If a single descriptor would define conservative activist and scholar, Lee Edwards, it would have to be Lee Edwards, anti-communist. And that would be anti-communism at home and abroad.
Just Right: A Life in Pursuit of Liberty by Lee Edwards. (378 pages, Regnery, 2024)
If the repeated call of the old Popular Front was “no enemies to the left,” what might have been a comparable call of the New Right? If Lee Edwards had paused long enough in his lengthy and productive career, it might have gone something like this: “Minimize your enemies on the right.”
Always on the right, Edwards always seemed to be doing his level best to be “just right,” as in there really is no need to be any more specific than that; it only results in making unnecessary enemies. The only two labels that he apparently sought to avoid were neoconservative and paleoconservative, although he was always willing to work with anyone on the right, whether they were simply willing to define themselves as “just right” or were intent on deploying something more refined than that.
A combination of social and economic conservative, Edwards was anything but a SLIBECON. The term might have been invented by Edwards himself during his early days as a PR man for the conservative movement, but it wasn’t. Nonetheless, you know the type. How often have you heard someone characterize oneself as a “social liberal and an economic conservative?” Over the years I have heard it a lot—and always in the same order—and usually in supreme confidence that one is being quite consistent and quite correct, not to mention quite with it.
Well, Lee Edwards was a SECON, as in social and economic conservative. But that doesn’t fully capture him either. He might also be described as a traditionalist with libertarian leanings, or a libertarian with traditionalist leanings. But in any case his social conservatism always managed to temper those libertarian leanings.
Getting Dr. Edwards just right must have been an inevitably tricky proposition during all of his many years of living, writing, and politicking. Maybe even for himself. Now that he is gone, it has remained an equally tricky proposition while reading and evaluating his memoir, the publication of which turned out to be just about right, at least in terms of its timing.
And it was Doctor Edwards. After better than twenty years as a movement conservative, and following a serious case of embezzlement within his PR firm, Edwards took a sabbatical of sorts to enroll in a doctoral program at Catholic University, culminating in a dissertation on the role of Congress in the early Cold War years.
In a sense, that undertaking took him back to his youth. Edwards’ father, Willard Edwards, was a reporter for Colonel Robert McCormick’s Chicago Tribune. As such, he came to cover Senator Joe McCarthy. He also came to know and support the Wisconsin senator. The same was true of Edwards’ mother, whose pro-McCarthy position likely cost her a seat on the Chicago school board.
In other words, Lee Edwards was on the right, if not yet necessarily concerned with being just right, right from the beginning. He was also a staunch anti-communist right from the beginning. And he remained firmly in both camps for the duration of his long political career. In fact, if a single descriptor would define Lee Edwards, it would have to be Lee Edwards, anti-communist. And that would be anti-communism at home and abroad.
If Edwards had difficulties with some of President Nixon’s deviations from “just right” policies and positions, and he did, he always retained a soft spot for Congressman Nixon, who spotted Alger Hiss for what he was right from the outset of his 1948 HUAC testimony.
If there would be one crowning achievement to Edwards’ long career in the trenches of the movement, it would be his key and singular role in the creation of the memorial to the victims of communism in our nation’s capital. Though his equally anti-communist wife, Anne, had the idea, Edwards had the drive and the contacts to secure the financial success necessary for this entirely privately funded project, which was opened to the public in the waning days of the George W. Bush presidency.
The fact that a Bush happened to be the president—and present—at the event that marked the opening of this memorial must have been a somewhat bittersweet moment for Edwards. Throughout the memoir Edwards seeks to make a clear distinction between the Republican party and the conservative movement. Yes, Lee Edwards was a Republican, but he was a conservative first and foremost… and a movement conservative at that. The Bushes and Bush Republicans may have been just right enough now and again for Lee Edwards, but they were seldom conservatives first or foremost and never movement conservatives.
Along the way Edwards had occasion to interview one of his intellectual heroes, Milton Friedman, who confided to Edwards that the “greatest mistake that Mr. Reagan made… was to pick George Bush as vice-president.” Edwards then replied that Reagan should perhaps have chosen Jack Kemp. Friedman demurred. No, it should have been Don Rumsfeld.
Hmmm… Rumsfeld following Reagan. The new Republican party of Ronald Reagan might have remained the new Republican party. After all, Edwards tells us that this was Reagan’s goal well before 1980. Pressured by movement conservatives during the seventies to start a new third party, Reagan demurred. What we need instead, he insisted then, was a “new second party.”
Edwards attributes much of that pressure to un-elected President Gerald R. Ford’s decision to appoint Nelson Rockefeller as his un-elected vice-president. That decision did more than rankle. It angered. It especially angered Lee Edwards, not to mention his fellow movement conservatives. But the Reagan years at least did calm most of the rankling and much of the anger.
