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 Reagans Soviet Rhetoric Telling the Soviet Redemption Story rhetorical scholar Mark LaVoie examines the ways Reagan negotiated his shift from a vehemently anticommunist discourse to a rhetoric of guarded optimism about the future of USSoviet relations that ultimately revealed a Soviet redemp