John Hinckley on March 30, 1981. Even more profound, it came just four days after Pope John Paul II had been shot in St. Peter’s Square on May 13, 1981. (Click here for a column highlighting what Tony told me about that speech.)
John Paul II had been shot on the Feast Day of Our Lady of Fatima. Tony also had a Fatima devotion, which he had conveyed to Ronald Reagan. He revealed to me some fascinating things about Reagan’s own interest in Fatima (even as Reagan was not Catholic). There’s much I could say about that here, but given the length of this tribute, I’ll refer readers to a piece I wrote for Crisis Magazine in May 2017. With Dolan’s input, President Reagan later went so far as to mention the three shepherd children of Fatima in a speech to the parliament of Portugal in May 1985. “I knew he would love it and use it,” said Dolan of that material.
A little over a year after the Notre Dame speech, Reagan and John Paul II, both survivors of assassination attempts, met at the Vatican on June 7, 1982 to share their mutual sense that they had been spared by God for a special purpose, namely, to work together to defeat atheistic, evil (choice word) Soviet communism. The very next day, on June 8, an inspired Reagan went to Westminster in London to deliver another great speech written by Tony, where Reagan predicted that communism would end up on the “ash heap of history.” Biographer Lou Cannon would call it the “most prophetic” of all Reagan speeches.
Still more classic Reagan orations on communism were to come, with Tony’s hand in most (if not all) of them. That brings me to the speech that titles this column in remembrance.
In March 1983, Tony crafted — working closely in tandem with President Reagan — his most memorable speech: Reagan’s classic “evil empire” address to the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida.
I have a photocopy of the marked-up March 5 draft of that text in front of me as I type. It is a gem to behold, immediately affirming what Dolan had always told me: “Paul, you give me too much credit. Half of that speech was written by The Gipper himself.” (The entire marked-up draft is printed in the appendix of the book, 11 Principles of a Reagan Conservative, with permission to reprint graciously granted by the Reagan Library.)
That is indeed true. And given that many obituaries on Tony are focusing on that speech, I would like to add some clarifying details on his role and Reagan’s.
Ronald Reagan personally wrote some of the best lines in the speech, but as the original draft makes clear, it was Dolan who coined the phrase “evil empire,” as well as the line calling the Soviet Union: “the focus of evil in the modern world.” Dolan also penned the theological statement, “There is sin and evil in the world, and we are enjoined by Scripture and the Lord Jesus to oppose it with all our might.” That was part of what Dolan in the text referred to as the “phenomenology of evil,” which he knew from Catholic theology and the work of the pope at that time, John Paul II, who was a moral philosopher and studied phenomenology.
As for their collaborative efforts, here is a good example of how Reagan and Dolan together teamed up to make the speech so memorable: In the most famous passage, Reagan had modified Dolan’s original text from past to present tense. Reagan declared that while the Soviets “preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the Earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world.” Dolan’s initial draft had stated: “Surely, those historians will find in the councils of the Marxist-Leninists — who preached the supremacy of the state, who declared its omnipotence over individual man, who predicted its eventual domination of all peoples on the Earth — surely historians will see there the focus of evil in the modern world.”
That change was critical. Switching to present tense transformed the speech into a cruise missile in Reagan’s verbal assault against the Soviet empire. It meant the statement was not some mere future historical opinion. The words were redirected to the here and now. By replacing the words “historians will see there” with “they are,” Reagan directly called the present Soviet leadership the “focus of evil in the modern world.”
And yet, there is more to the “evil empire” story, with Tony once again at the center of the battle.
As with the June 1982 Westminster speech, which had also included references to communist evil, a battle ensued within the Reagan White House over the “incendiary” language. The so-called “pragmatists” — Jim Baker, Mike Deaver, Dick Darman, David Gergen, George Shultz — never liked moral language about good versus evil. But Dolan and Reagan (and NSC director Bill Clark) relished the language. They wanted those moral truths declared from the mountaintop.
In his initial “evil empire” draft, Dolan had included the word “evil” a number of times, as high as seven (by my count). He submitted his draft on March 3, while Ronald Reagan was at his ranch in California. At the White House, then-speechwriting director Aram Bakshian reviewed the draft. Aram saw the “evil” references and particularly liked the term “evil empire.” But how in the world would they get this strong language past the wimpy pragmatists? Both Bakshian and Dolan hoped to route it past the gatekeepers as a “low-priority speech” for a prayer breakfast, rather than a major foreign-policy address. “I made a point of not flagging it,” said Bakshian later. “It was the stealth speech.”
