[The European Conservative] “Everyman’s Bill Buckley”

Conservative author Stanton Evans, who died of cancer in 2015, was every bit as bright as Buckley, and more kind-hearted. A new biography by Steven F. Hayward is out to re-apportion praise.

M. Stanton Evans: Conservative Wit, Apostle of Freedom. By Steven F. Hayward. Encounter Books; 400 pages; $33.99.

Someday in 1970, William F. Buckley Jr. told Playboy magazine that the biggest problem facing the conservative movement was “a scarcity of good writers and journalists”. What seemed like a yawning shortfall then has since become a wild oversupply, as anyone chasing a career in right-wing print media these days can attest. Buckley put part of his money where his mouth was by founding National Review (NR), but that denser pipeline of talent was almost single-handedly the work of Stanton Evans, to whom “thousands of activists and journalists”, writes Berkeley lecturer Steven F. Hayward in a new book, “owe their lives and livelihoods”. Yet Evans “is not well known among the rising conservative generation”, remarks the book’s introduction. To acquaint readers with this unsung conservative hero, Hawyard’s biography portrays three key attributes of Evans, only the last of which Buckley, who was 9 years his senior…