Lee Willard Edwards (born 1932) is an American academic and author, currently a fellow at The Heritage Foundation. He is a historian of the conservative movement in the United States.[1][2]
Edwards was born in Chicago in 1932. Edwards says he was influenced by the politics of his parents, both anti-communist. His father Willard was a journalist for the Chicago Tribune.[3]
He holds a bachelor's degree in English from Duke University and a doctorate in political science from Catholic University.[4] His dissertation was entitled Congress and the origins of the Cold War, 1946–1948.[5]
External videos | |
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Booknotes interview with Edwards on The Life and Times of Walter Judd, September 2, 1990, C-SPAN | |
Q&A interview with Edwards on Just Right, December 24, 2017, C-SPAN |
Edwards helped found Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) in 1960, and then worked for the YAF magazine New Guard as editor.[6] In 1963, he became news director of the Draft Goldwater Committee.[6]
His publications include biographies of Ronald Reagan, William F. Buckley, Edwin Meese, and Barry Goldwater,[7][8][9][10] and a work of history, The Conservative Revolution: The Movement That Remade America[11] and The Power of Ideas.[12] He acted as senior editor for the World & I, owned by a subsidiary of Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church.[13][14]
Edwards was the founding director of the Institute on Political Journalism at Georgetown University and a fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics.[15] He is a past president of the Philadelphia Society and has been a media fellow at the Hoover Institution.[16][17][18]
He is a distinguished fellow in conservative thought in the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies at The Heritage Foundation,[19] and as of 2011[update], was an adjunct professor of politics at the Catholic University of America and Institute of World Politics.[20] Edwards co-founded the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation with The Heritage Foundation's founder and chairman, Edwin Feulner, and was appointed its chairman emeritus.[21] Edwards is a signatory of the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism.[22]
He and his wife, Anne, who assists him in all his writing, live in Alexandria, Virginia. They have two daughters and eleven grandchildren.