Posted on 02/21/2006 5:28:54 PM PST by Mike Bates
M. Stanton Evans has watched conservatives come and go for 50 years, and has long lamented their tendency to catch "Potomac fever" as soon as they come to power.
"When our people get to the point where they can do us some good, they stop being our people," he said in enunciating what he calls "Evans' Law of Politics."
Through good times and bad, Mr. Evans has used his syndicated columns, his books and his whiskey-wry humor to steady the spirits of fellow conservatives for 50 years.
"I was never for Nixon until Watergate," he once told a press conference at which others on the right joined liberals in demanding that the scandal-scarred Republican president step down.
Mr. Evans, a traditionalist who at 71 won't touch a computer or a cell phone, has been at the center of the slowly building force of conservatism for half a century.
"I entered Yale in the fall of 1951, and about November of that year Bill Buckley published 'God and Man at Yale,' " Mr. Evans said while being interviewed at a Union Station restaurant he favors because he can smoke there without hassle.
"The Buckley book caused a huge furor at Yale," he says of the elite campus that Mr. Buckley accused of promoting collectivism. "Everybody was attacking him. I got the book, read it and thought: This is a very accurate description of what's going on here."
Graduating in 1955, he turned down a job in advertising and took instead a series of jobs at conservative publications. In 1959, he joined the staff of the Indianapolis News, serving as editorial page editor until 1974.
(Excerpt) Read more at washtimes.com ...
I have always enjoyed his commentary in Human Events.
Are there any other former YAF'ers out there? I attended the national convention in the summer of 1969[?] in St. Louis.
I met Al Capp at dinner. Capp was embroiled in a defamation of character suit with Joan Baez. He had a cartoon character named Joanie Phony in his Lil Abner comic strip.
"The Republican Party in Congress basically has given up on stopping the growth of big government," he says. "They're adding to the problem almost daily with their earmarks and their pork."
He lost patience with the GOP-dominated House two years ago, when Republican leaders coerced lawmakers to approve a prescription-drug plan for Medicare.
His writing was influential to me as a paper delivery boy for the Indianapolis News (1962-63).
Right here, Watchman. Came in right out of "Youth For Goldwater" and met Bill Buckley when I was 15 -- what a thrill! I have many fond memories of reading Stan Evans's columns in NR back in its glory period -- WFB, Rusher, Russell Kirk, Erik von Kuenheldt-Lehddin, James Burnham, Ralph de Toledano (his cool jazz reviews), Frank Meyer, Nika Standon Hazleton -- exciting times, weren't they? I used to man the YAF tables at Penn State, peddling Milton Friedman books and Ronald Reagan buttons. I remember the Al Capp business with Joan Baez. Very entertaining. Other YAFers from back in the day, make yourselves known.
I was in YAF for a few years also. I remember holding a protest outside the IBM building in Chicago one frigid night - I think IBM was doing business with the Commies - and although it was across the street from the Chicago Sun-Times, the paper wouldn't send a reporter over to cover it. A pro ERA demo, with about one-third of the participants we had, made it into the next day's paper. I figured out MSM bias pretty early.
I bought his "The Future of Conservatism" as a nineteen-year-old Army private. Twenty years later, I got him to autograph it when he spoke at the annual Sen. Joe McCarthy Foundation dinner in Appleton. We were both on the board of directors.
Mike -- it was the same in my day. The press would give front page coverage to three druggies protesting the Vietnam War, but our YAF rallies against the Commies couldn't buy a column inch in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Not only is the MSM the same now as it was then, it's still a lot of the same people covering the news, they just dress a little better.
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