And Stan Evans has the documents to prove it. I'm reading the book now (well...simultaneously with a few other things). Stan Evans is, with Bill Buckley, the founder of modern American conservatism: Mr. Evans was one of the leading activists who gathered in 1960 at the Connecticut home of William F. Buckley Jr. to chart the future course of the conservative movement. The conference chose Mr. Evans — then a Midwestern newspaper editor only five years past graduating from Yale University — to draft what became known as the Sharon Statement, summarizing the "transcendent values" the movement sought to advance.And the funniest man in politics. And scrupulously honest.
"There is no greater lie than the lie about Joe McCarthy," Mr. Evans says.
This lie about McCarthy — who died at age 48 in 1957, less than three years after being censured by the Senate — has been accepted as truth, Mr. Evans says, because so many earlier historians and biographers have uncritically accepted accusations against McCarthy first made in 1950 by Maryland Sen. Millard Tydings and other Democrats, without bothering to examine the original records that vindicate the outspoken anti-communist.
"What's out there is all bunk, to put it mildly," Mr. Evans says, and that "bunk" is repeated as truth in an age when the study of history is in decline.
