Lee Edwards

Lee Edwards (born 1932 in Chicago, Illinois) is a distinguished fellow in conservative thought at the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies at The Heritage Foundation. A historian of the conservative movement in America, and he has published more than 15 books, including biographies of President Ronald Reagan, Senator Barry Goldwater, Attorney General Edwin Meese III and William F. Buckley, Jr. He is currently the Chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.

Edwards was born in Chicago in 1932. At an early age, he was introduced to conservative values and the importance of the written word by his parents; both of Edwards' parents were anti-communist, and his father was a journalist for the Chicago Tribune.

He holds a bachelor's degree in English from Duke University and a doctorate in world politics from Catholic University. He also did graduate work at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Edwards' involvement in the conservative movement began in 1960. He was one of the founding members of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), and later served as the director of information for the Barry Goldwater presidential campaign in 1964. In 1969, the New York Times dubbed Edwards “the voice of the silent majority.” He has acted as a consultant for the Richard Nixon administration, Senators Strom Thurmond and Bob Dole, the Republican National Committee, YAF, the American Conservative Union, the Committee for a Free China and the American Council for World Freedom.

Edwards has written biographies of Ronald Reagan, William F. Buckley, Edwin Meese III and Goldwater, as well as a number of other books, which include The Conservative Revolution: The Movement That Remade America, The Power of Ideas, a retrospective on the first 25 years of the Heritage Foundation, and a history of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

He was the initial editor of the Conservative Digest in 1975, and has been a senior editor for The World & I. He has also written for major newspapers including The Boston Globe, Detroit News, Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times, as well as magazines such as Crisis, National Review, Policy Review and Reader's Digest. He is a frequent commentator on television and radio and has appeared on Fox News Channel's The O'Reilly Factor and Fox and Friends, PBS' The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, C-SPAN's Booknotes and Washington Journal and NPR's The Diane Rehm Show. He has lectured in nearly 20 nations on various aspects of American and world politics.

Edwards was the founding director of the Institute on Political Journalism at Georgetown University and a fellow at the Institute of Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is a past president of the Philadelphia Society and has been a media fellow at the Hoover Institution.

He is a distinguished fellow in conservative thought at the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies at The Heritage Foundation, and as of 2011, holds the title of adjunct professor of politics at the Catholic University of America and at the Institute of World Politics. In addition, he is chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, an organization dedicated to the creation of an international memorial in Washington to the victims of communism across history and the online Global Museum on Communism.

He is a signatory of the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism.

Honors he has been awarded include the Millennium Star of Lithuania, the Cross of Terra Mariana of Estonia, the Friendship Medal of Diplomacy from the Republic of China (Taiwan), the John Ashbrook Award, the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award and the Walter Judd Freedom Award.

He and his wife, Anne, who assists him in all his writing, live in Alexandria, Virginia. They have two daughters and eight grandchildren.