American Girl Takes On 'Evil Empire'

Good morning, it’s April 25. Today’s date reminds us that all the Cold War presidents were dealing, ultimately, with a rational foe: Thirty years ago today, Soviet premier Yuri Andropov sent a letter to 10-year-old Samantha Reed Smith of Manchester, Maine. He assured the American girl that his countrymen did not want war with the United States, and invited her to visit the Soviet Union.

It was a propaganda ploy, to be sure. But young Samantha had some innate public relations skills of her own. She accepted Andropov’s offer – and gave hope to a nervous world. 

Samantha Smith saw Yuri Andropov on the cover of Time magazine, with an accompanying article on the former KGB chief’s career that would be alarming to any discerning reader, even one who was 10 years old. Samantha asked her mother, Jane, to write to the Soviet premier and ask if he planned to start a nuclear war.

“Why don’t you write to him,” Jane Smith said. This casual suggestion set in motion a series of events that provided hope to a frightened world, but not a happy ending for the Smith family.

“God made the world for us to live together in peace,” Samantha told Andropov in her December 1982 letter, “and not to fight.”

Two months later, President Reagan warned Americans of the “the aggressive impulses of an evil empire.” The “evil empire” speech was cheered by conservatives in the U.S., but denounced by liberals. Soviet propagandists, seeing an opening, printed Samantha’s letter in Pravda as a tacit contrast with the supposedly bellicose American president. The Pravda item included the patronizing comment that Samantha could be forgiven her misapprehensions about Russians because of her tender age.

But Samantha Reed Smith turned out to be a difficult person to patronize.

She penned another letter, this one to Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, inquiring whether Andropov planned to answer her directly. “I thought my questions were good ones,” she added, “and it shouldn’t matter if I was ten years old.”

Andropov responded with an uncommonly warm letter comparing Samantha to Mark Twain’s Becky Thatcher, while including some educational material designed to assure his young pen pal that Soviets viewed armed conflict as a last resort. He asserted that the Russians’ grievous loss of life in World War II made them fearful of total war, and that the Soviet Union – unlike the United States – had pledged never to use weapons of mass destruction first.

And in that April 25, 1983 letter, Andropov invited her to visit his country.

That summer, she and her parents took him up on his offer. They did not see Andropov, who by then was seriously ill, but Samantha met many Russians, gave speeches, attracted media attention, and became a pint-sized world ambassador for peace.

I made this observation last year on this date, but it bears repeating: In some ways, the Soviet Union’s public relations overture to an elementary school girl living in the United States was precisely the kind of superficial, feel-good atmospherics Reagan had warned about in his “evil empire” speech. But Samantha Smith also provided a respite from the grim rhetoric on all sides, while putting people in touch with the better angels of their natures all over the world.

In a widely covered speech in Japan, Samantha came across as poised, but also unpretentious. She talked about visiting the “beautiful and awesome” Soviet Union, but made no pretense of being an expert or even worldly in a grownup way. “Until last April, I had never traveled outside the eastern United States, I had never even heard of sushi!” she said. “And now I will try my wish in Japanese: Sekaiju ni heiwa ga kimasu yo mi (I wish for the world peace and understanding).”

Samantha told the Japanese kids that she had been spending a lot of time imagining herself in the future – in the year 2001 – and what the world might look like in the new millennium, and she in it.

“First of all, I don’t want to have these freckles anymore, and I want this tooth straightened, and I hope I like the idea of being almost 30,” she said. “Maybe it’s because I’ve met so many wonderful people who look a little different from the way I look – maybe their skin, or their eyes, or their language is not like mine – but I can picture them becoming my best friends. Maybe it’s because of these things that I think the year 2001 and the years that follow are going to be just great.”

The year 2001, of course, featured a deadly attack from the sky on the United States. It didn’t come from Russia and thank God it wasn’t a nuclear bomb. But Samantha Reed Smith didn’t live to see the 21st century. She died in a small plane crash in Auburn, Maine, in the summer of 1985 at the age of 13. Yuri Andropov, her pen-pal, had passed away in early 1984.

Andropov’s place was taken, after about a year, by Mikhail Gorbachev, a man who understood that the Soviet system couldn’t sustain its current path. He found a willing partner for negotiations in Ronald Reagan, who despite the Left’s caricature of him, had been talking about arms reductions since 1976. The two men ultimately agreed to make the world safer by vastly reducing their nations' lethal arsenals.

They were in agreement about something else, too, or, as I noted last April 25, someone else.

“Everyone in the Soviet Union who has known Samantha Smith will forever remember the image of the American girl ... who dreamt about peace, and about friendship,” Gorbachev said when she died.