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Chapter One: Early Life and Education
Medford Stanton Evans was born on July 20, 1934, in Kingsville, Texas. He was named for his father, Medford Bryan Evans (hence his use of his first initial M and middle name so as to avoid confusion with his father), and his mother, Josephine Stanton Evans. His father, a Texas native, was a man of considerable literary and polemical reputation himself having been a magna cum laude graduate of the Universityof Tennessee before earning a PhD in literature from Yale (which included passing language exams in Latin, French, and German), where he wrote a dissertation on Samuel Johnson’s coverage of the parliamentary debates of the 1740s. Medford Evans was described as being a soft-spoken, courtly southern gentleman. Stan always called him “Pop” and in later years described him as “the gentlest and kindest of human beings,” who possessed “indomitable courage” and “sweetness of character,” all descriptions that would later be applied to Stan in equal measure, showing that Stan was his father’s son. Medford became a conservative as the modern movement took shape, joining the masthead of National Review at its founding in 1955. Stan wrote of his father: “What was most distinctive politically about my father was that he brought verbal skills and intellectual force to bear on behalf of, rather than against, traditional values and common sense. This was extremely rare when he started out.”
Stan’s mother, a Mississippi native, was also highly educated, having graduated with honors from the Universityof Mississippi. Fluent in Greek and Latin, Josephine Evans taught classics in public schools in the various locations the family lived during Stan’s youth. She was also a devout Methodist, from which Stan derived his own religious affiliation, though accompanied with his usual quips. He liked to tell the old joke that “A Methodist is a Baptist who has learned to read.” Following his mother’s death in 2005 at the age of ninety-seven, for which she had requested a high church Episcopal funeral service, Stan joked that he was facing difficulties “finding an Episcopal priest who has leanings towards Christianity.”
At the time of Stan’s birth in 1934, his father was teaching English literature at the Texas College of Arts and Industry, today better known as Texas A&M, but within weeks of Stan’s birth the family relocated to Chattanooga, Tennessee, where Medford took up a teaching post at his undergraduate alma mater, the Universityof Tennessee. He taught at Chattanooga from 1934 to 1942 and then for the next two years at the Universityof the South in Sewanee. He published both poetry and prose in The Sewanee Review, and H. L. Mencken cited one of his philological articles (“The Southern ‘Long I’,” published in American Speech) in his treatise on The American Language, which is perhaps surprising since Evans had taken after Mencken harshly in an article in The Southwest Review in 1929. (“Is Mencken simply the victim of a sort of latitudinal Sadism not dependent upon real defects in the object of his cruelty?”)
During his years teaching literature, Medford observed the decline of liberal education that was already underway and issued alarms that sound familiar to our own time. “It is my considered opinion,” he wrote in the late 1950s, “that the average graduate of a non-elite college today knows less than the average graduate of an accredited high school knew thirty years ago. You may ask: Less of what? If so, I reply: Less of almost any field you care to name. . . It is sometimes assumed that we have substituted science for the classics. But in the mass institutions this is certainly not true. We have abandoned the classics, but we have not put science in their place.”
His dismay at the decay of higher education may account for the abrupt change in his career in the late years of World War II, which deepened his existing conservative inclinations. In 1945 he joined the new Atomic Energy Commission at Los Alamos as an “organizations and methods examiner” during the late stages of the Manhattan Project and later moved to a post as chief of training with the AEC Washington, DC, through 1952. Thus Stan Evans spent his middle school and high school years in suburban Maryland and likely acquired his lifelong fondness for baseball from his little league coach Bill Moffitt, who was the father of tennis great Billie Jean King and major league baseball pitcher Randy Moffitt. Jackie Jensen, then a star with the Washington Senators, lived in Evans’s neighborhood and was married to Olympic medal winner Zoe Ann Olsen, a sports celebrity in her own right. Evans and other teenage boys would hang out near Jensen’s home hoping to catch a glimpse, and perhaps an autograph, from the glamorous couple as they came and went.
In later years Stan took an abiding interest in nuclear power, both on the merits and in disgust at the way the left attacked nuclear energy in the 1970s. This is only one aspect of the ways in which Stan was his father’s son, though not in every respect. Stan revered his father, calling him at the time of his death “the finest man I have ever known,” in part because “every son should love and admire his father.” But like all sons of famous or strong fathers, Stan would carve out his own independent existence (although his writing style was similar to his father’s in some ways). At the time of his father’s passing in 1989, Stan wrote: “I well recall the many times when, after I had favored some conservative group with what I thought was a ringing oration, some member of the audience would patiently wait to say to me: ‘I just want to tell you—I’m such a fan of your father!’” This is likely an exaggeration but the kind of filial piety consonant with a proper conservative disposition.
Medford acquired a reputation as a supposed extremist for his anti-Communist views and his later association with the John Birch Society, an easy designation to get in that time of liberal hysteria over Joe McCarthy. As we shall see in Chapter 4, Stan walked a fine line with regard to the controversial group. At the Atomic Energy Commission in Washington, part of Medford’s portfolio as chief of training was overseeing security education, and he resigned in March of 1952, charging that none of his security recommendations were being adopted. Medford had not thought of himself as a self-conscious conservative prior to his time at the AEC. It was this experience at the AEC, Stan said later, that “conservatized” him.
He moved back to Texas in 1953 to resume his teaching career, by which time Stan had started at Yale University. But before returning to academia, Medford wrote an article for The Freeman entitled “Are Soviet A-Bombs Russian?”, which he later turned into his first book appearing later in 1953, The Secret War for the A-Bomb. James Burnham wrote the introduction. The uproar over the Rosenberg spy ring that had conveyed our atomic bomb technology to the Soviets was still running at high pitch, and Evans had met Klaus Fuchs, one of the conspiring scientists, during one of his many visits to Los Alamos. In his Freeman article, Medford expressed skepticism that the transfer of technical knowledge alone could account for the Soviets’ rapid development of actual warheads. Among other things, there was little evidence that the Soviets had the industrial capacity to produce sufficient fissile material. How had the Soviets managed to produce a working A-bomb before the more advanced British? Had some fissile material been diverted from American stocks along with A-bomb plans? “It is easier to imagine Communists stealing bomb parts from American plants and relaying them to Russia,” Medford wrote, “than it is to imagine the Russians going through the whole industrial process themselves.” Stan would take up the general theme of overestimating Soviet capacities early in his journalistic career, as we shall see.
