R.I.P. Lee Edwards, Champion Of Hope And Freedom

The year was 1985. I had arrived in Washington, D.C., as a junior at Indiana University-Bloomington to serve as an intern to Sen. Dan Quayle, R-Ind. With great eagerness, I was ready to jump into my new assignment in our nation’s capital.

It was a heady time. Ronald Reagan had just won a historic landslide, and conservatives were on a roll. After the turmoil of the 1960s and the despair of the 1970s, America was seemingly back on track with a sunny optimism of greater days ahead — rather than the pessimistic view of just a decade earlier that perhaps the American moment had come to an end.

Nineteen eighty-five was also the year that I would meet one of my dearest mentors and friends, Lee Edwards, biographer of Ronald Reagan, Edwin Meese III, Barry Goldwater, and others, and the founder of the Victims of Communism Museum. I had read his books voraciously and after sending him a note, was honored to have lunch with him at the famous Washington, D.C., restaurant, The Monocle, near the Heritage Foundation.

Now, nearly forty years later, the book on his life has closed. Lee Edwards passed away Thursday morning at the age of 92, leaving a legacy of freedom and love for our nation’s founding principles that will be difficult to follow or replicate.

Lee was one of the founders of Young Americans for Freedom. His father, Willard Edwards, was the national political reporter for The Chicago Tribune and a poker playing friend of President Franklin Roosevelt, even though the Tribune was perhaps FDR’s harshest critic. Lee had a political and conservative pedigree right from the start.

But it was as a graduate student at the Sorbonne University in Paris in 1956 that Lee had a life-changing experience.

While he was there, a group of courageous Hungarian students in Budapest chose to stand up to the Communist regime which ruled their nation with an iron fist. The regime, propped up by Moscow, crumbled, but before it landed in the ash heap of history, Soviet tanks rolled into the city and annihilated the courageous students, with hardly an objection from the West.

It was that horror, and the West’s lack of response, to what played out on the streets of Budapest that resulted in Lee’s lifelong pledge to bring an end to Communism.

In 1990, as the Soviet Empire teetered and tottered towards its eventual demise, Lee and his family wanted to make sure that the history of what happened on those Hungarian streets, and other streets around the world, never happened again. Their deaths could not be in vain.

With the unanimous approval of Congress and the signature of President Bill Clinton, Lee and Dr. Lev Dobriansky co-founded the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in 1994 to commemorate the more than 100 million people killed by Communism and to pursue freedom worldwide.

Thirteen years later, the Victims of Communism Museum opened in Washington, D.C. At the time I was serving under President George W. Bush. My old friend, and coincidentally also my neighbor on the same circle in Northern Virginia, found me and asked if the president would provide the dedication address.

President Bush readily agreed. In his remarks, the president said:

Building this memorial took more than a decade of effort, and its presence in our Capital is a testament to the passion and determination of two distinguished Americans: Lev Dobriansky … and Dr. Lee Edwards. They faced setbacks and challenges along the way; yet they never gave up, because in their hearts, they heard the voices of the fallen crying out, ‘Remember us’ …

… The men and women who designed this memorial could have chosen an image of repression for this space, a replica of the wall that once divided Berlin, or the frozen barracks of the Gulag, or a killing field littered with skulls. Instead, they chose an image of hope, a woman holding a lamp of liberty. She reminds us of the victims of communism and also of the power that overcame communism.

It is no accident that Lee chose the symbol of hope because that was what Lee was all about, as he genuinely believed that America’s greatest days were yet to come. He was gifted with uncommon grace and humility — a man whose unalloyed joy for his wife and his family was unequaled in my experience. His unbounded affection for the United States was contagious, and until the very end, he was a revered font of wisdom for the conservative movement.

That hope, grace, and affection is the legacy that Lee leaves us as he now goes to his eternal reward for being a good and faithful servant who believed in the dignity and freedom for all whom God has created.

Requiescat in peace.