Ronald Reagan's Evil Empire Speech Memorial

On this site on March 8, 1983, President Ronald Reagan gave a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals in which he described the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” Given at the height of the Cold War, President Reagan knew that victory against Soviet communism had as much to do with words as weapons.

In what became known as the “Evil Empire” speech, he made his case for freedom with a moral clarity that galvanized victims of communism across the world. In the years that followed the speech, the Soviet Union came to the negotiating table, the Berlin Wall was taken down, the Iron Curtain fell, and the Soviet empire crumbled.

In 1988, when asked whether he thought the Soviet Union was still an "evil empire," President Reagan responded that he no longer did, and that when he used the term it was "another time, another era.”