Writer Adrian Lee, conservative's conservative

NEARLY everybody loved Adrian Lee, but you had to be sitting as far right politically as you could get to agree with him.

Because that's where Adrian sat. He was a gentleman's gentleman and a conservative's conservative.

On the occasion of his move from his job as a columnist for the Daily News to Washington, in 1988, to work for then-Attorney General Edwin Meese, an editorial writer for the paper commented that Adrian's conservatism, "sometimes of such strength to take the breath away from Genghis Khan, is pure and undiluted.

"There are people in Washington who claim to be conservatives who ain't seen nothin' yet."

Adrian I. Lee, a reporter, rewriteman and columnist for the old Evening Bulletin who came to the Daily News as a columnist when the Bulletin closed in 1982, and a Navy veteran of World War II, died June 15. He was 90 and was living in Cathedral Village, in Roxborough, but had previously lived in Flourtown and Chestnut Hill.

Adrian gloried in expressing his views in columns, but he always considered himself first and above all a newspaperman.

The title of an essay he wrote in 1988 about his days at the Bulletin was "I Loved Every Minute." That neatly expressed his feelings for a profession that he graced with his talents and devotion for nearly 40 years.

"Adrian is the kind of person everybody describes as a gentleman and everybody treasures," that unnamed editorial writer for the Daily News wrote. "As newspapermen go, he's downright elegant."

"We hate to see Adrian go," Zachary Stalberg, the editor, said at the time. "He's one of a kind and has brought a great deal to the Daily News."

As a member of the Daily News editorial board, Adrian's opinions were often contrary to those of the basically liberal newspaper, but always expressed in a gentle, reasonable manner.

He loved Frank Rizzo, supported Richard Nixon even in the grim Watergate days, praised Robert Bork, defended prayer in schools and generally towed the right-wing line.

"Some of us learned a lot from Adrian about how to argue the right way," the Daily News editorial writer wrote. "We also learned with great impact when our arguments had vulnerabilities on the right flank."

As a reporter, Adrian covered local, state and national politics, the Vietnam War, the Cuban missile crisis and the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Some years after Richard Nixon resigned from the presidency in the wake of the Watergate scandal, Nixon invited Adrian to dine with him at his New York home.

The former president gave him a bottle of brandy that had been given to him by Chinese Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong during the historic diplomatic thaw between the U.S. and China in the 1970s.

Later, at family gatherings, Adrian would bring out "Mao's brandy" and give everybody a sip. They unanimously found the taste unpleasant.

While in Poland in 1972, covering a visit by Philadelphia Cardinal John Krol, he had a chance encounter with Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, of Krakow, who later became Pope John Paul II.

"It was cold as blue blazes," Adrian recalled years later. "The pope-to-be is looking over our shoulders, fascinated with what we are writing. Well, the pens are not writing because it's such cold weather. We're shaking, we're so cold."

The future pontiff beckoned the reporters to follow him into a nearby hut. A man emerged and gave Adrian and Tom Fox, late Daily News and Inquirer columnist, a bottle of vodka.

"The pope-to-be was a delighted onlooker," Adrian said. "This amused him tremendously."

Years later, when Adrian had a chance to shake the pope's hand, he reminded him of the incident. "I think he may have been embarrassed," Adrian said. "He certainly didn't remember it with any enthusiasm."

Jack McKinney, the late Daily News columnist who delighted in being a wild Irishman, called Adrian, his polar opposite in political thought, a "paragon of rectitude."

A reader once told McKinney that "having you and Adrian Lee on alternate days is as adventurous a mix as sweet-and-sour pork."

Adrian called Bork, who was nominated for the Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan but rejected by the Senate, "an eminent conservative and constitutional scholar."

Adrian was a native of Miami, which, with his Southern drawl, he pronounced "Miam-uh." He graduated in 1943 from Spring Hill College, in Mobile, Ala., where he studied the classics and majored in Greek.

An interesting irony since Frank Rizzo, who loved Adrian, nevertheless said he "writes in Latin."

Adrian served in the Navy in World War II, mostly aboard modified, heavily armed gunboats called LCIs, which provided close-in fire support for amphibious landings at such South Pacific battles as Kwajelein, Saipan and Tinian.

He joined the Evening Bulletin in 1948, when its daily circulation was 774,000, close to a million on Sunday.

Adrian wrote of his first day at the Bulletin, then at Juniper and Filbert streets, across from City Hall:

"What fascinated me . . . was the rising tide of noise, the increasing tempo of the typewriters, the sense of urgency that permeated the room. . . . It all reached out to me and enfolded me in its embrace. I couldn't have escaped it if I had wanted to."

He is survived by his wife of 61 years, Marie; three sons, Andy, Tom and Owen; three daughters, Katie Lee, Anne Hughes and Louisa Viele; and seven grandchildren.

Services: Funeral Mass 10 a.m. Monday at Immaculate Heart of Mary Church, 819 Cathedral Road, Roxborough. Friends may call at 9 a.m.

Donations may be made to Autism Research Institute, 4182 Adams Ave., San Diego, Calif., 92116.