As a conservative presidential speechwriter, he also relegated communism to “the ash heap of history.” Earlier, he won a Pulitzer Prize as a young reporter.
Anthony R. Dolan, who as Ronald Reagan’s chief speechwriter deployed the phrase “evil empire” in 1983 to describe the Soviet Union and in another address consigned Marxism and Leninism to “the ash heap of history,” died on March 11 in Alexandria, Va. He was 76.
His death, in a hospital, was announced by Fred Ryan, the board chairman of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute, who said, “Tony’s ability to distill complex ideas into powerful, memorable speeches helped define the Reagan presidency and shaped the course of the Cold War.”
The cause was not specified.
Mr. Dolan was one of the youngest winners of a Pulitzer Prize in journalism. As a reporter for The Advocate in Stamford, Conn., he was 29 when he was awarded the prize in 1978 for local investigative specialized reporting, for a series of exposés of corruption in that city’s municipal government and organized crime’s infiltration of its police department.
After serving for eight years as a speechwriter in the Reagan White House, he was a special adviser to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and a senior adviser to Secretary of State Colin Powell during the administration of President George W. Bush. He was a White House special assistant during Donald J. Trump’s first term, and in January was recruited as a special assistant by the president’s Domestic Policy Council.
Mr. Dolan began his political career as a teenage volunteer in Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign. He went on to take jobs in three Republican administrations and was for a time a singer and lyricist of conservative folk songs. (His “The New York Times Blues” parodies the paper as containing “all the news that’s fit to print, unless, of course, its anti-communist.”)
In the White House, he was a dogged defender of President Reagan’s blunt war of words against what Mr. Dolan saw as the ungodly Soviets. He resisted pressure from presidential advisers who, subscribing to realpolitik, wanted him to tone down his verbal assaults — including his hope that “the march of freedom and democracy” would “leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history.”