The night was June 12, 2007, and Lee Edwards was beaming. After years of work, his personal brainchild was coming to fruition: That day, he had unveiled in Washington a statue, a monument, to the “victims of communism,” as the first step toward a later museum, now thriving, on the same subject. At a major party and dinner that evening, Edwards was surrounded by heroes of the international coalition that defeated Soviet communism and by great leaders bearing witness to the successful struggle.
Edwards, who died Thursday of pancreatic cancer at age 92, was, for more than 65 years, a linchpin of the conservative movement, with his first article in National Review appearing in 1958 and his most recent in the fall of 2023. That 2007 celebration was marked by the very last public speech of NR’s William F. Buckley Jr., who died of emphysema within a year; an address by conservative idea man Jack Kemp; testimonials from Eastern European dissidents; and an extremely moving peroration by the aged Yelena Bonner, who, with her husband, Andrei Sakharov, had bravely agitated for human rights in the Soviet Union.
In a lengthy advance interview with me, Edwards said, “You must resist tyranny, you cannot just accept it. You cannot just think it is not going to challenge me. … You must stand up to tyranny with purpose and with conviction and with dispatch.”
Edwards dedicated his life to resisting tyranny, promoting freedom, and memorializing other people, both famous and not-so-famous, who valiantly did the same. As the distinguished fellow in conservative thought at the Heritage Foundation, Edwards essentially was the historian of the American conservative movement, with scholarly articles too numerous to mention and 25 books either written or edited, including biographies of former Sen. Barry Goldwater and former President Ronald Reagan. Edwards was the director of public information for Goldwater’s seminal presidential campaign in 1964 and then spent the next decades ensuring that Goldwater’s electoral loss became a launching pad for long-term conservative victory.
Kindly and soft-spoken, Edwards was nonetheless energetic and indefatigable. And he played one of the biggest roles at the conference that, by many accounts, was the event that turned Buckley’s still-nascent conservative intellectual agenda into a real political force. The 1960 Sharon Conference at Buckley’s Great Elm Estate in Connecticut was where the Young Americans for Freedom, which became the youth vanguard and troop provider for the conservative movement, was created.
My father, Haywood Hillyer III, was one of 96 Sharon attendees. In his later accounts of the YAF-founding conference, there were only five names, other than Buckley’s, that he mentioned as making a big impression on him. Edwards, then a senatorial press secretary who at only age 28 was the oldest, non-Buckley attendee, was foremost among those five. As confirmed by Wayne Thorburn’s A Generation Awakes: Young Americans for Freedom and the Creation of the Conservative Movement, Edwards was the leading advocate, in a hotly contested discussion, of including “freedom” in the new organization’s name. And freedom was Edwards’s lifelong cause.
Indeed, among other marks of distinction too numerous to mention, Edwards, at one point, served as president of the elite, not “elitist,” intellectual organization The Philadelphia Society, dedicated to expanding “the future of freedom around the world.”
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Edwards was the first-ever editor of The New Guard, YAF’s national magazine, and, in its first issue, he explained that it would celebrate “man’s God-given free will, the interdependence of economic and political freedom, [and] the efficacy of the market economy.”
Edwards lived to promote those ideals. We should do likewise.