That same Friedman interview found Edwards asking for comparisons between Reagan and Goldwater. Friedman readily complied: “Both men had one common feature, they had real principles, that’s what distinguished them… from any other candidate for the presidency during my lifetime.”
That line takes us back to what might be defined as the first post-World War II Republican attempt to create a new second party. Specifically, it takes us to Edwards’ discussion of his early movement years with the Goldwater run for the presidency. And even more specifically, it takes us to Edwards’ commentary on the campaign of someone he deemed to have been the “most consequential loser” of any presidential campaign in modern American history, if not in all of American history. In any case, it is easily the best portion of the memoir.
Barely thirty at the time, Edwards was not a key player, but he was more than a fly on the wall. What he gives us here is Lee Edwards at his writing best and Barry Goldwater at his very best. And all of it confirms Friedman’s judgment of Goldwater as a highly principled individual.
Much of the story is well known, but the writing is vivid and the conclusions are valid. This is the Goldwater who had anticipated a spirited, idea-dominated, friendly-enemy sort of campaign against President Kennedy. Instead, he had to face off against Lyndon Johnson.
It is Edwards’ judgment that as of the fall of 1963 the idea of a President Goldwater was “not a chimera.” After November 22, 1963, it was.
Who was Lee Harvey Oswald, wondered Lee Edwards at the time? He had never heard of him. Nor, for that matter, had anyone else in the conservative movement: “All over America conservatives were checking their membership and donor lists.”
“Praise the Lord,” were Edwards’ words when he learned that Oswald was a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. In other words, Oswald isn’t one of ours–he’s one of theirs.” That relief aside, Goldwater–and presumably Edwards–knew that the senator faced defeat in the fall of 1964, if only because the country wouldn’t tolerate three different presidents in as many years. Nonetheless, Goldwater soldiered on.
That soldiering by the anti-Johnson in the race makes for compelling reading. The anti-Johnson? Unlike Johnson in 1960, Goldwater surrendered his senate seat in 1964. Unlike Johnson, Goldwater had any number of interests aside from politics. And unlike Johnson, Goldwater could not constitutionally support the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Lastly, Goldwater was always willing to speak his mind, or as he put it to his young aide, “Lee, you have no idea how much trouble I’m going to cause you.”
Well, he also gave a much older Lee Edwards plenty of material. There are three political figures who dominate these pages, and all deservedly so, namely Goldwater, William F. Buckley, and Ronald Reagan. Edwards ultimately wrote books on all three, as well as biographies of a few others of much more than minor note, especially Ed Feulner, who created and built the Heritage Foundation, and Minnesota Congressman and one-time Chinese medical missionary Walter Judd, who almost became Richard Nixon’s running mate in 1960.
Once Edwards shed the PF flak jacket for academic robes, the memoir loses some of its steam, as Edwards shifts from chronicling his own journey to achieve just rightness to judging that of others on the right. But the reader should soldier on nonetheless, if only to come to terms with Edwards’ attempt to come to terms with Donald Trump, which he attempts to do in the final chapter, which is simply, and perhaps mischievously, titled “Trumped.”
Perhaps? That was my suspicion, given the title–and given the wide-ranging reactions among conservatives to Trump and/or to being trumped. Just where would Dr. Just Right fall? Would it be into or out of the Trump band wagon? Would a Trump presidency qualify as, well, as barely right or as not-at-all right or as just right?
Since this is a memoir and not a who-done-it, giving the game away should not be out of order, especially since it forces me to admit a misjudgment. Mischievousness was not Edwards’ intent. Instead, he links Robert Taft, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich and Donald Trump, each of whom in “their own different ways rejected the claims of the nation’s elites to rule.”
In a very real sense, I should have seen it coming, but didn’t. It is Edward’s “just right” conclusion that Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016 because he had “tapped into a constituency that had been at the center of the Republican party and the conservative movement for six decades.” That would be a constituency that the old second party had largely managed to ignore.
Trump, on the other hand, did manage to solidify Reagan’s desired “new second party.” In doing so, he brought the GOP and movement conservatism closer together. The result has been a very different version of big tent movement conservatism, as opposed to previous versions of big tent Republicanism. More than that, it was Lee Edwards’ final judgment that a trumped up conservatism is “best positioned to confront the problems and divisions revealed by the 2016 election, and it is conservatives who will shape our institutions to address them.”
It’s too soon to offer any final answers here. It also remains difficult to pin down precisely what Lee Edwards might have meant by being “just right” at any given historical moment over the full run of his sixty-year career. But surely minimizing those actual and potential enemies on the right remained his lodestar for all those decades. It no doubt also helped him see the good sense behind William F. Buckley’s willingness to be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory, rather than the Harvard faculty… his own affections for and attachments to the academia notwithstanding.
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