Ed Feulner believed that people are policy. But he didn’t just believe it. He lived it. Feulner, born in Chicago in 1941, carved a path to the conservative movement that was guided by his reading as a college student of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind and Barry Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative. That movement was still in relative infancy when he joined it as a young man. There was this magazine, ISI (a campus chapter of which he founded), and YAF, but little else.
It didn’t take long for Feulner to start correcting this situation.
He entered Washington as a think-tank staffer, then became an adviser to Melvin Laird, first when Laird was a member of the House of Representatives, then when he became secretary of defense. Feulner helped congressional Republicans organize the Republican Study Committee as a committed conservative counterpart to the Democratic Study Group and served as its executive chairman.
Feulner’s institution-building went far beyond the Hill, however. He, William F. Buckley Jr., Don Lipsett (then in ISI’s leadership), Frank Meyer, and other movement leaders discussed the need for a kind of intellectual clearinghouse for their ranks. Out of their conversations and planning arose the Philadelphia Society in 1964. In the 1970s, still feeling under-resourced compared with the left, Feulner and Paul Weyrich began formulating what launched in 1973 as the Heritage Foundation. Feulner became its president in 1977, serving in that role until 2013, and then again in 2017–18. Under his tenure, it became the premier conservative think tank in Washington.
Perhaps its signal achievement came in 1980. As Heritage president, Feulner spearheaded one of the most successful implementations of conservative thought into policy by releasing the Mandate for Leadership. The product of extensive collaboration with conservative thinkers and activists across the country, the Mandate for Leadership was intended as a practical framework for the incoming Ronald Reagan administration. It functioned as intended. More than 60 percent of its guidelines became reality by the end of Reagan’s presidency. Not for nothing did Reagan award Feulner the Presidential Citizens Medal in 1989.
His accomplishments in other areas also deserve attention. Beyond Washington, he played significant roles in starting the American Legislative Exchange Council and the State Policy Network, both of which remain essential incubators of conservative policy at the state and local levels. Later in life, in addition to returning briefly as Heritage’s president, he served as chairman emeritus of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and Museum, and he was appointed by Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin as chairman of the Virginia Commission on Higher Education Board Appointments. He wrote nine books. He was a faithful Catholic, active in his parish and a Knight of Malta. And he was a devoted husband to his wife, Linda, for four decades, and a beloved father and grandfather.
Feulner adopted the credo “Onward, Always,” and it guided him from the start of his career to his very last days.
He lived to see many of the great figures of our movement — of which he was undoubtedly one — pass into history. A magnanimous man, he was unsparing in his praise of them. Of the late James L. Buckley, he said that he “devoted his life to defending constitutional principles of liberty, prosperity, and civil society.” He described William F. Buckley Jr. as a “Renaissance man whose dedication to his cause would lead him to shape his country’s history in wide-reaching ways.” With Feulner’s own passing, it is now obvious that such encomia apply just as well to Feulner himself.
In a recent National Affairs piece he authored with former Vice President Mike Pence, he concluded that “conservatism is far more than a resistance to disorder — it is a promise, a calling, a duty to preserve what is good and cultivate what is enduring.”
Ed Feulner believed that in Washington, there are no permanent victories and no permanent defeats. His life and legacy prove that this is true. But his passing nonetheless remains a loss for the movement he did so much to build. Here at National Review, we will continue to honor his legacy by moving “onward. Always.”