Edwards Looks at the Bigger Picture

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 5, 1999 | by Stephen Goode

Writer and editor Lee Edwards offers a fresh historical perspective on the conservative movement in his new book and is optimistic that the revolution he admires will continue.

Lee Edwards' most recent book is The Conservative Revolution: The Movement That Remade America, a political history of the contemporary American conservative movement, published this spring by the Free Press. Edwards, a longtime conservative activist, holds a doctorate in political science and is author of biographies of Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater, among other books, as well as articles in periodicals as diverse as Reader's Digest, Policy Review and Insight.

Edwards' new book joins a number of other recent books on modern conservatism such as George Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 that are helping to fill the gap in serious comprehensive histories of conservatism. But Edwards suggests that much more work needs to be done about the history of the right in the United States. He tells Insight, "Hopefully at some point it will start getting done, by historians on the left and the right."

Insight: It's obvious from the way you write history that you believe individuals can make a big difference, that it is individuals who have made the history of movements such as American conservatism.

Lee Edwards: For my book, I've picked out my four "Misters": Taft, Goldwater, Reagan and Gingrich.

I think Robert Taft was the consummate senator -- brilliant, incredibly hardworking, dedicated and committed to his legislative craft. He was abrasive, tree and did not gladly suffer fools or even middling intellectuals. But he was a man of tremendous integrity, tremendous probity, guided always by the Constitution.

Barry Goldwater -- a courageous man. To run for the presidency as he did in 1964, knowing that he would get clobbered, knowing that Lyndon Johnson would smear him and cover him head to toe with dung -- what Goldwater called "electronic dirt" -- that was an extraordinary act, to me, of political courage.

Ronald Reagan. Very deceptive: Reagan comes across to people so often as very laid back, easygoing, a little bit lazy, maybe. But here was somebody at the age of 65 in 1976-77, having just been defeated for the Republican candidacy for president, who already was laying plans to run again.

He was determined; he saw a role for himself; he sensed his destiny was to lead and to be a president. Most men of 65 are ready to retire and he was cranking up once again to run for the presidency. So there was a lot more passion and toughness to Reagan that's sometimes not apparent at first glance.

Newt Gingrich. I admire him. When he first arrived on Capitol Hill as a freshman congressman in 1979, one of the first things he said was, "There will be a Republican majority in the House!" And he was laughed at. "It will never happen!" everyone said. "Never going to happen!" Not only did he say it was going to happen, he worked for 15 years and more to make it happen.

There would have been no Republican victory in 1994, there would have been no "Contract With America" without Newt Gingrich's leadership, his vision and, again, his stick-to-it-edness. So I think he's a brilliant revolutionary. In fact, he was not as good a legislator as he was a political revolutionary, but his role [in the conservative movement] was key.

Insight: Just what was the "Reagan Revolution?"

LE: With Ronald Reagan, it was a revolution because he said: "No, government is not the solution, government is the problem -- and we've got to stop accepting this idea of turning to government always as the court of first resort." He led a revolution -- a sharp departure from what had been the prevailing political philosophy for 50 years. Reagan wanted limited government in a Jeffersonian, federalist direction. He didn't accomplish everything he started, but he made this great philosophical and political contribution.

Insight: Is it still true that college students know a lot about the history of the left but little about that of the right?

LE: I had some fun. I taught this course called "The Politics of the Sixties" at Catholic University last year. I was asked to do so by the chairman of the department.

The first day I got up and said, "You've all heard about SDS [the leftist Students for a Democratic Society]. We're going to talk about them. But we're also going to talk about Young Americans for Freedom. And there was this blank look on the faces of all of my students! They didn't know what I was talking about!

Insight: What big mistakes has conservatism made?

LE: I think probably the most lasting one is the one in 1964 when Barry Goldwater voted no -- when the "conscience of the conservative movement," Mr. Conservative as I called him in my book, voted no on the Civil Rights Act.

Why? Because he felt the act was unconstitutional. He feared that, on the one hand, it only could be policed through the creation of a large bureaucracy. He was proved right about that. He predicted it would lead to quotas (what we now call affirmative action), something denied by its sponsors, and he's been proved fight about that. And he didn't like the idea that in the area of public accommodations you had to rent to whomever came to the door. As Goldwater put it, there are many white people that he didn't want to rent to.