Reagan Speechwriter Tony Dolan on “The Expert Class”

Plus, Trump panic hits the coasts with threat of general strike

Dolan’s reminder of how the expert class got Reagan “wrong, wrong, wrong” sent me back to one of my favorite documents, a November 2, 1984, New York Times ad signed by a lot of faculty members and warning that four more years of Reaganism would “bring us closer to a nuclear holocaust.”

President Reagan’s chief speechwriter, Anthony R. Dolan, died earlier this month. The chairman of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, Fred Ryan, issued a statement crediting Dolan for work on the iconic “Evil Empire” speech, delivered by President Reagan in March 1983. Sam Roberts did his usual sensitive and solid work on the New York Times obituary.

It sent me back to an interview Dolan did on June 26, 1997, for the journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs:

Reagan grievously embarrassed America's expert class. They said he couldn’t be elected. First they were astonished by every manifestation of conservative political power, whether it was Goldwater's nomination, the rise of the New Right, or Reagan's near win in 1976 against an incumbent president. They said he couldn’t be elected. When he did get elected, they said he would never get his economic program through without a major compromise. He did. They said he could never achieve anything in foreign policy as long as he kept speaking that way about the Soviets. He kept speaking that way about the Soviets and he did achieve his goals. They were wrong, wrong, wrong. They said the economy was going to go down the drain. It didn’t. It became the greatest peacetime boom in history, and if you are a member of the expert class and you are grievously embarrassed by some conservative ex-actor, you’ve got to explain why that happened.

Meanwhile, here in Massachusetts, I got an email this afternoon from Rachel White, the CEO of Byggmeister, a design-build firm based in Newton. She likens the current Trump administration to the early days of the Covid pandemic. “We now find ourselves in a similarly frightening time without precedent or guide for how to respond,” she writes. “We are horrified by the actions of the administration. This isn’t solely or even primarily about policy differences, although many of the administration’s actions — from tariffs to gutting federal agencies — directly threaten our business and conflict with our mission to serve as exemplary stewards of existing homes and to help build a more equitable and sustainable future.”