A Lion of the Right is Called Home

It is a measure of the respect and admiration accorded to Paul Weyrich that his passing Wednesday evening after a long and painful illness sparked a flood of moving, often lengthy, tributes from people across the political spectrum. Weyrich, 66, came as a determined young activist to Washington from Wisconsin in the late 1960s to work for Sen. Gordon Allot of Colorado. From the moment he arrived in the nation’s capital, Weyrich knew what he believed and why, and he was blessed with a knack for undertaking efforts on the most vital issues that frequently helped shape modern American political history. At his last breath, he left behind a monumental list of achievements on behalf of individual liberty and limited government that will not soon be matched.

The first of those efforts came when a letter from brewer Joe Coors to Allot landed on Weyrich’s desk. Coors wanted to use his fortune to advance the conservative movement. From that moment forward in the early 1970s, Weyrich was present at the creation of virtually every significant conservative institution. He was the founding president in 1973 of The Heritage Foundation, which under the leadership of his friend, Ed Feulner, became the nation’s leading think tank and produced “Mandate for Leadership,” the policy blueprint for the Reagan Revolution. In 1974, Weyrich created the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress (CSFC), which trained generations of conservatives in grassroots political activism. Later from his office at the Free Congress Foundation, Weyrich inaugurated the weekly networking meetings that united conservatives of all stripes to plot strategy. And it was Weyrich who recommended the idea of the Moral Majority to Rev. Jerry Falwell, thus cementing the decisive element of Reagan’s coalition of economic, defense and social conservatives as a national electoral force with which to be reckoned.

Other Weyrich landmarks were no less significant for being less well-known. It was Weyrich, for example, who wrote a political action textbook in 1989 and used it to help train legions of anti-communist leaders behind the Iron Curtain. He grew up in a Wisconsin community of émigrés from Soviet tyranny, saw the cracks in that brutal curtain, and yearned to exploit them in the liberation of the captive nations of Eastern Europe.

A Christian of unwavering faith, Weyrich endured endless pain in his final years, but his devotion to principle and wise counsel never left him. Perhaps Feulner captured Weyrich best in calling him “one of the great architects of the modern conservative movement,” and “a man of unbending principle and unfailing courage. Rest in peace, old friend.”