Michael Barone

Barone is senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner. A resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, he is also a Fox News Channel contributor and co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. Barone has also written for many major market publications, including The Economist, The New York Times, The Detroit Press, American Enterprise and The Daily Telegraph of London.

Robert Bauman

Bauman is an author, writer, lecturer and attorney. He has represented eastern Maryland in the State Senate and U.S. House of Representatives. Since then, he has worked as a lawyer and financial consultant as well as a writer of books, articles, newsletters and other publications. He has traveled the world extensively and currently serves as general counsel to The Sovereign Society, a financial company. He served as a national chairman and board member of Young Americans for Freedom and was involved with the Goldwater and Reagan campaigns as well as the founding of the American Conservative Union.

James L. Buckley

Buckley is a former United State Senator from the state of New York. He was the only candidate of the Conservative Party to be elected to Congress. Born in New York City, Buckley attended Yale for both undergraduate and law school. He served three years in the U.S. Navy and was discharged with the rank of Lieutenant (jg). Formerly, he was the vice president and director of The Catawba Corporation. After his tenure in the Senate, Buckley served as a business consultant and was later appointed under secretary of state for security assistance and was chairman of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations Conference on Population in Mexico City. He served as president of Radio Free Europe until President Reagan appointed him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, where he became senior judge in 1996. Buckley is the author of If Men were Angels: A View from the Senate and Gleanings from an Unplanned Life: an Annotated Oral History. He is the brother of William F. Buckley Jr. (the founder of the influential conservative magazine National Review) and the proud father of five sons and a daughter.

Don Devine

Devine, the former director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, is Senior Scholar at Bellevue University's Center for American Vision and Values. He is editor of the American Conservation Union Foundation's ConservativeBattleline On Line, a writer, an adjunct scholar at The Heritage Foundation, and a Washington policy consultant. He was President Ronald Reagan's head of Federal personnel from 1981-85, advising him beginning in 1976. He was a senior advisor to Bob Dole from 1988 to 1996 and to Steve Forbes between 1998-2000. For 14 years, Dr. Devine was associate professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland, specializing in democratic theory, public opinion and policy. Devine is the author of seven books, The Attentive Public, The Political Culture of the United States, Does Freedom Work?, Reagan Electionomics, Reagan's Terrible Swift Sword, Restoring the Tenth Amendment and, most recently, In Defense of the West. He lives in Shadyside, Maryland, is married to Ann S. Devine and they have four children and thirteen grandchildren.

Lee Edwards, Ph.D.

As distinguished fellow in conservative thought, Edwards is Heritage's in-house authority on the U.S. conservative movement. A leading historian of American conservatism, Edwards is the author or editor of 20 books, including biographies of Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater and Edwin Meese III as well as histories of The Heritage Foundation and the movement as a whole. Edwards also is chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which dedicated the Victims of Communism Memorial in 2007 and launched the online Global Museum on Communism in 2009. He lives in Alexandria, Va. with his wife Anne who assists him in all his writing.

Bary Goldwater, Jr.

At the age of 30 Barry Goldwater, Jr was elected to Congress where he represented northern Los Angeles County for 14 years. He and his father were unique, representing one of the few instances in U.S. history when both father and son were serving in Congress at the same time. He served on a number of committees, including Committee on Science and Technology, Committee on Public Works and Transportation, and the Joint Committee on Energy. Congressman Barry Goldwater, Jr. retired from politics in 1983 and in1984 entered business in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, New York and Phoenix where he currently lives with his wife Sylvia Goldwater and near his son Barry M. Goldwater III.

Quin Hillyer

Hillyer, a senior editorial writer for the Washington Times and a senior editor for The American Spectator magazine, has won awards for journalistic excellence at the local, state, regional and national levels. Hillyer also has worked in professional or volunteer capacities in dozens of political campaigns, and served for five years as press secretary for U.S. House Appropriations Committee Chairman Bob Livingston of New Orleans. He was an original executive board member of the internationally acclaimed Louisiana Coalition against Racism and Nazism, formed to halt the then-meteoric political rise of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.

Hillyer also has volunteered in leadership roles for numerous church, civic, and educational organizations. He is a cum laude graduate of Georgetown University, and is a Fellow of the Loyola University (New Orleans) Institute of Politics and of Leadership Coastal Alabama. He served on the board of YAF at Georgetown University from 1982-1986.

Jim Kolbe

Kolbe currently serves as a aenior transatlantic fellow for the German Marshall Fund of the United States. For 22 years, Kolbe served in the United States House of Representatives, elected for eleven consecutive terms, from 1985 to 2007, where he spent 20 years on the appropriations committee. Kolbe also currently serves as an adjunct professor in the College of Business at the University of Arizona, and serves on a part time basis as strategic consultant with McLarty Associates. Graduating from Northwestern University with a bachelor's degree in political science, Kolbe went on to Stanford University where he received an MBA with a concentration in economics. He has received numerous awards and tributes, but notable among them is the George Marshall Award for Distinguished Service from the United States Agency for International Development and the Order of the Aztec from the President of Mexico.

Al Regnery

Regnery is the publisher of The American Spectator. He is the former president and publisher of Regnery Publishing, Inc., which produced 22 New York Times bestsellers during his tenure. Regnery also served in the Justice Department during the Reagan Administration, worked on the U.S. Senate staff and has been in private law practice. He currently serves on several corporate and nonprofit boards, and is the chairman of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. His first book, Upstream: The Ascendance of American Conservatism, was published in 2008. The book has been praised as one of the best authoritative accounts on the history of the American conservative movement.

Wayne Thorburn

Thorburn joined YAF in 1961 and held nearly every position in the organization, including serving as executive director from 1971-73. Formerly a political science faculty member at three universities, he held appointments in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. He lives in Austin, Texas with his wife Judith, also a former YAF activist.

Richard Viguerie

Viguerie transformed American politics in the 1960s and 70s by pioneering the use of direct mail fundraising in the political and ideological spheres. He used computerized direct mail fundraising to help build the conservative movement, which then elected Ronald Reagan as the first conservative president of the modern era.

As the “Funding Father of the conservative movement,” Viguerie motivated millions of Americans to participate in politics for the first time, greatly expanding the base of active citizenship. He is our era’s equivalent of Tom Paine, using a direct mail letter rather than a pamphlet to deliver his call to arms. George magazine credited this as one of the defining political moments of the 20th century.

Viguerie’s latest book is Conservatives Betrayed: How George W. Bush and Other Big Government Republicans Hijacked the Conservative Cause (Bonus Books, 2006). Conservatives Betrayed is an incisive look at how the GOP rode the support of America’s conservatives to majority status, only to subsequently advance a big-government agenda. Conservatives Betrayed is both a manifesto of what conservatism stands for in the 21st century and a battle plan for reclaiming and revitalizing the movement.