Reagan’s Soviet Rhetoric

How did Ronald Reagan go from calling the Soviet Union an “evil empire” in his first term as president to saying the US had “forged a satisfying new closeness” with the Soviets by the end of his second term? In Reagan’s Soviet Rhetoric: Telling the Soviet Redemption Story , rhetorical scholar Mark LaVoie examines the ways Reagan negotiated his shift from a vehemently anti-communist discourse to a rhetoric of guarded optimism about the future of US-Soviet relations that ultimately revealed a Sovi