“Russia is Spain with a lot of nuclear weapons,” Ed Feulner quipped during a 47-minute conversation we had five years ago.
I recorded the interview, which I re-listened to while news of his death reached me while vacationing in (of all places) Spain, as research for a book that finally comes out next month, The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer.
The big story that he told involved the big meeting: a 23-year-old Feulner, with his friend Lipsett, economist Milton Friedman, Meyer, and National Review editor-in-chief William F. Buckley Jr. convening in the latter part of 1964.
Ed, like others interviewed for the project (to include James Buckley, Charlie Wiley, David Franke, Noel Parmentel, William Dennis, and Lee Edwards), died before he could see his words in the bound volume. He passed away on Saturday at 83. His voice, like theirs, sounds very much alive on my recordings.
“My whole time, 37 years the first stretch and another nine months in the second stretch at Heritage,” Feulner explained in May of 2020, “I always tried to find those ways to add and multiply rather than subtract and divide.”
He credited that mindset that helped guide him to Frank Meyer, who died the year before Feulner co-founded the Heritage Foundation.
“One of the things I learned from Frank is what I then distilled into Feulner’s First Law, which is in politics and philosophy, it’s better to add and multiply than it is to subtract and divide,” he explained. “Meyer really was always trying to add and multiply.”
Feulner reflected on various amazing people whom he met through the conservative movement.
He called Philadelphia Society founder Don Lipsett “just a grossly underestimated person in the conservative movement in terms of being the guy who made so many connections not just through the Philadelphia Society but earlier in his career through ISI.” He described Lipsett, William Campbell, and himself as “three musketeers” who traveled together with their spouses to the Mont Pelerin Society and other such gatherings.
He credited Don Devine with “bringing people together not just around a common enemy but a common set of beliefs,” noting, “That’s what Devine is so good at explaining in his later books.”
He recalled that he praised The Conservative Mind to Russell Kirk but noted the minor criticism that it offered little in terms of economics to a young person encountering it. Unbeknownst to Feulner, “He had taken it as a challenge.” When Feulner saw him later, Kirk presented him with the textbook he had written, Economics: Work and Prosperity.
The big story that he told involved the big meeting: a 23-year-old Feulner, with his friend Lipsett, economist Milton Friedman, Meyer, and National Review editor-in-chief William F. Buckley Jr. convening in the latter part of 1964 on how to continue the Philadelphia Society, a group that Lipsett had launched in April of that year.
“It was the first time Buckley had ever met Friedman,” he recalled. “It was the first time I had ever met any of the three of them. It was unbelievable.”
There, at the Sheraton Atlantic Hotel in Manhattan, Buckley wrote a $100 check that Feulner, as the group’s new treasurer, put to good use. The momentous meeting, he said, “really meant so much for the future of everything I believed in.”
He meant this in terms of the conservative movement. But it also opened doors for him personally. He soon studied at the London School of Economics, which catalyzed a chaotic, and almost unbelievable chain of events in Frank Meyer’s life when it expelled him in 1934.
“Frank encouraged me to go to LSE,” he explained. Friedman then wrote a letter of introduction for Feulner to provide Ralph Harris, the head of the Institute of Economic Affairs. He soon became employed there. The experience impregnated thoughts of such a group in the United States.
“Frank was engaging and just peripatetic,” he remembered of the principals of that 1964 meeting. “Whereas Buckley and Friedman were a little bit more laid back.”
Within a few years, of course, Feulner ranked as a massively important figure within the conservative movement. The policy group he launched with Paul Weyrich and Joe Coors in 1973, an especially fallow period for the postwar right, provided conservative legislators with right-thinking staffers and the right its own Brookings Institute of sorts. Now, when conservative think tanks sprout up like peas, the importance of the Heritage Foundation that Feulner helped create gets easily overlooked. In real time, it helped transform the nature of Washington, D.C.
The recording of our 2020 conversation includes bits and pieces about Ed and various conservative personages. But its focus was the subject of The Man Who Invented Conservatism.
“Fusionism, in bringing libertarians and traditionalists together, certainly ended up being his primary contribution to what we call the modern conservative movement,” he said of Meyer. “Back then, it wasn’t so much a philosophical coming together as it was: Everybody had a common enemy, that was Marxism-Leninism as expressed through the Soviet Union.”
The movement in which Feulner played so integral a role, and the world, has changed dramatically since that time. He acted as one who contributed mightily to that change.
For that, we owe Ed Feulner a debt.
READ MORE from Daniel J. Flynn:
Congress Moves to End the Perpetual PBS Pledge Drive on Capitol Hill
Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson Gleaned the Wrong Message From Sesame Street