Been There Done That

Young conservatives watching the poll ratings of the only president they have ever voted for implode got some words of comfort, sort of, from a veteran conservative journalist last month at the Heritage Foundation. After conservative Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater’s landslide defeat in 1964, the movement that nominated him was “apparently dead,” M. Stanton Evans remembers.
“We didn’t even have grief counselors at that time,” Evans wryly recounts. “The malls weren’t covered.”

“It could rain.” Back then, Evans was the editorial page editor of The Indianapolis News.

“There were no remote controls,” Evans, 72, pointed out to the audience of 20-somethings. “We dug our way out,” Evans said of the aftermath of the ’64 debacle. He hastened to add that conservatives in the 1960s managed to regroup “without counselors.”

Evans himself played a key role in the recovery. He wrote The Future of Conservatism in 1968 which featured a chapter entitled “The Rise of Reagan.”

The future president was then halfway through his first term as governor of California, the first elected office he ever held outside of the presidency of the Screen Actors Guild union.

“Try while you’re here to learn as much as you can, but don’t become too enmeshed in it,” Evans advised his audience of Washington, D. C. interns. “The front line is back at your home.”

Evans recalled the description of America’s two-party system offered by a former congressional staffer. “One is the evil party, and one is the stupid party,” Evans explained. “Bipartisan is a combination of the two.”

Needless to say, Evans advised the young audience to “maintain some independence from the party line.” The advice of leaving the Beltway was counsel Evans himself followed when he was in the same age-bracket as his listeners.

He left a job as managing editor of Human Events, the country’s oldest conservative weekly newspaper here, in the late 1950s in order to take an editorial-writing job at the aforementioned Midwestern daily newspaper. As an identifiably conservative commentator, Evans has watched opportunities for right-leaning writers and broadcasters mushroom with the partial deregulation of electronic media.

“When I took this position, there were three channels,” a former official of the Federal Communications Commission told Evans before he exited the agency. “When I leave, there will be 103.”

The founder of the National Journalism Center, Evans next book is due out in November. Published by Crown Forum, Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies promises to set the record straight on one of the greatest controversies of the Twentieth Century.

Mary Kapp is an intern at the American Journalism Center, a joint program run by Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.