On March 5, Ronald Reagan returned to Washington from California. By then, just three days before the speech was to be delivered in Orlando, the West Wing pragmatists — Gergen and others — discovered Dolan’s draft and began hacking away with a meat cleaver. Dolan remembers his text came back with “a lot of green ink” and the whole evil empire section crossed out. The rogue pragmatists firmly expected it to be deleted before the president saw it. Dolan was livid. “I just won’t go along with those [changes],” he protested. “Let’s just let the president decide on this.” He later said that he “rarely took a stand like this, but I was disgusted because this stuff was crossed out.”
So, the decision was left to Ronald Reagan. Like the later “Tear Down this Wall” speech, Reagan sparred with his own State Department and White House staff who wanted to gut the most meaningful phrases (see Josh Gilder on this point). The line on “evil empire” stayed.
I bet that many of Tony’s old friends did not even know he was working for Donald Trump until the president last week announced Tony’s death.
As for the June 1987 Berlin Wall address, it was written brilliantly by the splendid Peter Robinson and shepherded and protected by Dolan when the White House pragmatists outrageously tried to remove the epic phrase, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” In a tribute to Dolan last week, Peter referred to Tony as a “heat shield” who had protected him and his historic speech from the destructive likes of Colin Powell and George Shultz, who tried to torpedo it.
I could go on and on with examples like this — of attempts by the odious White House squishes to destroy tremendous Reagan speeches.
One more set of remarks that I’ll just mention — and that to my knowledge was not obstructed by the limp-wristed types — were President Reagan’s deeply moving words at Normandy in June 1984. I’ll refer readers elsewhere for the very moving details that Tony shared with me in a 2011 column for The American Spectator. The background story is wonderful, especially the tear-jerker story of “Private Zanatta,” which choked up everyone, including President Reagan. Another credit to Tony.
What Dolan Didn’t Say
In all, Tony Dolan was responsible for many of Ronald Reagan’s most memorable orations.
As my words here suggest, I got to know him quite well from interviewing him for various books and articles. He was an always-responsive and reliable go-to source on numerous questions I had about President Reagan over the years. He was always a call or email away. He preferred to communicate by phone. Once you had him in conversation, he was a wealth of information and insights. Gosh, there are so many things he told me and so much about his life that I simply cannot do them justice here, even in this unusually lengthy tribute where I regret too often (unavoidably) using the word “I.”
Nonetheless, Tony deserves such a tribute, with all he did. And as for the “I,” there are many things that I alone was told. Only my close friends and insider Reaganites Bill Clark and Herb Meyer, the right-hand man to CIA Director Bill Casey, told me more. In fact, they and other key Reagan lieutenants counted on Tony. Our founder at The American Spectator, R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., observed that. Tyrrell and Dolan went way back, with Dolan an avid reader of this magazine. Tyrrell, Tony, and Bill Casey had dinner together at the height of the Cold War in the mid-1980s.
For the record, Tony, Bill Casey, Bill Clark, Herb Meyer, and Ronald Reagan all correctly suspected that the Soviets were behind the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II. And all of them fought the CIA “establishment” who insisted the Kremlin would never do such a thing. The establishmentarians asserted that these men were “paranoid” and “reckless” for believing Moscow would dare do such a deed. Tony told me about how he and Herb had a nasty confrontation with CIA official John McMahon in the White House dining room (Tony described it as a “fight”).
Again, so much that could be said, a testimony to Tony’s life lived fully.
But even as Tony was such a great go-to source, he also had a strange secretiveness about him, at times almost hush-hush conspiratorial. Invariably, he would end a conversation by saying, “Now Paul, don’t repeat any of that please.”
Tony seemed especially secretive about advising the speechwriting team of President Donald Trump during the first term. He was a stalwart supporter of Trump from the very beginning, comparing him to Ronald Reagan. I thought he had lost his mind, and I told him so. He insisted otherwise, arguing in 2016 that Donald Trump would be a transformative force. To convince me, he implored me to visit him at the Trump White House. After repeated urging, I finally said, “Okay, Tony, okay. I’ll come.” I did just that.
