Paul Weyrich: The Architect
By: Lee Edwards, OpEd Contributor
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December 18, 2008
There might not have been a President Reagan without Paul Weyrich.
In early 1979, Weyrich and other leaders of the New Right went calling on the Rev. Jerry Falwell in Lynchburg, Virginia, to persuade him and other evangelicals to take a leadership role in American politics.
In the course of his briefing, Weyrich remarked, “Out there is what you might call a moral majority. They are politically and socially conservative. If we could get these people active in politics, there is no limit to what we could do.”
A Falwell associate interrupted and asked Weyrich to repeat himself. “A `moral majority,’” he mused, “that’s a great name.” Falwell immediately agreed, saying, “That’s the phrase I’ve been looking for.” By the end of the meeting, Falwell had committed himself and the Moral Majority was born.
Falwell, Pat Robertson and other television evangelicals set about organizing their followers. From November 1979 through July 1980, the Moral Majority and other Christian organizations registered 2.5 million new voters.
Pollster Louis Harris concluded that Ronald Reagan won “his stunning victory” over Jimmy Carter because the conservatives, particularly the Moral Majority, “gave him such massive support.”
By helping to create the Moral Majority, co-founding the Heritage Foundation and other key organizations, and serving as the strategist of the New Right, Paul Weyrich was a major architect of the American conservative movement.
He was born on October 7, 1942, in Racine, Wisconsin, the son of working-class German Catholics. His father tended the boilers of St. Mary’s Catholic Hospital for 50 years. He was politically active from an early age: at 19, he and his friends took over the Racine Republican party.
He worked for a local daily newspaper and then as a radio-television journalist before coming to Washington in 1967 as press secretary to Senator Gordon Allott (R-CO).
He learned how to organize from the liberal opposition. During President Nixon’s first term, he attended a meeting of key liberals planning the enactment of an open housing bill. Present were a White House official, a Washington newspaper columnist, an analyst from the Brookings Institution, representatives from several black lobbying groups, and aides to a dozen senators.
Weyrich noted that everyone took an assignment. The Senate aides promised that their bosses would make supporting statements and contact other senators. The White House official said he would keep everyone informed of the administration’s strategy.
The newspaper columnist promised to write a favorable article about the legislation. The Brookings analyst promised to publish a timely study that would impact the debate. The black lobbyists agreed to produce public demonstrations at the right time.
“I saw how easily it could be done with planning and determination,” Weyrich later recalled, “and decided to try it myself.” With funding from conservative businessmen like Joseph Coors and direct mail assistance from fundraiser Richard Viguerie, he helped start major conservative institutions such as Heritage, the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress (later the Free Congress Foundation), the Senate Steering Committee, the Republican Study Committee, and the American Legislative Exchange Council.
Liberals as well as conservatives acknowledged his essential role. In January 1981, the AFL-CIO described the New Right and specifically the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress as smart, effective and responsible for “a whole passel of persons sitting in the U.S. House and Senate.”
Although restricted to a wheelchair and a double amputee since 2005, Weyrich continued to write his column and host most of the Free Congress Foundation’s weekly luncheons of Congressional leaders and conservative activists.
From his first days in Washington, Paul’s abiding interest was the Congress. One week ago, he and I talked to some 20 members of the new Congress who will be sworn in the first week of January.
His advice to them was not to sit back and wait for things to happen but to select a subject they were interested in and concerned about and become an expert about it. You will find, he said, that in a very short while other members will start coming to you for advice and counsel. You can make a difference in this town, Paul said.
Paul Weyrich made a difference, a monumental difference, in this town and this nation to the very end.
Lee Edwards is Distinguished Fellow in Conservative Thought at the Heritage Foundation.
