Conservative strategist Weyrich dies at 66

WASHINGTON -- Conservatives are mourning the loss of Paul Weyrich, a savvy tactician and big thinker who drove the revival of the Republican Party after Watergate and was working on a blueprint for "the next conservatism" when he died early Thursday at 66.

"He was on the frontlines for a very long time. We're really going to miss him," said Heritage Foundation President Edwin Feulner, who knew Weyrich for 41 years.

John Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, called Weyrich a pillar of the conservative movement and one of its chief strategists "to his dying day."

Weyrich was CEO and chairman of the Free Congress Foundation, which focused on cultural issues. He had long battled diabetes and used a wheelchair after his legs were amputated.

"The health problems Paul confronted in the last few years would have stopped most men, but not him," David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, said in a statement. "He could be ornery, but he accomplished more than almost anyone of his generation."

Weyrich and Feulner co-founded Heritage, a conservative think tank, and Weyrich was its first president.

He recruited Jerry Falwell to start the Moral Majority. He also founded the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, which recruited and trained candidates; it later became Weyrich's foundation.

Beyond institutions, Weyrich knit together the coalition that served the GOP so well until recently: fiscal conservatives, national security hawks and cultural conservatives. He pretty much discovered and mobilized that last group.

"He didn't overintellectualize about Christians 'jumping into the fray,' " — he just taught them how to organize and get action, said Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council.

Phyllis Schlafly, president of the Eagle Forum, said Weyrich traveled the country in 1980 teaching "pro-family neophytes" how to win elections. He turned the "pro-family movement into a fighting brigade," she said.

Weyrich was more than willing to take on people in his own party, especially those he considered accommodationist or defeatist. "Paul always liked the idea that he was conservative first" — not Republican, said Stuart Rothenberg, publisher of an independent political newsletter, who knew Weyrich for 20 years.