The date was June 26, 2018. It was at that trip to the White House that Tony introduced me to President Trump’s “speechwriting shop.” I was super impressed. Several of those talented and quality individuals recently teamed up to write a nice tribute to Tony at RealClearPolitics.
I spent several hours with Tony that day, with him tugging me everywhere around the facilities, sharing stories about Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan. Once again, he shared many intriguing things. And then, as he walked me outside to the gate, he demanded, “Now Paul, you can’t tell anyone anything that I’ve told you today.” My response: “Really, Tony? Why not? I’m very impressed with what I’ve seen. I can help you guys. You haven’t given me any state secrets.”
Tony knew that I was in town to work from the offices of The American Spectator. He didn’t want anything he told me to end up in print, including the basic fact that the former Reagan chief speechwriter was advising the Trump speechwriters. He proceeded to remind me of that with four consecutive phone calls in my 20-minute cab ride from the White House back to Old Town Alexandria. I told him, “Okay, Tony, it’s cool. I swear I won’t write anything on this.”
TAS honchos Bob Tyrrell and Wlady Pleszczynski were probably disappointed and mystified by that, but such was Tony: secretive.
If someone reading this knows that answer … then you need to act. It is now up to you to help get Tony Dolan’s memoirs published.
To that end, I bet that many of Tony’s old friends did not even know he was working for Donald Trump until the president last week announced Tony’s death on (fittingly) St. Patrick’s Day, a day that Trump knew was special to the proud Irish Catholic. “He was a great person,” said President Trump. “A great, brilliant writer and he will be very greatly missed.”
As for Tony’s death, it was unexpected and came suddenly. He had been at the office as recently as the Friday before his death late Monday night or early Tuesday morning, March 11. He had developed a kidney infection that turned sepsis on Monday and which then took him quickly.
A shame. He still had much to give.
Write That Damned Book
Alas, let me close with a great frustration of mine that involved Tony and should concern all of us.
I wrote an article here a few weeks ago on the death of close Reagan ally and foreign-policy adviser Richard V. Allen. I wrote with exasperation how Allen was one of those guys who often told those of us who interviewed him that he couldn’t share this or that piece of information because “I’m saving it for my book.” A book that was never written. The article was titled, “Write That Damned Book — Now!” and it concerned not only Dick Allen. I had written of “similarly uncompleted endeavors by other Reaganites that I know of … who have compelling stories that never see print. They take them to the grave.” I continued:
I’ve seen this again and again. Various Reaganites tell me they’re writing a major memoir, and thus saving this or that historical gem for their big book. “Now, you can’t publish that,” they’ll admonish me, “because I’m saving it for my book!” Knowing that our conversation is taking place decades after they left the White House and that they’ll likely never do that book, I urge them to let me report the information anyway, so it doesn’t get lost to history….
The magnum opus never gets published.
It’s an exasperating thing to behold. Think about it: How long does it take to write a memoir? Is a near-half century not enough time?
Confession: When I wrote that back in December, I was referring particularly to Tony Dolan. He had been writing his magnum opus for decades. For Tony, I found the delay especially inexcusable because he was a writer himself. I used to say to him, “Please, listen to me, make sure that others know about that book manuscript and that they know where to find and access it in case something happens to you. Do not let that manuscript get lost, Tony.”
He assured me that he had taken steps to ensure that. Did he? If someone reading this knows that answer, and has that access, then you need to act. It is now up to you to help get Tony Dolan’s memoirs published.
Other colleagues of Tony succeeded in publishing memoirs. Peggy Noonan wrote several excellent books. Ken Khachigian just published his long-awaited memoir. So did Peter Robinson.
Incidentally, I think the best book for insights into the colorful character that was Tony was his colleague Peter Robinson’s terrific memoir, How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life. There are so many distinctively Tony moments in that book. Get it and read it. Peter will have you smiling with his memories of Tony. Among them, I shall close with this.
One of Peter’s stories that sticks with me is a funny account about Tony’s love of Latin, where he took shots at Peter and Josh Gilder for their ignorance of the language. His love and knowledge of the language stemmed (yet again) from his ardent Roman Catholicism. When President Reagan invoked a Latin phrase in a speech, you knew that was the handiwork of Tony Dolan. That and much more.
Anthony R. Dolan, requiescat in pace.
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