Legendary speechwriter, bon vivant, and conservative political fixture Tony Dolan passed away on March 10 at the age of 77, having served in both Trump administrations as well as the White House of President Ronald Reagan.
Dolan connected the Republican establishment to the conservative grassroots, and was universally loved on the American right, often holding court from his restaurant perch at Café Milano in the historic Georgetown area.
He was already a highly accomplished journalist by the time he went to work for the Reagan administration, having won a Pulitzer Prize for his work for the Stamford Advocate in Connecticut, uncovering mob ties in local government.
The Stamford Advocate noted earlier this year:
Dolan won a Pulitzer in 1978 for dozens of articles he wrote during 1977 that exposed the infiltration of organized crime into the Stamford Police Department, among other things. Dolan’s reporting also uncovered collusion on contracts in various city departments and an arson ring protected by a high ranking official in the local fire department.
In a full-page announcement in the May 31, 1978, edition of The Advocate, Dolan’s win was celebrated for “precipitating far-reaching reforms.”
In announcing Dolan’s appointment in January as Special Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, the Trump-Vance transition team noted that Dolan’s journalistic work led to Reagan’s “1982 crackdown on the American mafia.”
Dolan is also widely credited with coining the phrase “Evil Empire” to describe the Soviet Union in a 1983 speech.
Reagan said at the time:
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.
Democrats and the media mocked Reagan’s rhetoric as simplistic and divisive.
But Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky, hearing about Reagan’s speech while imprisoned in the USSR, was inspired by it. As he recalled in 2004:
In 1983, I was confined to an 8-by-10-foot prison cell on the border of Siberia. My Soviet jailers gave me the privilege of reading the latest copy of Pravda. Splashed across the front page was a condemnation of President Ronald Reagan for having the temerity to call the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” By tapping on walls and talking through toilets, word of Reagan’s “provocation” quickly spread throughout the prison. We dissidents were ecstatic. Finally, the leader of the free world had spoken the truth — a truth that burned inside the heart of each and every one of us.
Dolan continued to write speeches — officially, and unofficially — for Republican candidates and conservative causes. As recently as the 2024 election, he wrote scripts for super PAC ads designed to reach Catholic and Latino voters.
This author met Tony Dolan in 2011 at the Café Milano, during a dinner meeting in D.C. with fellow Breitbart News executives. Andrew Breitbart, who was then still with us, stood up to greet Dolan and welcome him to the table. Dolan pulled up a chair and proceeded to regale those present with tales from the political trenches. He understood what our fledgling news organization was trying to achieve in disrupting the mainstream media and giving citizens a voice.
I had remained in touch with Dolan ever since then, enjoying his political insights — and, quite frequently, his jokes. He savored the second Inauguration of President Trump, writing to close friends from the festivities in a frigid Washington: “Lots of good looking people and pretty faces here. … [W]hat is inescapable is the glow and unbounded joy. Congrats to you all. America and history owes you. You must enjoy it all. What a time to be alive.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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