Farewell, Ed Feulner | The American Spectator

In a summer filled with pain and regrets, here is today’s slice of sadness: I am not well enough to attend the memorial events for the late, great Edwin Feulner, PhD.

Edwin John Feulner, Jr. was born in suburban Chicago on August 12, 1941. He passed away in Alexandria, Virginia, in July 2025, at age 83.

In between, he became one of the grand old men of the American conservative movement. His greatest and most enduring legacy was founding the Heritage Foundation in 1973. He was Heritage’s president from 1977 to 2013 and again from 2017 to 2018.

Under Ed’s steady and kind leadership, Heritage grew from a modest operation into a juggernaut: America’s largest and most influential conservative think tank. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Georgia) once called the Heritage Foundation “the Parthenon of the conservative metropolis.” As National Review’s John Miller reports, by 2013, Feulner had expanded Heritage’s payroll from nine employees to 250, its donors from 120,000 to 600,000, and its annual budget from $2.5 million to $80 million. Not bad for a non-profit.

Heritage served and still serves as a conservative idea factory. It has plied school board members, mayors, governors, congressmen, senators, and presidents with concrete proposals to increase individual liberty, promote personal responsibility, limit government, foster free enterprise, and secure peace through strength. Heritage’s platoons of policy experts have testified thousands of times on Capitol Hill, relentlessly debated current events on TV and radio, and filled America’s newspapers and websites with column miles of copy that extol the virtues of the American Founding and apply them to today’s public problems.

I had the pleasure of knowing Ed since the 1980s. I was a young conservative activist at Georgetown University and a chapter leader and eventual board member of Young Americans for Freedom. I was proud to be among a cadre of fledgling Right-wingers who helped pave the way for President Ronald Reagan’s agenda and erect roadblocks against the Soviet Union and global Communism. This was what patriots did in that thrilling decade.

Throughout these years, I ran into Ed at CPAC, numerous galas and dinners across Washington, D.C., and at countless panel discussions, policy seminars, and book launches at Heritage’s spacious, ever-larger Capitol Hill headquarters.

I got to know Ed even better through his relationship with the Atlas Network, with which I am a senior fellow. The Atlas Network collaborates with some 500-plus free-market think tanks in the USA and more than 100 nations worldwide. From 2000 through 2009, Atlas Network beckoned freedom fighters from around the globe to its Liberty Forums around the USA each spring.

Just as our gatherings ended, they flowed like streams into the river called the Heritage Resource Bank. These events convened 800 to 1,000 or more conservative thinkers and doers from across America.

These combined domestic and international confabs facilitated tremendous cross-pollination among people fighting for lower taxes, reduced government spending, broader school choice, sound science, and many other worthy goals. Under the leadership of the Atlas Network’s Alex Chafuen and Brad Lips and Heritage’s Ed Feulner, the relationships that sprang from these conservative/free-market conventions still spawn policy victories from coast to coast and hemisphere to hemisphere.

Ed also cultivated the media. His public relations team developed an uncanny ability to predict what legislation would land on the floor of the U.S. House and Senate, whereupon they would furnish journalists with the pros and cons of bills that soon came up for votes. Even in the days before the Internet, I recall multiple occasions when the Senate was about to consider a particular measure worthy of my pen’s fresh dip in venom. Sure enough, I would open my mailbox and — bang, zoom — there was a policy brief from the Heritage Foundation on that very topic. Brimming with facts, figures, arguments, and analysis, these papers gave me all the arsenic I needed to neutralize the bad guys and help the good guys.

Ed hosted annual Christmas parties and dinners for Heritage’s friends in New York City’s Center-Right media circles. These thoughtful soirees featured tremendous conviviality from the ever-gracious and cheerful Feulner and his equally hospitable staffers. Thanks to Ed’s generous invitations, I was fortunate to share cocktails and meals with such luminaries as Robert Bartley, William F. Buckley, Jr., Midge Decter, Herb London, Norman Podhoretz, and many more.

Throughout all this deep thought, policy development, and networking, Ed was invariably warm, charming, and humble. Never mind his decades of achievements among America’s commanding heights, ever-smiling Ed was always approachable, funny, and eager to offer cool adult beverages and equally warm, welcoming words. We discussed the contours of the political landscape. We booed the Left, cheered the Right, and often ground our molars over the pre-Trump Republicans’ dreadful habit of surrendering elegantly to dodge messy fights that might muss their hair.

Normally, I would have been among those honoring Ed Feulner at this afternoon’s memorial mass at Alexandria, Virginia’s Basilica of Saint Mary. Alas, my recovery from prostate-cancer surgery has been slow and grueling. I simply lack the energy and stamina to be where I want to be right now — among those who knew, admired, and loved Ed.

At 2:00 p.m. today, just as his service began, I played Sir Elton John’s epic “Funeral for a Friend.” This was appropriate and, with enormous regrets, all that I could do in my current condition.

Farewell, Ed! And thank you for everything.

Dr. Feulner gets the last word, with which he closed nearly every e-mail he sent me:

“Onward!”

READ MORE from Deroy Murdock:

Kill the Tillis Tax!

Unmaking Whoopi

When Good Judges Go Bad

Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News Contributor.