Photo: Dale Robbins

Mickey Edwards

Conservative thinker

Mickey Edwards was a Republican Congressman from Oklahoma for 16 years, serving as a member of the Appropriations and Budget Committees, the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, as well as a senior member of the House Republican leadership.

One of the three founding trustees of the Heritage Foundation, national chairman of the American Conservative Union, and chairman of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, he was also the director of the congressional policy task force advising Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign for the presidency.

Upon leaving Congress, Edwards taught at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government for 11 years where he was the John Quincy Adams Lecturer in Legislative Practice, and now teaches at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs as a visiting lecturer. Edwards has also been a visiting lecturer at the Harvard Law School and a visiting professor at Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute.

Edwards is on the board of directors of The Constitution Project, has chaired task forces for the Brookings Institution and the Council on Foreign Relations, and is Vice President and Director of the Aspen Institute Rodel Fellowships in Public Leadership.

Edwards has been a weekly political commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered and a weekly opinion columnist for The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune and other major newspapers. His book, Reclaiming Conservatism, was published in 2008.