Lee Edwards, who died last week at the age of 92, was right from the beginning.
Consider the moment of his political awakening. When Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary in 1956, crushing an anti-Communist rebellion, Lee was in Europe. He had just served his country as a U.S. Army officer in West Germany. He witnessed the stark divide that would define the coming decades of the Cold War. And he had no trouble distinguishing the good guys from the bad guys.
Communism was the enemy. The Soviet Union smothered individual freedom, warred against the family, and recognized no higher power. Its vast armies and growing nuclear arsenal menaced America. If the Communists won—if their revolution spread across the world, leaving nothing behind but misery and death—then the last best hope of Earth would vanish.
Containment was not enough. Only victory over communism would secure the American way of life. Thus, Lee enlisted in the growing ranks of a civilian force devoted to protecting the American experiment from threats foreign and domestic: the conservative movement.
It is easy to forget today how radical American conservatism seemed to the nation’s elite in the 1950s and ’60s. The crucial decade was a period of consensus. New Deal liberalism—the philosophy of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt—was dominant. Big government, big labor, and big business spurred economic activity and subsidized the middle class through generous spending, union contracts, and long-term employment and pensions. Experts sent Americans to the stars, invented technology to improve living standards, and attempted to limit Soviet encroachments by fine-tuning intelligence and military operations.
Lee and other young conservatives were contrarians. They believed the reigning consensus weakened America’s internal and external defenses against communism. The consensus ignored or undermined the constitutional structure that had preserved American freedom and made this country great. Lee and his friends rejected the intellectuals and politicians who lionized or apologized for communist tyranny. In 1960, Lee helped organize the Young Americans for Freedom, pledging to “affirm certain eternal truths,” such as “the individual’s use of his God-given free will, whence derives his right to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force.”
Lee was part of a movement. Like other great political movements of the mid-20th century—the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the environmental movement—the conservative movement had an overarching cause. American conservatives wanted to return to the limited federal government that existed before Roosevelt and to defeat global communism. And they were willing to risk domestic unpopularity, as well as foreign war, to achieve their goals.
American conservatism was grassroots. Young people bought into the project because they felt it was just, necessary, compelling, and fun. Outsider status was part of the appeal. The great movements are animated by causes the parties initially ignore. They launch insurgencies to take over the parties from within.
The great movements have identifiable, singular leaders. When Lee joined the conservative movement, he got to know William F. Buckley Jr., the impresario behind National Review. He worked for Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, author of The Conscience of a Conservative and, in 1964, the first conservative to be nominated for president by the Republican Party since the 1930s. In 1967, Lee wrote the first political biography of Ronald Reagan. He had a front-row seat for the rise of the American Right.
Lee’s experience served as the background to his books on conservatism, the Republican Party, communism, and the Cold War. The fact that he rarely, if ever, used the personal pronoun in his writing, relying instead on research methods he learned as a Catholic University Ph.D., is evidence of both his professionalism and his modesty. He recognized greatness when he saw it: Buckley, Goldwater, Reagan, and others, including former Heritage Foundation colleagues Ed Feulner and Ed Meese, stride through Lee’s books in a grand and stately manner.
The ideas came first. But Lee also recognized that conservative principles of freedom and tradition would go nowhere without supporters acting in a common cause. Conservatives, he wrote in 2020, should “take the lead in demonstrating that the American Spirit still lives, America remains an exceptional nation, and ‘We the People’ still govern. All this can best be done through a New Fusionism that unites conservatives of all persuasions in a crusade to preserve that most precious of our possessions—ordered liberty.”
Lee’s intellect and action found expression in the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and Museum, which he cofounded in 1994. Visitors to the museum confront the true cost of communist tyranny—populations held in captivity, millions and millions of lives lost—and an unvarnished and unapologetic take on America’s role in the Cold War. By the time the museum opened its doors, the Soviet Union was no more. Communism was discredited. Not only did Lee participate in the USSR’s downfall. He built a fortress of memory against the left’s attempts to deny or diminish or forget the evil done in communism’s name.
Toward the end of life, Lee wrote a memoir, Just Right, where he explained how he fit into the epic tale he’d been telling in some 25 volumes over the course of many decades. I came to know him as a friend and mentor. He always had a kind word and a positive outlook on life, conservatism, and the United States of America. Everyone who had the good fortune to know Lee Edwards will long remember and greatly miss the conservative movement’s memory bank. He was a happy warrior for God’s country and the cause of freedom.
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