Aug 14
VOC Mourns the Passing of Dr. Edwin J. Feulner
WASHINGTON—The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC) mourns the passing of its Chairman Emeritus, Dr. Edwin J. Feulner, on July 18, 2025. A long-time Trustee and former Chairman, Dr. Feulner was instrumental in the founding and growth of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and was recognized with its highest award, the Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom, in 2006.
Dr. Eric Patterson, President and CEO of the Foundation, noted,
The passing of Dr. Ed Feulner is a tremendous loss for all of us who were inspired by his patriotism, enthusiasm, wise counsel, and strategic leadership. The global movement for liberty has been shaped by Dr. Feulner. We pledge to honor his memory by continuing this vital work.
Dr. Elizabeth Spalding, Chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and Founding Director of the Victims of Communism Museum, released the following statement on his passing:
Our VOC family joins Linda and all of Ed’s family and friends in mourning the loss and celebrating the contributions of this great man, husband, father, grandfather, friend, and mentor, who made a difference for good—on behalf of ordered liberty and against communism and all other forms of tyranny—each and every day. His legacy will be enduring. Among his many contributions to advancing freedom was his hands-on chairmanship during the making and building of the Victims of Communism Museum and the expansion of VOC’s policy-relevant research on Communist China. Ed helped to build institutions in which ‘people are policy’ is carried out.
Dr. Feulner was renowned across the globe for his many years of strategic leadership as president of The Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC, as well as his founding of and influence on many other organizations. During a speech in 1986, President Reagan praised him thus, “Ed Feulner, you’re a combination of many things: intellectual, administrator, politician, diplomat, but most of all, dreamer and darer.”
Dr. Feulner came to the Victims of Communism Foundation by way of his friendship with its co-founders: the late Dr. Lee Edwards—Dr. Feulner’s biographer and frequent partner on projects—and the late Dr. Lev Dobriansky, his Georgetown University economics professor and mentor. Dr. Feulner actively supported the construction and dedication of the Victims of Communism Memorial, ensured the perpetuation of VOC’s Nikolai Getman Gulag art collection in the years before its permanent home at the Museum, and, through his consequential chairmanship during COVID and its aftermath, helped to make the Victims of Communism Museum a reality.
Dr. Feulner’s career began with time as an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, an aide to Representative Melvin Laird (R-WI) when Laird was Chairman of the House Republican Conference and later, when he was U.S. Secretary of Defense, as Chief of Staff to Congressman Phil Crane (R-IL), and as the Executive Director of the Republican Study Committee. Feulner assumed the presidency of The Heritage Foundation in 1977, transforming it from a small think tank with nine employees to a highly influential research and policy institution of over two hundred and fifty.
Dr. Feulner also held leadership positions in a wide array of academic, political, and economic non-profit organizations and universities, and served on the Gingrich-Mitchell Congressional UN Reform Task Force and the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, of which he was Chairman. He served as the Public Member (Ambassador) of the U.S. Delegation to the United Nations Second Special Session on Disarmament. In 2022, Governor Glenn Youngkin of Virginia appointed Dr. Feulner Chairman of the Virginia Commission on Higher Education Board Appointments. Feulner wrote nine books, including The American Spirit (2012) and Getting America Right (2006). He held a B.A. from Regis University, an M.B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, and a Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh.
Randal Teague, Vice Chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, added:
Ed Feulner has left us for the promised, better place, but his ideas, his achievements, and his organizations remain. We honor him now by dedicating ourselves to accomplishing what he was unable to finish. We will join others in doing that.
I met Ed in 1973 when he was hard at work organizing the Republican Study Committee. I was Jack Kemp’s chief of staff, and we were on the first floor of the Cannon House Office Building. There was a commotion at the end of a hallway whose exit to First Street, Southeast had been blocked for years. Why this noise? Because the House Republican Leadership would not give him a real office to harness conservative thought into legislative action, so he was going to do it from desks, chairs, lamps and typewriters in an obscure hallway, and did he ever do that and with much success. It did not take long for him to conclude this work needed to reach the Senate, White House, courts and state capitals; thus, the Heritage Foundation was founded, and Ed began leading. It added to the momentum in public opinion leading to Gov. Ronald Reagan’s 1980 victory. That done, he put hundreds of pages as to what to do, collectively a Mandate for Leadership, on the new President’s desk and every Cabinet member’s desk, and they went to work fulfilling its goals.
Ed knew that international communism was an ideological and military threat to the free world and especially to the United States. Among his many efforts to go beyond containing it to rolling it back, he joined Georgetown University professor, Dr. Lev Dobriansky, and later Dr. Lee Edwards and others in the design and growth in influence of a Captive Nations Committee which in the late 1990s became the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and later museum near the White House. Ed served on its governing board and later served as its chairman. He helped it gain national prominence. Led by Moscow and Beijing, over 100 million had died under their heels, but he knew another billion-plus were still being suppressed in surviving communist countries.
There are few things I appreciate more than Ed straightening me out when I was not quite yet on his page. It was an honor to be guided by him, and I am not alone in that sentiment.
The Honorable Bruce Weinrod, VOC Trustee, noted:
I was privileged to know Ed Feulner for many years. Over the years, he became a career advisor, a boss, a good friend, and, most recently, a fellow Board Member of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. Most important of all to those who knew him, Ed was a genuinely decent and good person.
Ed was a brilliant organizational leader and institution-builder. At the same time, my sense is that his first love was always the battle of ideas. Ed’s interest in ideas began with his campus involvement with ISI, and continued as a founder and active member of the Philadelphia Society, as a leader of the Mt. Pelerin Society, and of course as the leader of the Heritage Foundation. In this regard, I recall Ed’s excitement when I showed him a copy of a long out-of-print Heritage symposium on conservatism that he had moderated and he asked me to send it to him so that he could make his own copy; and also his enthusiastic response when I sent him a copy of an article featuring himself and the Indian free market economist Sudha Shenoy at the London School of Economics (where he also encountered Hayek and others).
With respect to his overall impact on modern American conservatism, Ed should rank alongside William F. Buckley Jr. and Ronald Reagan. All three had an ability to bring together the various intellectual and policy strands of American conservatism for common purposes.
While Ed saw the principal mission of the Heritage Foundation as directly influencing public policy on Capitol Hill and elsewhere, he also always carved out space for considering the intellectual underpinnings of a free society, and he also found ways to support associates who had fallen on hard times.
In addition to Heritage, Ed supported various worthy causes and institutions–none more important and none where he had a greater impact than the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC). Ed understood the crucial importance of remembering those who have suffered under communism (and those who continue to suffer) as well as educating younger generations on its historical record, its ideological fallacies, and the contrasting positive virtues of free societies. And thus Ed, while retired from Heritage, accepted a request to lead VOC’s Board. In that role, he effectively and successfully navigated VOC through challenging times so that VOC could become the robust organization it is today.
