In October 1956, shortly after being honorably discharged from the Army at age 23, Lee Edwards found himself in Paris. There he fell into the rhythms of expatriate life, smoking Gauloises, frequenting cafés, and writing fiction. It was in French newspapers that he read of the Hungarian revolt against Soviet occupation.
At first the Hungarian independence movement seemed victorious. The Soviets retreated from Budapest. The rebel leader, Imre Nagy, withdrew Hungary from the Warsaw Pact and began the transition to democracy. “My dormant anticommunism came alive,” Edwards writes in his memoir. “All that I had learned from my reporter-father, who had covered congressional hearings about communism, came flooding back.” The Hungarian revolution, he thought wonderingly, might be the beginning of the end of the Soviet Empire.
His hopes were dashed. The next month 17 Soviet tank divisions invaded Hungary, joined forces with the 5 divisions already there, and crushed the uprising. The Soviets murdered thousands of Hungarians and sent hundreds of thousands more into exile. Nagy was arrested and executed. The Soviet occupation continued for another 30-some years. Edwards was horrified both by the slaughter and by the reluctance of Western powers such as the United States to intervene. “I took an oath,” he writes. “I resolved that for the rest of my life, wherever I was, whatever I was, I would help those who resisted communism however I could.”
And so he has. Indeed, the reader of Just Right can’t help marveling at how closely the life of Lee Edwards has tracked the history of the conservative movement in which he’s participated as activist and scholar. The son of a correspondent for Colonel Robert R. McCormick’s Chicago Tribune, Edwards recalls the visits Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy paid to his childhood home outside Washington, D.C. When he returned from his European sojourn, Edwards renewed his Catholic faith, got a job with a Republican senator from Maryland, and began contributing to Human Events and William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review.
Attending the July 1960 Republican National Convention as the editor of a publication for the Young Republicans, Edwards watched as Congressman Walter Judd of Minnesota brought the crowd to its feet with an anti-Communist, anti-Soviet oration, and as Senator Barry Goldwater established himself as a national leader with the words, “Let’s grow up, conservatives!”
Edwards was among the 100 men and women who visited the Buckley family home in Sharon, Connecticut, in September of that year to form Young Americans for Freedom. He signed its charter and creed. “The ideas of the Sharon Statement,” he writes, “would serve as the philosophical base of modern American conservatism for the next three decades, until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.”
It was primarily the idea of freedom that animated the young conservatives’ domestic policy of limited government and foreign policy of anticommunism. “Foremost among the transcendent values is the individual’s use of his God-given free will,” says the Sharon Statement, which also holds that “liberty is indivisible” and that “political freedom cannot long exist without economic freedom.” And because “the forces of international communism” deny the existence of the author of freedom and seek to dominate the world, the statement reads, they “are, at present, the greatest single threat to these liberties.” Each of the three original factions of the conservative movement, then, had a reason to oppose communism. Classical liberals opposed its socialism. Traditionalists opposed its atheism. Anti-Communists opposed its totalitarianism.
However, before they could fight the Soviets, conservatives first had to take over the Republican party. Edwards helped them accomplish this task, too, through his work on Arizona senator Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign. The chapters on Goldwater are perhaps the most fascinating and heartfelt in this compelling and elegantly written book. The author of The Conscience of a Conservative (1960) comes across as a charming, self-deprecating, and thoughtful man of principle, who from the moment he stepped into the race understood that he was doomed.
Following the Kennedy assassination, Goldwater rightly suspected that Americans would not want three presidents within one year. He nonetheless ran for the GOP nomination out of a sense of duty—both to his ideas and to his youthful and impassioned followers. His dogged and sometimes prickly adherence to principle, and his penchant for improvisation and irreverence, did not make him the slickest candidate on the trail. The press routinely misquoted or distorted his words. His reluctant opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act made it easy for critics to label him racist. In the general election he faced the wily protégé of FDR.
