Having been part of the conservative movement for over 35 years, I’ve met a lot of the people who make the movement work. Unfortunately, given this long association, I find myself knowing more and more of the departed conservatives each year. This year was a particularly tough one, as I personally knew 10 of the luminaries who died in 2025. 

This year starts with Lee Edwards, who died in late 2024, just after the deadline for last year’s piece. Edwards was a historian, author of 25 books, and chronicler of conservatives and conservative institutions. Edwards himself was also an institution in the conservative world, having helped found Young Americans for Freedom in 1960, working on Sen. Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, and having a half-century relationship with William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of modern conservatism. 

Edwards was inspired to join the movement when he was studying in Europe during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Excited that communism was about to be defeated, he was then disappointed when Soviet troops brutally crushed the uprising. Typically, he turned his disappointment into resolve, recalling that “right then, I swore I would spend the rest of my life trying to defeat communism and help those fighting for their freedom.” His resolve was revealed in many ways: his books, his relationships with just about everyone in the conservative movement, his self-description as a “Reagan optimist,” and his multidecade effort to build the Victims of Communism Museum. This latter idea came about at an Edwards family gathering in 1990 when they decided the world needed a way to tell the story of communism’s 100 million victims. The museum opened near the White House in 2022.

We lost another eminent conservative when Ed Feulner died in 2025. The legendary founder of the Heritage Foundation in 1973 and its longtime president, he helped create the model for a conservative think tank. As a student at Regis University in Denver, Feulner read Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative and Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, showing the impact that conservative ideas can have on young people.

After earning a master’s degree from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Feulner worked on Capitol Hill, where he was disappointed in conservative think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute that provided too little intellectual ammunition for conservatives for the policy debates of the day. An AEI paper that intentionally came after conservatives had lost a key vote spurred him to create a think tank that could help conservatives win policy disputes in real time. One of the insights that helped make Heritage into what the New York Times called “the Parthenon of the conservative metropolis” was the belief that “personnel is policy.” This concept entailed staffing administrations with talented conservatives as well as hiring and nurturing people at Heritage. As economist Tim Kane recalled of his time at Heritage, “Feulner wanted me to get 100% of the limelight.” It’s a concept that other think tank heads should take to heart, especially today, as Heritage faces serious problems stemming from a president who is, unfortunately, in the limelight far too........

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