Tribute to M. Stanton Evans
Remarks by American Veterans Center President James Roberts
Tribute to M Stanton Evans
The Heritage Foundation
March 13, 2015
I knew Stan for almost 50 years as a mentor, my boss for three years, a colleague on many projects and as a friend.
I first met Stan in the fall of 1967 when I was a junior at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio and Stan was editor of the Indianapolis News. It was not an auspicious meeting. I was a leader of the campus Conservative Club and we had been asked by the Student Senate to recommend someone to debate liberal economist Robert Theobald on a topic I cannot recall.
We recommended Stan and he and his then- wife Sue Ellen, who was very elegantly dressed and wearing a fur stole, made the two-hour drive from Indianapolis. The moderator began his introduction, Stan, (as he told me later) opened his briefcase to take out his prepared remarks and discovered he had left them back at the office. Despite having to wing it, Stan gave a brilliant presentation.
After the debate I took Stan and Mrs. Evans over to the Sigma Nu house for a Q & A session with the brothers. We had a mascot, a huge St. Bernard dog named Floyd, who despite the name was a female. Floyd was also crazed, as you can understand, from living in a house with 80 noisy guys. Well Floyd spied Sue Ellen and her fur stole, bounded through the room and leaped onto Mrs. Evans lap and began growling and gnawing on the stole.
At length the dog was removed, the Evanses prepared to leave and, as a parting shot, I had the chutzpah to ask Stan if he would consider donating his honorarium to the Conservative Club. He agreed, of course. Given all this, it’s surprising that Stan had anything more to do with me, but he came back to speak the next year (this time collecting his honorarium) and we kept in touch over the next three years when I was in the Navy.
In December of 1973 I was hired as political director at the American Conservative Union where Stan was chairman and reported to work the second of January, 1974, where the small staff was engulfed in organizing the first CPAC conference, co-sponsored with YAF, which was scheduled a little less than a month away. The hotel was booked and then – Governor Ronald Reagan had agreed to be the banquet speaker, but unfortunately virtually no one had registered.
ACU had never organized a conference like this, there were no lists to draw on and we were all in crisis mode. Out in Indianapolis, Stan worked the phones cutting special deals with conservative organization leaders and in his daily calls with executive director Ron Dear rallied the staff with inspiring words such as, “bring in the winos.”
The first CPAC turned out to be a success with 400 registrations and almost 1,000 people attending the Reagan banquet and 41 years later has become a conservative institution attended by thousands of people.
For the four nights of that CPAC Stan could be found every night in the hospitality suite engaged in “S.D”. (That meant “serious drinking”) and literally dancing the night away, doing the jitterbug and a highly personalized interpretation of the mashed potato, never seen before or since.
The second day of the conference we had Stan scheduled for an 8:00 a.m. panel and I saw him making his way through the lobby with his trademark breakfast of coke and cigarette.
“Anybody who knows me,” he said, knows that I had nothing to do with my being on this panel at this ungodly hour. I always thought there was something slightly obscene about getting dressed in the dark.”
CPAC was just one of Stan’s great legacies at ACU. Others include the organizational meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and the creation of the ACU Education and Research Institute.
Another great legacy of Stan’s was the independent effort for Ronald Reagan in the 1976 GOP primaries – which grew out of the Buckley v. Valeo Supreme Court lawsuit, itself funded by ACU – which ended in a decision permitting independent expenditures for federal political campaigns.
On the eve of the North Carolina primary Ronald Reagan’s campaign was on the ropes. He had lost five primaries and was out of money. ACU’s independent expenditure effort, led by Stan, pumped tens of thousands of dollars into North Carolina in the form of television, radio and newspaper ads. Stan kicked off the campaign himself, holding press conferences in a number of cities around the state to which he was flown by a volunteer, the owner of what he described as a wash & wear airplane made out of canvas and aluminum. It was, he said, the most frightening day of his life. Stan survived and so, politically, did Ronald Reagan. The ACU campaign played a significant role in Reagan’s win, which saved his candidacy and thus led eventually to his election in 1980. Reagan never forgot his debt of gratitude and ended up speaking at every CPAC conference except one, after that, firmly committed to “dancing with the one who brung you.”
Stan moved to Washington in 1975 and took a more active role in ACU’s daily activities. Among these was the coalition to defeat Jimmy Carter’s nomination of Paul Warnke, a leftist dove, to be head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. At one meeting, it was Morton Blackwell I think, who reported excitedly that Democratic Senator Sam Nunn had come out against Warnke.
“ That’s great news, Stan said, but does Nunn dare call it treason?”
After leaving ACU, Stan continued to head up the ACU Education and Research Institute and founded the National Journalism Center which educated more than 1,000 students while Stan headed it, another of his great legacies. I was an ERI board member from the beginning. ERI board meetings were meetings I actually enjoyed attending. For one thing, barbeque were always served – a condition of Terry Scanlon’s attendance.