Goldwater’s acceptance speech at the Cow Palace in San Francisco announced the entry of the conservative intellectual movement into politics. “This party, with its every action, every word, every breath, and every heartbeat, has but a single resolve,” Goldwater said. “And that is freedom.” Later, he uttered the famous paraphrase of rhetoric attributed to Cicero: “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
Lee Edwards (center) with 1964 GOP presidential candidate Barry Goldwater and running mate William E. Miller [Courtesy of ISI]
Edwards, a campaign adviser, was both exhilarated and disappointed at what he heard. “Watching from our communications center at the Mark Hopkins [hotel],” he writes, “I saw my hero, deeply tanned and silver-haired, ensure his defeat with his acceptance speech.” On Election Day, Johnson won by 23 points and took all but six states.
Yet Goldwater’s repudiation at the polls was not exactly the disaster it seemed. Conservatives found solace in the Americans who, despite everything, still cast ballots for AuH2O. In the words of a popular bumper sticker, “27 million Americans can’t be wrong.”
The movement also discovered a new star: an actor and television host who had switched his party registration to Republican just a few years before. “The Reagan TV show has elicited the greatest response of any program to date,” Edwards wrote in his campaign diary after Ronald Reagan’s nationally televised “A Time for Choosing” speech in support of Goldwater aired one week before the election. “Reagan is the man they wish Barry Goldwater was. Or perhaps I should say the man they wish he had been in this campaign.”
Less than a year after Goldwater’s defeat, Edwards and his wife found themselves interviewing Reagan for a profile in Reader’s Digest. “There was about him the aura of a star and a leader,” Edwards recalls. “At the end of the first day, back in our motel, I looked at Anne and she looked at me and we said at the same time, ‘He’s got it!’ ”
That and subsequent interviews became Reagan: A Political Biography (1967), published in the first year Reagan was governor of California. It remains the most successful of the more than two dozen books Edwards has authored over the years, in between raising a family, managing a public relations firm, organizing anti-Communist rallies, earning a doctorate from Catholic University, joining the Heritage Foundation as a distinguished fellow in conservative thought, teaching classes and writing curricula, and serving as chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
President George W. Bush attended the dedication of the memorial, a sculpture of the Goddess of Democracy that sits on Capitol Hill. “Sharing the platform with the president of the United States that morning in June 2007 was the pinnacle of my life,” writes Edwards, “a life committed to freedom and opposed to every form of tyranny over the mind of man (to borrow from Thomas Jefferson).”
It is also a life that invites reflection. The victory of Donald Trump in 2016 unsettled political categories and reopened the question of what being a conservative means. As Edwards reminds us, “The conservative movement and the Republican Party are two different institutions—different in structure and in objective.” The party may be Trump’s, but what about the movement? Here Edwards is cautious and more than a little politic: “The implications of Trump’s success—his extraordinary takeover of the Republican Party and his dramatic general-election victory—for the future of conservatism remain difficult to discern.”
Not so difficult to discern, however, is the attack on the idea of freedom from both left and right. Autocrats and strongmen are ascendant, America’s most pressing strategic threat is a Stalinist dictatorship armed with nuclear weapons, socialism is making a comeback among young people, blood and soil ethno-nationalism has returned to the West, and some on the right are criticizing the American founding itself. “Is tyranny winning and freedom losing?” Edwards asks. It is not an easy question to answer.
We should be grateful to Lee Edwards because he reminds us that conservatives, as they cope with the present, should never forget their past. Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan were not only champions of freedom. They were men of character and good humor who belonged to a tradition, to an intellectual and political genealogy, that branched off in an uncountable number of directions after the USSR fell apart in 1991.
This memoir is worth reading for the anecdotes alone. Edwards tells the story of how, early in Reagan’s first term, he presented Reagan with a copy of the latest edition of his presidential biography. “As we stood there chatting and the photographer snapped away, I saw the president glancing down at the cover with its bold, black-on-yellow banner, ‘Complete Through the Assassination Attempt.’ Finally, the president looked up and, with that irresistible smile spreading across his face, said, ‘Well, Lee, I’m sorry I messed up your ending.’ ”
Matthew Continetti, a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is editor in chief of the Washington Free Beacon.
