Death of an activist

Monday, Jan. 7, 1993: "That's an excellent idea!" beamed Joe Beard, president of the Parish Council of St. Matthew's Cathedral in Washington, during a meeting in which a fellow council member suggested that the church hold regular Sunday morning coffee-and-donut socials to help bring together regular parishioners and guests. Then, with a sly smile and his signature North Carolina drawl, Beard said, "Since you have come up with the idea, I hereby appoint you to put together the committee that will run Sunday coffees on the first day of each month."

But from his years as an activist in the political vineyards, Hugh Joseph Beard also knew that a leader could best motivate volunteers by also pitching in himself. When the first coffee at St. Matthew's was held January 20, the Parish Council president was there pouring coffee for guests and actually walking with a sandwich board sign in front of the church and calling out. "Coffee!! Donuts!! Get your donuts!!"

That's how I remembered Joe Beard when I learned of his untimely death on July 7 of a heart attack at age 55. He was inevitably motivating and organizing people-whether the cause was the conservative movement and candidates that were his passion, the law that he loved, or the church to which he was a convert.

A 1968 graduate of Davidson (N.C.) University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Law School and a great devotee of Sen. Jesse Helms, Beard was in private law practice in Charlotte before serving as an assistant U.S. attorney. He moved to Washington in 1981, and spent 12 years in the Reagan and Bush Administrations at the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, beginning under Assistant Atty. Gen. William Bradford Reynolds. He returned to private practice and also worked from 1997 to 2000 as senior counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity, trying to end racial preferences in higher education. Last year, Beard became a career government lawyer in the Justice Department.

But Beard's great love was politics. Operating as a volunteer for the American Conservative Union's effort for Ronald Reagan in the North Carolina presidential primary of 1976, Beard helped arrange a speaking tour on Reagan's behalf by then-ACU Chairman M. Stanton Evans and personally delivered hard-hitting commercials to TV stations-all of which help culminate in Reagan's first primary victory over Gerald Ford.

Beard was also a master of national Republican Party rules with few peers. Two years ago, when several Republican National Committee members began discussing how to get the party's presidential nomination process away from primaries and more into conventions and caucuses, it was Beard who was frequently consulted on the mechanism for doing so.

An activist to the very end, Joe Beard was calling and sounding out potential members of the conservative Republican Assembly of the District of Columbia for a meeting less than a week before his passing. He is survived by his parents and a brother.

Copyright Human Events Publishing, Inc. Jul 22, 2002
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