Jon Utley: Rest in Peace

Jon Utley and his wife Ana at VOC’s Triumph of Liberty Gala Dinner in November, 2019.

Jon and I first met as teenagers at a Washington cocktail party hosted by his mother, the formidable Freda Utley, best-selling author and political activist. We were decades younger than anyone else but had one thing in common—we were implacable anti-communists. Jon’s Russian father had died in the Gulag during Stalin’s Great Terror, and my reporter father had covered and knew all the leading anti-communists of the day from Richard Nixon to Joseph McCarthy.  Jon and I formed a friendship based on our love of freedom and enmity toward tyranny that lasted more than 60 years.

Time and again, we worked together to preserve and extend liberty, he as a libertarian and I as a conservative. When I was editor of Conservative Digest in the 1970s, he was a contributor and editorial board member. When we formed the Center for International Relations in the 1980s, he helped to plan our free market think tank conferences in Rome, Bangkok, Costa Rica and Washington, D.C.

We attended the weekly Weyrich and Norquist lunches at which he would not hesitate to challenge the conventional wisdom of the day, especially in foreign policy. He was an unyielding critic of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and skeptical about nation-building. I recall that frequently after Jon had questioned U.S. foreign policy a conservative would whisper in his ear: “Keep asking those questions, Jon, I don’t dare.”

He was always gentle in speech, respectful of others’ opinions, never resorting to ad hominem arguments, possessing a sweet smile. He was an early and generous supporter of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and when others said it was a crazy idea and would never come to pass, Jon encouraged us and helped us.

At the same time, Jon was a successful businessman, able to make his way through the maze of D.C. regulations. Fluent in Spanish, he was a popular broadcaster for the Voice of America for many years. As publisher of The American Conservative in recent years, he was a significant part of the debate about the conduct of our national security.

My heart and prayers go out to his loving wife Ana and their sons. I could always depend upon Jon. I don’t know where I will go now that he is gone. Rest in peace, old friend, rest in peace.