Lee Edwards is widely regarded as the chief historian of the American conservative movement. He has published more than 15 books about the leading individuals and institutions of American conservatism, including biographies of Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater and a history of The Heritage Foundation.
He published To Preserve and Protect: The Life of Edwin Meese III in 2005. It is a biography of Meese, the 75th U.S. Attorney General, a Reagan adviser for more than 30 years – and Heritage's Ronald Reagan Distinguished Fellow in Public Policy.
A second offering in 2005 revisited a favorite subject: Ronald Reagan. A year after the former president's death, Edwards – who published the first Reagan biography in 1967 – thought he should write another to help keep the memory alive. The 187-page result, The Essential Ronald Reagan: A Profile in Courage, Justice and Wisdom, covers Reagan's life and impact on America in a way that led one Amazon.com reviewer to write, "This book is essential for anyone wanting to learn about Ronald Reagan – especially those who are reading about him for the first time."
He is currently working on an updated version of The Power of Ideas, Heritage's official history.
Edwards, Heritage's Distinguished Fellow in Conservative Thought, also serves as an Adjunct Professor of Politics at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. He is chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which reached an important goal in 2007: the creation of an international memorial in Washington to the more than 100 million victims of communism.
Modeled after the statue created by Chinese students in 1989 before the Tiananmen Square massacre, the memorial stands at the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue NW and New Jersey Avenue NW. President George W. Bush helped dedicate it on June 12, 2007, saying that while we will never know the names of all who perished, "at this sacred place, communism's unknown victims will be consecrated to history and remembered forever."
A prolific writer, Edwards has been published in such major newspapers as The Boston Globe, Detroit News, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times and 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 Lehrer NewsHour," 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.
Edwards 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. He and his wife, Anne, who assists him in all his writing, live in Alexandria, Va. They have two daughters and eight grandchildren.
February 29, 2008
