Today, my dear old friend and collaborator Ed Feulner, Founder and long-time President of the Heritage Foundation, will be laid to rest after a Mass of Christian Burial at The Basilica of St. Mary in Alexandria, Virginia. In honor of his memory and contributions to our county and the conservative movement ConservativeHQ presents this three-part video tribute.
Ed Feulner was there at the beginning of the modern conservative movement, and if the passing of so many of our old comrades in arms has made me 001, Ed certainly qualified to be 002. Few people received more mentions in my book TAKEOVER, than did Ed Feulner, and few contributed more to the rise and successes of the conservative movement than Ed did.
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Back in 1975, we of what reporter John Filka then called the “New Right” believed that having a plan and coordinating our efforts on the conservative agenda was the only way to achieve success. We soon formalized a breakfast meeting every Wednesday from 7:30 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. To the extent that Hillary Clinton’s vast right-wing conspiracy ever existed, it met at my home in McLean from 1975 until 1984.
Among the indispensable regulars at the breakfast were Ed Feulner of the Heritage Foundation, Terry Dolan of the National Conservative Political Action Committee, Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation, Morton Blackwell of the Leadership Institute, Ron Godwin of the Moral Majority, and Howard Phillips of the Conservative Caucus.
Ed Feulner’s motto was “onward, always,” and that spirit was in large measure what defined the “New Right.”
What made the New Right different from the Old Right was not ideology; what distinguished the New Right from the Old Right was that we were operationally different. The Old Right had become defeatist; they were used to showing up and getting beat two to one and then retiring from the fight until the next vote.
However, in the same situation, those in the New Right would cinch up their belts, organize, call meetings, develop plans, and send out a couple million letters explaining why the way to win the next battle was to defeat those who voted wrong—be they Democrats or Republicans—and keep pushing forward toward our goal of having conservatives govern America.
And few contributed more to achieving that goal of having conservatives govern America than did Ed Feulner.
Several years before we began meeting Ed had recognized the need for an organization devoted to crafting conservative policy recommendations that was independent of the Republican Party and the Republican congressional leadership and, with the help of a small group of conservative thinkers and donors, the Heritage Foundation was born.
Feulner’s aim in founding Heritage in 1973, alongside fellow builders Paul Weyrich and Joseph Coors, was, as Illya Shapiro so deftly put it, to create an organization capable of advancing bold policies across all three legs of the Cold War–era conservative stool: free-market economics, cultural traditionalism, and anti-Communist foreign policy.
Ed Feulner’s crucial contribution to the New Right and the modern conservative movement was his insight that we conservatives needed to sell our ideas by publishing policy papers before legislative or executive action, rather than afterward.
And to do that we needed a permanent institution in Washington where conservative scholars and researchers could work to craft real world recommendations to conservatives in government.
The first real test of Ed’s idea was the Heritage Foundation’s 1980 Mandate for Leadership, a thick book of policy prescriptions and legislative recommendations that became a blueprint for Ronald Reagan’s first term agenda.
The idea was so successful the Heritage Foundation has continued to issue similar recommendations in presidential election years ever since.
Thanks to Ed Feulner the idea that conservatives should have institutions to educate, activate, and energize voters that weren’t mere appendages of the national Republican Party or the Washington political establishment has spread far beyond DC. Thanks to Ed Feulner and the success of the Heritage Foundation similar conservative institutions have been founded in many state capitols, all in some degree modeled on Ed Feulner’s idea for the Heritage Foundation.
In addition to our mutual commitment to preserve constitutional liberty under God’s laws, Ed Feulner and I shared a devout Catholic faith, and it is through that faith in God’s omnipotence and mercy I believe my dear friend Ed Feulner walked in God’s grace and so, at the end of his journey, has come to eternal life.
Mass of Christian Burial for Ed Feulner, Monday, August 11, 2025
2:30PM
The Basilica of St. Mary
310 S. Royal St.
Alexandria, VA 22314
- Ed Feulner
- Heritage Foundation
- Conservative Movement
- Morton Blackwell
- New Right
- Conservative agenda
- Grassroots organization
- Republican party
- Paul Weyrich
- policy papers
- Ronald Reagan presidency
- Onward Always
