We lost an very important Conservative voice today. Mr Evans was there at the beginning of the modern Conservative movement, helped make possible the Reagan candidacy, was a founder of CPAC, the head of the ACU for years, and most recently authored a revisionist history of Senator Joseph McCarthy which set the record straight when it came to the senator's investigations of Communist infiltration of the Roosevelt government (which was massive).

RIP, Mr Evans.

"M. Stanton Evans, an early leader of the conservative movement in American politics and an author of its central manifesto, the Sharon Statement, died on Tuesday at a nursing home in Leesburg, Va. He was 80.

A longtime friend, Patrick S. Korten, said the cause was pancreatic cancer.

Mr. Evans was the editor of The Indianapolis News, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, a radio and television commentator, a journalism teacher and the author of a raft of books, including a defense of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, Republican of Wisconsin, in his anti-communist crusade.

Mr. Evans said he became a conservative in 1949, as a teenager, after reading George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984” at the height of the Cold War.

“It was about communism,” he said in an interview for this obituary in 2010. “I said: ‘Well, I’m against communism. What am I for?’ ”

One of his first contributions to the conservative cause was perhaps the most significant. At 26, he drafted the statement of principles upon which Young Americans for Freedom, the first substantial national conservative organization, was created in September 1960. He was chosen for the task because of his editorial writing in Indianapolis.

The Sharon Statement — so-called because the founding meeting was held at William F. Buckley Jr.’s home in Sharon, Conn. — drew on the major streams of conservative thought, including religious freedom, free-market economics and an unbending resistance to communism.

The statement began by asserting “foremost among the transcendent values is the individual’s use of his God-given free will.”

It viewed the United States Constitution as the consummate prescription for limited government, calling it “the best arrangement yet devised for empowering government to fulfill its proper role, while restraining it from the concentration and abuse of power.”

When government interferes with the market economy, the statement said, “it tends to reduce the moral and physical strength of the nation.”

Finally, it said, “the forces of international communism are, at present, the greatest single threat” to liberty. “The United States,” it added, “should stress victory over, rather than coexistence with, this menace.”

More than a manifesto for young conservatives, however, the document proved to be a seminal document in bringing different kinds of conservatives together.

Mr. Evans worked to unify conservatives for many years, especially as head of the American Conservative Union from 1971 to 1977. Under Mr. Evans, the conservative union, which sought to function as an umbrella organization for the right, took a hard line in dealing with the White House, even when a Republican occupied it.

The union and other conservatives were disillusioned by President Richard M. Nixon’s wage and price controls and his opening to China. They were equally disheartened when Nixon’s successor, Gerald R. Ford, picked Nelson A. Rockefeller, the former governor of New York and a longtime enemy of conservatives, to be vice president. And when the Ford administration began negotiations to turn over the Panama Canal to Panama, they revolted and lined up behind Ronald Reagan in his race for the 1976 Republican nomination.

Under Mr. Evans, the conservative union joined the landmark case testing the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1974. With other plaintiffs, including the generally liberal American Civil Liberties Union, the conservative union argued that limits on campaign contributions and spending violated the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech.

Ruling in 1976 in Buckley v. Valeo, the Supreme Court upheld contribution limits but not curbs on spending. For Mr. Evans and his colleagues, the decision pointed the way for groups to help finance campaigns through what became known as independent expenditures, amounting to millions of dollars in subsequent elections. They began with the hotly contested 1976 Republican primary race in North Carolina.

The conservative union spent about $250,000 on independent ads, on both radio and in newspapers, in the state attacking Mr. Ford over the canal. In one radio ad, Mr. Evans told primary voters: “Ronald Reagan would not cave in to Castro and says American sovereignty in Panama must be maintained. The choice for North Carolina Republicans is clear.”

The Reagan campaign had been faltering, but the ads helped give Reagan his first primary victory. In a 2006 interview, Mr. Evans called it one of “the most important elections in terms of the conservative movement” and “a crucial turning point” for Reagan’s nearly successful run for the 1976 presidential nomination.

Mr. Evans’s career as an author or co-author began in 1961 with “Revolt on the Campus,” an account of rising college conservatism. His most recent book was “Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government,” written with Herbert Romerstein and published in 2012.

His 2007 book, “Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies,” argued that while McCarthy might have made mistakes and occasionally gone too far in his campaign to root out communists from government, he did identify many subversives and “summoned the nation to a firm-willed resistance to the communist challenge, both abroad and on the home front.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/04/us/m-s...at-80.html?_r=0

His book, "Untold" said no such thing as "McCarthy might have made mistakes and occasionally gone too far in his campaign to root out communists from government". That is just NYT spin because the book is so devastating when it comes to the Leftist lies told about the senator for over 50 years. It is also a work I most highly recommend with "Witness" by Whitaker Chambers as its accompaniment.