Ed Feulner, who died on July 18, was a big man in every sense. Tall and bulky, he had a largeness of spirit, a generosity of soul, and his ambitions were commensurately vast. When he started running the Heritage Foundation in the early 1970s, it had nine employees. Now it has 300, half a million registered supporters and a nine-figure budget.

If Feulner was bothered by Heritage’s swing to MAGA isolationism after 2020, he was too discreet to say so. Yet the think tank he leaves behind is very different from the one he helped found.