Lee Edwards

Lee Willard Edwards (born 1932) is an American academic and author, currently a fellow at The Heritage Foundation. He is a historian of the conservative movement in the United States.

Early life and education
Edwards was born in Chicago in 1932. Edwards says he was influenced by the politics of his parents, both anti-communist. His father Willard was a journalist for the Chicago Tribune.

He holds a bachelor's degree in English from Duke University and a doctorate in political science from Catholic University. His dissertation was entitled Congress and the origins of the Cold War, 1946–1948.

Career
Edwards helped found Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) in 1960, and then worked for the YAF magazine New Guard as editor. In 1963, he became news director of the Draft Goldwater Committee.

His publications include biographies of Ronald Reagan, William F. Buckley, Edwin Meese, and Barry Goldwater,   and a work of history, The Conservative Revolution: The Movement That Remade America and The Power of Ideas. He acted as senior editor for the World & I, owned by a subsidiary of Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church.

Edwards was the founding director of the Institute on Political Journalism at Georgetown University and a fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics. 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 in the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies at The Heritage Foundation, and, was an adjunct professor of politics at the Catholic University of America and Institute of World Politics. Edwards co-founded the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation with The Heritage Foundation's founder and chairman, Edwin Feulner, and was appointed its chairman emeritus. Edwards is a signatory of the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism.

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