Little business was actually conducted as the three- hour or so meetings which usually degenerated into raucous banter and laughter at Stan’s one- liners.
Among them:
“Washington D.C. Is much like the Soviet Union — without the amenities.”
“Mayor Marion Barry wants to turn Washington DC into a work-free drug zone,”
“Marion Barry’s re-election slogan should be ‘give me Librium or give me Meth.’
One meeting following a particularly dire financial report, Stan put the situation in perspective by observing, “It’s a wonder we’re doing as well as we are. After all, I’m drunk half the time,” a remark that left Dr. Casey Kay, Dean of Abilene Christian University visibly stunned.
Then there was the time when Stan was selected by the Philadelphia Society, which was meeting that year in New York City, to debate the affirmative on the topic:
“Resolved: This house would immanentize the eschaton”. Beginning his argument on this fairly abstruse topic before an audience full of intellectuals of sundry types, Stan said, “I’ve come up here to New York to kick ass.”
Stan was the best master of ceremonies in the conservative movement, hands down. He MC’d a number of events for Radio America including our 15th anniversary, which as it happens was shortly after Princess Diana’s funeral.
“A lot of things have occurred in my lifetime that I thought I’d never see,” Stan said. “Ronald Reagan elected president, the fall of communism,” pause, “Elton John singing in Westminster Abbey. When that guy first appeared on the scene, I said,’he’s really got talent, but he’ll never sing in Westminster Abbey.’”
For the last five years before he became ill Stan came in weekly to meet with our summer interns at Radio America. These college kid loved him and were amazed that a man 60 years their senior could talk pop culture – people like Kate Perry and Lady Gaga and topics like mosh pit etiquette.
In the case of Gaga he commented on the fact that she not only dressed entirely in meat for an appearance at the Oscars, but that she accessorized with meat – meat hat, meat purse, etc.
He said he could think of two possible explanations for this. One, Lady Gaga was making a statement that God had given man domination over the created order and that he therefore had complete control over the lower animals to use as he saw fit. Or theory number, 2 she was just doing this to bring attention to herself.
One of the most remarkable Stan Evans stories I recall occurred in 1983 at CPAC. I was waiting in the green room to introduce Jack Kemp, and Allan Ryskind was moderating a debate between Stan and Bill Rusher over whether the Reagan administration was really conservative.
Stan was ticking off the apostasies of the senior White House staff, Ed Meese exempted of course — really laying the wood to Jim Baker, Mike Deaver, Richard Darman, David Gergen and company and the crowd was growing more and more agitated. Inside the green room the sound of the howling mob was beginning to unnerve Jack Kemp who was starting to wonder whether he was about to walk into some kind of riot.
“They’re not conservatives,” Stan shouted about the White House staff. “They treat conservatives like some interest group to be appeased, like ” and here he groped for an analogy” “like handicapped Filipinos.”
Well the next morning, back in the office, Stan’s desk was covered with messages and the phone was ringing off the hook with protests from Filipino-Americans insulted by his remarks. One call was from the President of the Filipino-American Society. “I hear that you insulted Filipino people yesterday,” he snapped.
Thinking quickly Stan stammered, “No, no, no that’s the media for you. They take everything out of context. My point was that the White House is ignoring conservatives just as they’re ignoring Filipino-Americans.”
“You damn right,” the suddenly amiable president said, adding, “How would you like to be banquet speaker at our national convention in two weeks.” Stan paused. He knew a lot about a lot of things, but Philippine history, culture and politics were not among them.
“Sure,” he said.
After two weeks of intense preparation Stan gave a rousing speech about Filipino-American friendship and got a standing ovation, his triumph complete when he crowned Miss Filipino-.American.
I’ll end this as I’ve gone on for far too long, but a final word about Stan’s lifestyle (a word he hated). Although he was deeply cultured and incredibly well read, Stan had an intense love for middle America. I always sensed that this was so because he felt that the true real strength, goodness and bedrock values of our country were not to be found in the elites, but in the average American. In any case, he was an exuberant celebrant of middlebrow culture. He told me once that back in Indianapolis his favorite Saturday activity was to, “ lounge around on the sofa in a pair of old khakis and undershirt chomping on a loaf of Wonderbread washed down by a bottle of Big Grape, while watching roller derby.”
We all knew of Stan’s fondness for burgers and fries, Coke and red jello. His contempt for fancy restaurants and gourmet food and pretentious people. He also had little interest in material things, except for his books. It is true that he owned two houses and rented an apartment on Capitol Hill but they were basically places to store his books.
For a staunch defender of capitalism he also had very little interest in money. Over the course of many years that he was paid to do commentaries on Radio America, we were almost always in arrears in paying him – as much as a year behind in one case – He never brought up the fact – not once.
What he cared about were what Russell Kirk called the permanent things – faith, country, family and friends foremost among them.
I was privileged to have him as my friend for 48 of my 68 years. However many years I have left, they won’t be the same.
