Lee Edwards, anti-communist and chronicler (Dec. 16):
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….
Clarke Reed, Mississippi GOP’s maestro (Dec. 13):
If not for one momentous decision in 1976, Mississippi’s Clarke Reed would be considered one of the great heroes of the Republican Party renaissance of the latter 20th century.
The reality that he spent his last 48 years detested by a swath of Reaganite activists should not obscure his larger contributions to the cause.
Journalist-historian Jon Meacham, a liberal who nonetheless was a favorite of former first lady Nancy Reagan, wrote a wonderful Dec. 9 obituary of Reed, who died the day before at age 96. Like eventual governor Dave Treen of neighboring Louisiana, Reed began his Republican activism in an era when Democrats so dominated the South that well under 10% of his state’s population considered themselves Republicans, and even fewer actually registered as such. Reed, who had a proverbial “big personality,” began building the Mississippi Republican Party way back in the 1950s when Southern Democrats were the party of vicious segregation and Southern Republicans were, by definition, the anti-racists…… [MORE]
