They were the giants of a political movement that reshaped American politics, and now they are all gone. Barry Goldwater. Ronald Reagan. William F. Buckley, Jr. went before him. On Monday evening, M. Stanton Evans followed them into eternity after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 80 years old and spent the final days near his beloved Shenandoah Valley in Virginia.
Goldwater, Reagan, and Buckley were better known to the American public than Evans, but his accomplishments over five tumultuous decades — beginning with his drafting in 1960 of the seminal Sharon Statement of the Young Americans for Freedom — made him their equal in the pantheon of first-generation leaders of the conservative movement.
Looking back, the man’s accomplishments were so many and significant that penning what quickly became one of the movement’s classic statements of principle can almost seem to pale by comparison. He was an influential journalist, scholar, fearsome and inspiring debater, noted radio and television commentator, syndicated newspaper columnist, adviser to presidents and politicians, and master humorist in the tradition of Mark Twain.
At age 26, he became editor of the Indianapolis News daily newspaper, making him then the youngest such newsroom leader in America. He would go on from there to National Review and then to chairman of the American Conservative Union, the prototypical political activist organization on the Right that launched the Conservative Political Action Conference in 1974 and then played a critical role in then-Gov. Ronald Reagan’s unexpected triumph over President Gerald Ford in the 1976 North Carolina GOP presidential primary.
It was during the same years that Evans coined a maxim heard to this day at places like CPAC in the continuing battles between conservative grassroots insurgents and RINOs, the infamous Republicans-In- Name-Only of the Washington political establishment: “When ‘our people’ get to the point where they can do us some good, they stop being ‘our people.'”
In 1977, Evans founded the National Journalism Center, a training course for an estimated 1,500 conservative young men and women, more than a few of whom went on to distinguished careers in print, broadcast and electronic journalism. The center continues today as a program of the Young Americas Foundation.
Evans wrote eight notable books during his career. The first two, Revolt on Campus and The Theme is Freedom, remain among the must-read works for political historians seeking to document the roots and growth of the conservative movement in America.
Evans delighted in engaging in public debate and never backed away from even the most controversial of topics. His depth of experience, intensely analytical approach and scholarly assets were most famously on display in his 663-pageBlacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies, published in 2007.
There, Evans systematically demolished academic, political and foreign critics of the bipartisan efforts in Congress and the White House during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations to combat subversion of the U.S. government by agents of the Soviet Union such as Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White and Klaus Fuchs.
For better or worse, Sen. Joseph McCarthy was often at the forefront of those efforts and the era became known in Hollywood movies and liberal political commentary for “McCarthyism,” a toxic combination of innuendo, false accusation and sensationalism allegedly used by the infamous Wisconsin legislator.
But where Hollywood made movies, Evans marshaled facts in so compelling a case that it was actually McCarthy’s critics who most often practiced such disreputable tactics. As conservative historian Lee Edwards noted in a moving Daily Signal tribute Tuesday, even a longtime McCarthy critic like columnist Robert Novak was impressed.
A dedicated anti-communist to the end, Evans’ last book — “Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government” — was co-authored with his long-time Cold War colleague, former House Un-American Activities Committee investigator Herbert Romerstein. It was published in 2012.
Though it was not often emphasized in his most notable writings and speeches, Evans was a devout Christian in his private life. It was an obscure but significant fact because, where Buckley appealed to traditional Catholics and Goldwater to Jewish Americans, Evans was a Methodist and an articulate defender of the Protestant Reformation. In that role, Evans quietly helped forge important links between conservative political thinkers and leading evangelical leaders that would prove decisive in Reagan’s 1980 and 1984 election victories.
He was also possessed of an encyclopedic knowledge of and appreciation for early American rock n’ roll, a fact brought home to this writer while penning a review for the Washington Times in 1986 that focused on a new offering from the luxury automaker that recalled the classic “Hot Rod Lincoln.” When memory failed to recall the artist behind the song, a quick call to Evans instantly produced the answer – Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen.
Throughout his career, Evans made mentoring young conservatives a priority, a characteristic that prompted Richard Viguerie, another Sharon veteran, to recall that “for us young, green conservatives in the early 1960s, Stan was our leader, friend and peer, but he was also the friend and peer of the country’s most important conservatives of the day, including Goldwater, Buckley, Russell Kirk, Brent Bozell, Jr., and Frank Meyer.
“As young conservatives entered the political arena in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, Stan was there to lead, mentor, educate and encourage them and, in the evenings, keep them laughing well into the night with his humor. He never really stopped doing this.”
Many of the effusion of tributes from Evans’ surviving contemporaries Tuesday mentioned the difficulty in comprehensively assessing the full range of his influence. Donald Devine, a Reagan political appointee in the 1980s and a long-time ally of Evans at the American Conservative Union, put it this way to the Washington Examiner:
“He was the voice of the movement as editor of The Indianapolis News, at National Review, as a radio commentator, syndicated columnist and as chairman of the American Conservative Union. He was the cleverest lecturer in the country and the most humorous.
“His book, The Theme Is Freedom,is a fusionist classic arguing for the twin themes creating Western civilization, the necessity of both freedom and tradition. Not merely an intellectual, as head of ACU he was instrumental in urging Ronald Reagan to run for president in 1976 and indeed turned the whole organization over to a campaign, which at the beginning had few other resources. He was a powerful force on the Right to the end and he will be sorely missed, indeed irreplaceable.”
Similarly, the Heritage Foundation’s Ed Feulner, another long-time Evans ally, pointed to his long-time friend’s capacity for uniting the philosophically disparate factions of the conservative movement, saying “Stan Evans was ‘an unhyphenated conservative.’ He believed in traditional values, in the free market, and in a strong national defense, unstintingly.His leadership going back to his Yale days (when he was a debate partner with Ed Meese), to his authorship of the Sharon Statement more than half a century ago, that has guided so many of us over the decades, and on to his insights on current policy issues, inspire us all to remember our roots, and to continue to rely on our basic conservative principles for guidance. His good humor and great insights will be missed by all of us.”
For others, though, like Patrick Korten, a long-time media friend and movement ally, measuring Evans’ significance always somehow comes back to Sharon, Connecticut, and the 368-word manifesto he drafted for the conservative campus insurgency. “That was his masterpiece. It remains the most concise and accurate description of American conservative principles ever written,” Korten said.
Born in Kingsville, Texas, and a graduate of Yale University and New York University, Evans was once asked by Time Magazine to describe his politics. Quoted Tuesday by Edwards, Evans’ reply captured the essence of common sense bedrock Midwestern American values:
“I think my philosophy is pretty close to the farmer in Seymour, Ind. He believes in God. He believes in the U.S. He believes in himself. This intuitive position is much closer to wisdom than the tormented theorems of some of our Harvard dons.”
UPDATE: Funeral services will be held at 1:30 pm, Thursday,, March 12, in Leesburg, Va., at St. John the Apostle Catholic Church.
Mark Tapscott is executive editor of the Washington Examiner.
