The Crusader

character for an official document.

Other similar distinctions are in order: NSDD-75 sought to reverse not only future but past Soviet expansion, and stated such a goal more explicitly than any previous Reagan administration document. “Past” expansion was crucial: That reflects an intention to roll back territory already taken by the Soviet Union. Tellingly, the name applied to NSDD by some administration insiders was “Operation Rollback.” One can rightly say that the intent of NSDD-75 was to alter both the Soviet empire and the USSR.

Further, NSDD-75 endeavored to “change” and “gradually reduce” the Marxist system within the USSR. By seeking political pluralism, it also hoped to repudiate the Communist Party monopoly on power. Alas, because the Communist system and USSR were one in the same, the intent of NSDD-75 was to transform the USSR itself.

Somehow the Soviets were able to procure a copy of the highly classified document. The Moscow Domestic Service released two statements on the directive, dubbing the “plan” a “subversive” attempt “to try to influence the internal situation” within the USSR. “[T]he task,” said Moscow, was “to exhaust the Soviet economy.” The Reagan administration had “drawn up aggressive plans” for “mass political, economic, and ideological pressure against the Soviet Union in an attempt to undermine the socioeconomic system and international position of the Soviet state.”¹⁵ This interpretation was correct on all counts.

Throughout the Soviet media, the directive resonated, as the propaganda machine sought to make sense of the confrontational wording. A piece in Sotsialisticheskaya Industriya stated, “Directive 75 speaks of changing the Soviet Union’s domestic policy. In other words, the powers that be in Washington are threatening the course of world history, neither more nor less.”¹⁶ In doubting such Washington ability, the publication quoted editorials in the Toronto Star and Los Angeles Times. “Our country,” it quoted assurances from the Los Angeles Times, “simply has no means of exerting pressure of this sort (on the Soviet Union), and it was staggering to hear that the Reagan administration thinks otherwise.” Going by such accounts, Sotsialisticheskaya Industriya confidently told Soviet readers that the general opinion of Western observers was that the grandiose “ideas of Reagan and Pipes” were “staggeringly naive.”¹⁷

LATE JANUARY TO FEBRUARY 1983

Despite the domestic and Soviet blowback, it was clear that NSDD-75 was a bold declaration of the administration’s vision—one that Reagan sought to embrace publicly. A week after signing NSDD-75 in private, Reagan spoke of this vision openly in his January 25 State of the Union, in which he called for a “comprehensive strategy for peace with freedom.” He referred to his Westminster Address in London the previous June and reiterated his commitment to the development of an “infrastructure of democracy” throughout the world. “We intend to pursue this democratic initiative vigorously,” said Reagan. “The future belongs not to governments and ideologies which oppress their peoples, but to democratic systems of self-government which encourage individual initiative and guarantee personal freedom.” Though he did not outline these initiatives in his speech, they would take the form of the National Endowment for Democracy, the modernization of the Voice of America and other broadcast facilities, and the launch of Radio Marti, a station designed to broadcast inside Cuba.¹⁸

In addition to discussing his plans for foreign policy, Reagan’s State of the Union also touched on the domestic front, making it clear that the economic turnaround he had desired in 1981 as his first priority was now underway, setting the stage for the strength he and his country needed to take on the Russians: “[O]ur strategy for peace with freedom must also be based on strength—economic strength and military strength,” said the president. “A strong American economy is essential to the well-being and security of our friends and allies. The restoration of a strong, healthy American economy has been and remains one of the central pillars of our foreign policy.”

This feeling of success continued beyond the State of the Union, and a month later, on February 22, he began heralding a full economic recovery. In a foreign-policy speech to the American Legion, in which he spoke of the need to rebuild defenses and take on the Soviets, he reminded, “Our first and highest priority was to restore a sound economic base here at home.”¹⁹ It was the beginning of a surge in prosperity on the home front, and Reagan enthusiastically welcomed the shift with open arms. The domestic foundation of his foreign policy was indeed becoming stronger by the day.

Feeling that such had been achieved, he was ready to move on to the larger battle, a fact made evident in another line in the speech: “History is not a darkening path twisting inevitably toward tyranny, as the forces of totalitarianism would have us believe. Indeed, the one clear pattern in world events—a pattern that’s grown with each passing year of this century—is in the opposite direction.”²⁰

The sum total of these events was that Pravda now really had something to crow about. “The anticommunist ‘crusade’ program outlined by the President has begun to acquire concrete form,” said the party organ. The “Washington ‘Crusaders,’” declared Pravda, were “on the march.”²¹ Now more than ever, “Crusade” was the operative word in the Soviet press.²² The Reagan administration, said TASS, the official Soviet news agency, was “bent on pushing forward its ‘crusade against communism.’”²³

MARCH 8, 1983: “EVIL EMPIRE”

Just when it seemed that the Soviets could not be more apoplectic over what they had been hearing from the Oval Office, on March 8, 1983 Ronald Reagan stepped before a group of evangelical Christians at the Sheraton Twin Towers Hotel in Orlando, Florida and made quite a claim. The USSR, the president told the National Association of Evangelicals, was the “focus of evil in the modern world”; it was an “evil empire.” The speech was polarizing, as was its intention: to draw a line of demarcation between the two superpowers. Said the Crusader to his fellow Christian soldiers:

I urge you to speak out against those who would place the United States in a position of military and moral inferiority…. I urge you to beware the… temptation of blithely declaring 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 and good and evil.

To suggest the United States and USSR were morally equal, judged Reagan, was “rubbish.” Some observers might try to declare themselves “above it all,” haughtily asserting that “both sides are wrong.” To do so, said Reagan, would be to ignore the facts. In his eyes, this Cold War battle was a struggle between good and evil, and there was no doubt over which side was which. By making this bold proclamation in this speech, Reagan hoped that others would likewise connect the dots.²⁴

From the start of the speech, it was clear that the language was atypical; it was also evident that Reagan, who was always keenly aware of his audience, was playing up the religious imagery, as he spoke to the Christian listeners about the sinful, fallen nature of man: “We know that living in this world means dealing with what philosophers would call the phenomenology of evil or, as theologians would put it, the doctrine of sin.” He then clarified his motivations for saying what he was saying: “There is sin and evil in the world,” said the president of the United States, “and we’re enjoined by Scripture and the Lord Jesus to oppose it with all our might.”

There was certainly a largesse of sin and evil in one part of the world: in Moscow. Now, Reagan wanted to announce the fact loud and clear, lest onlookers had any confusion regarding what the Cold War was all about— ditto its origins. Unlike America’s founders, said Reagan, the godfather of the Bolshevik state had a twisted conception of morality:

[A]s good Marxist-Leninists, the Soviet leaders have openly and publicly declared that the only morality