A lifelong voice for conservatives

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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.

Mr. Evans made his bones as a conservative in September 1960, when he and other young leaders assembled at the Buckley home in Sharon, Conn. Inspired by Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater's rallying cry to conservatives at the 1960 Republican National Convention, Mr. Buckley gathered a group of activists -- the founders of Young Americans for Freedom -- who aimed to "institutionalize the youth" on the right.

"And the people organizing it asked me to draft a statement of what we believe," Mr. Evans recalls. "So I did, and it was given to a committee that made a few changes, and Bill Buckley made a few changes. But other than those changes, it was my draft."