Anthony R. "Tony" Dolan

Anthony R. Dolan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist-turned-chief-speechwriter to President Ronald Reagan who used insights into what he called the phenomenology of evil – refined by his courageous reporting on the mafia’s corrupt control of local government in Stamford, Connecticut, in the late 1970s – to shape key presidential speeches in the 1980s and thus pave the way for the United States’ victory in the Cold War, died last week at Inova Alexandria Hospital in Virginia. He was 76.

Born in Norwalk, Connecticut, to Joseph and Margaret Kelley Dolan in 1948, Dolan attended Fairfield Preparatory School and later Yale University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy and history in 1970 before entering the fields of politics and journalism. A young man during the early days of modern American conservatism, Dolan received his first letter from William F. Buckley when he was a student – marking the beginning of a lifelong friendship.

After graduating from Yale, Dolan worked on the successful U.S. Senate campaign of James L. Buckley and also enjoyed a brief career as a conservative folk singer. His album “Cry, The Beloved Country” was featured on “The Merv Griffin Show.”

As a diligent investigative reporter for the Stamford Advocate, Dolan won numerous journalism awards, including the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for his exposures of organized crime and public corruption in Connecticut. Dolan’s work in Stamford was detailed in the 2013 book “Rogue Town,” which chronicled the efforts of undercover police detective Vito Colucci to fight against public corruption, police murder, and drug dealing by the mafia. Colucci’s book is dedicated to Dolan. As Vito has previously said, “If Tony Dolan had never come to Stamford, CT, I don’t think anything would ever have changed. Stamford was running on 20 years of corruption already.”

During the 1980 presidential campaign, after several telegrams from Bill Buckley, Reagan’s campaign chairman William Casey hired 32-year-old Dolan as speechwriter.

During the eight years Dolan served as special assistant and later deputy assistant and chief speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan, he was intimately involved in both the administration’s anti-crime and anti-communism policies.

In June 1982, at the invitation of Attorney General William French Smith, Dolan made a presentation on organized crime to senior staff at the Department of Justice and played a major role in establishing the President’s Commission on Organized Crime and developing the administration’s successful strategy for taking down the mob.

He also helped craft many of Reagan’s speeches that exposed the malevolence of communism and predicted the coming triumph of freedom and democracy. These included the May 17, 1981, “Source of All Strength” speech at the University of Notre Dame; the June 8, 1982, “Crusade for Freedom” speech before the British Parliament; and the March 8, 1983, “Evil Empire” speech before the National Association of Evangelicals.

Before the British Parliament at Westminster Hall, London, Reagan declared, “What I am describing now is a plan and a hope for the long term – the march of freedom and democracy which 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.”

On March 8, 1983, using a draft that Dolan had helped prepare, Reagan declared to the world the truth that previous leaders had not dared to speak:

I urge you to speak out against those who would place the United States in a position of military and moral inferiority. You know, I’ve always believed that old Screwtape reserved his best efforts for those of you in the Church. So, in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride–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.

It was the first time President Reagan called the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” and as the New York Times wrote in 1988, it was the president’s “most memorable phrase” – and one “Mr. Dolan coined.”

Just as those two powerful words caused the Soviet regime to tremble, they gave hope to countless souls yearning for freedom behind the Iron Curtain. Future Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Natan Sharansky later wrote of his experience as a prisoner in a Soviet gulag upon hearing Reagan’s declaration of the Soviet Union as an evil empire.

“It was the great, brilliant moment when we learned that Ronald Reagan had proclaimed the Soviet Union an Evil Empire before the entire world,” Sharansky wrote. “There was a long list of all the Western leaders who had lined up to condemn the evil Reagan for daring to call the great Soviet Union an evil empire right next to the front-page story about this dangerous, terrible man who wanted to take the world back to the dark days of the Cold War. This was the moment. It was the brightest, most glorious day. Finally, a spade had been called a spade. Finally, Orwell’s Newspeak was dead. President Reagan had from that moment made it impossible for anyone in the West to continue closing their eyes to the real nature of the Soviet Union. It was one of the most important, freedom-affirming declarations, and we all instantly knew it. For us, that was the moment that really marked the end for them, and the beginning for us.”

In America’s long struggle against communism, Dolan played an indispensable role. While many of his Reagan administration colleagues sought to moderate the president’s engagement with the Soviet Union, Dolan channeled Reagan’s moral and intellectual arguments that framed the USSR not simply as a competitor but as an aggressive force of evil in the world.

Dolan’s anti-communism was bolstered by his religious faith. A devout Roman Catholic, he knew, as President Reagan once described it in a 1981 speech at Notre Dame, that America’s greatest weapons are “rooted in the source of all strength – a belief in a Supreme Being, and a law higher than our own.” Which is why, in later years, Tony fondly recalled his contribution to Reagan’s speech to the Portuguese Assembly in May 1985 when the president of the United States noted that there resides more power “in the prayers of simple people everywhere, simple people like the children of Fatima … than in all the great armies and statesmen of the world.”

In June 1987, Dolan accompanied the official White House delegation to West Berlin, Germany, where President Reagan famously implored Mikhail Gorbachev in front of the Brandenburg Gate to “tear down this wall.” As Peter Robinson, who drafted the Berlin Wall speech under Dolan’s guidance, recently said: “‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,’ is in all kinds of ways a Tony Dolan production. … [He] erected a kind of shield over me. … He ran interference for me day after day over a period of weeks. … Tony understood something. … The pressure didn’t go on the president, it went to speechwriters.”

Through Dolan’s dogged protection of those four shattering words, the folk singer-journalist-speechwriter from Connecticut helped an American president rally free men and women around the world to defeat communism – and, in the process, changed the course of history.

Dolan was the only member of Reagan’s senior staff to serve all eight years at the White House. On the last day of the administration, he received a simple handwritten thank-you note from the president for being the “Keeper of the Flame.”

During the George W. Bush administration, Dolan served as a senior advisor to Secretary of State Colin Powell from December 2000 to July 2001 and then as a special advisor to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld from August 2001 to January 2007.

Dolan returned to public service in 2017 and served all four years of President Trump’s first term as special assistant to the president and advisor for planning. Most recently, Trump appointed him to service as special assistant to the president for domestic policy for his second term.

A former U.S. Army Specialist 4, Dolan was the recipient of the Department of Defense’s Medal for Public Service. He was also a veteran of six presidential transitions – including the most recent Trump transition – and nine presidential campaigns, including the campaigns of Fred Thompson in 2008, Newt Gingrich in 2012, and Ted Cruz in 2016. Some of his more recent works, such as “Dolan’s Guide to Speechwriting,” the “Third Option Paper,” and his five-hour YouTube presentation on the genius of Donald Trump, have provided thoughtful insights and useful approaches to innumerable leaders. Across five decades, Tony’s wise counsel, generous mentorship, unflagging loyalty, and steadfast friendship have played a critical role in shaping the conservative movement of today.

Tony is survived by his nephew Robert A. Shortley and wife Jenn, and their daughter Violet. He is preceded in death by his mother and father, Peg and Joe Dolan, brother John T. “Terry” Dolan, and sister Maiselle and her husband Robert L. Shortley.