The story begins during the height of the Cold War. In 1961, Ed Feulner (EJF) was on a two-month summer college trip with 16 other students and a Jesuit priest and professor. On his first trip abroad, and given his German family heritage, he looked forward to celebrating his 20th birthday on August 12 in Berlin. But the construction of the Berlin Wall got in the way.

Ed liked to tell this story, which is one reason that the picture above is, indeed, worth a thousand words. In 1990, he celebrated the collapse of the Berlin Wall — and everything the previous year of miracles meant in Eastern and Central Europe — by traveling to Berlin with members of the Heritage Foundation Board of Trustees and taking a hammer to the Wall.

Others — many others — have expounded and will continue to expound on EJF’s matchless, extraordinary contributions to the growth and institutions of the conservative movement. All that is true. Still others will highlight Ed’s “people are policy” approach. Also true, and his legendary “Feulnerisms” revealed deeper truth. And some will connect the two. Again, true. For Ed, it was people first, then institutions.

Ed was a man fully alive. Why? Ed’s strong anti-communism because of his religious faith and his political beliefs merits special mention. His Roman Catholic faith was present — from the cradle — and deepened throughout his life. As others have noted, he discovered and learned the core principles and lessons of conservatism during his undergraduate years at Regis College. Ed stood staunchly for ordered liberty in politics and economics. He championed what he held to be true and permanent, and thus he recognized in communism the worst man-made attack on the “permanent things” in human history. Ed also understood the evil of and threats from communism around the world. While some focused on Europe and others on Asia, he always had one foot in each — literally, as his many travels over the course of 60 years attest.

The main tenets of the Heritage Foundation under EJF underscore the magnitude of communism’s threat to and attack on authentic freedom. Limited government is the opposite of communism’s unlimited state. Individual freedom is the opposite of the forced collective and of enslaved peoples under communism. Traditional values, including those of the family, are the opposite of the new communist man, the ideological destruction of nature, and deforming society’s foundational institutions to serve the one-party state. Free enterprise is the opposite of state ownership of the means of production and control of the distribution of goods and services. A strong national defense to protect a country and its people is the opposite of the Red Army or People’s Liberation Army that exists to safeguard and spread the one-party communist state.

In the end, Ed thought that a free society was the most powerful weapon against communism. And he believed that institutions such as Heritage and the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC) could challenge and even undermine communism as they advanced human freedom and flourishing, limited government, and alliances (political, economic, strategic, and personal) on behalf of liberty around the world.

Ed did not regard any good undertaking as impossible — if you went about it the right way. The combination of the thinker and the MBA led EJF to be a doer extraordinaire. Further, he was an optimistic doer.

Ed shared that quality — that gift — of optimism with his dear friend Lee Edwards (my father), who passed away in December 2024. Ronald Reagan may have been more optimistic than they, and Edwards edged out Feulner (and a few other still-living conservatives; but we will leave it to them to duke out rankings) on the sanguinity scale, but all three were possessed of a positive temperament. It was natural that Dr. Edwards became Dr. Feulner’s biographer and frequent partner on Heritage projects. They shared more than an outlook: from Chicago as their birthplace to deep respect for Russell Kirk and F. A. Hayek, from decades-long friendships with many of the same fellow conservatives to the drive to put consequential ideas into practice. (A small difference is that Ed placed G. K. Chesterton in his intellectual pantheon with Kirk and Hayek, while my father put Whittaker Chambers at their level.) Most important, both men were rooted in their Catholic faith and supported by the love and counsel of their respective wives of over 55 years, Linda and Anne. Separated by a little less than four years in the 1960s, the two couples were even married at the same church in Manhattan. Ed and my dad were also proud and loving fathers.

And they shared anti-communism. With Ed’s economics professor and mentor at Georgetown University in the mid 1960s, Dr. Lev Dobriansky, Lee Edwards founded the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in 1994. It was, again, natural that Ed would join their “Great Adventure,” in Lev’s words. Over the years, the three men worked together to speak for the world’s Captive Nations through Heritage, VOC, and elsewhere. Ed was an early, active supporter of building the Victims of Communism Memorial, a nearly 15-year effort undertaken by my father and a small band of friends to overcome bureaucratic obstacles and raise the money to have sculpted and erect a statue on national parkland for all the victims of communism. That memorial stands just two blocks from Union Station in Washington, D.C., and is visited annually by thousands. As president of Heritage and a long-time VOC Trustee, Ed was pivotal in protecting the unique Nikolai Getman Gulag art collection, even hosting it at Heritage when my dad did not have it on the road. Today that collection is on view at its permanent home in the Victims of Communism Museum on McPherson Square in Washington, D.C. When serving as VOC Chairman in the early 2020s, Ed navigated the complex challenges of Covid faced by many small nonprofit organizations and worked to ensure that the Museum would become not only a reality but a success — open to the public, educating all generations, and witnessing on behalf of and remembering all the victims of communism.

Ed’s story starts with and culminates in his Catholic faith. Ed and Linda were longtime parishioners of St. Mary’s in Old Town Alexandria in the diocese of Arlington, Va. Ed was proud when St. Mary’s was elevated to the status of basilica. A basilica was a fitting parish home for a man with the biggest of hearts. In November 2024, he hosted a dinner at his club for Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco, and Ed seated his pastor, Fr. Edward Hathaway, between my husband Matthew and me. (Ed also possessed and practiced the gift of hospitality and took his dinner seating charts seriously.) At the time, my dad was entering the final stages of aggressive pancreatic cancer. When he heard about this development, Fr. Hathaway said, “Well, you know, it’s really just taking a breath here and the next in heaven.” Another gift: Ed excelled at remembering the very best lines. He loved and used that line for months afterward, and I pray, hope, and believe that this man, fully alive, lived it.

Elizabeth Edwards Spalding, Ph.D., is a senior fellow at the Pepperdine University School of Public Policy and the chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.