The most important legacy of Joe Coors

By Paul M. Weyrich	
web posted March 24, 2003

This is the sort of story that belongs in a novel. Forgive me for its
length but I thought you ought to know, as Paul Harvey might
say, "the rest of the story."

Back in 1968, Jim Lucier, Sr. was a young aide to Sen. Strom
Thurmond (R-SC). Victor Fediay, who has since died, was a
researcher at the Library of Congress. I was an aide to Senator
Gordon Allott (R-CO).  We visited frequently about what was
going on in the world.  Most of it wasn't good. Conservatives
were being killed politically and the left was constantly
advancing. After some time, Lucier and Fediay let me in on their
plans. We had watched how the left operated and in those days,
conservatives weren't even in the ballgame. What was needed,
Lucier and Fediay told me, was an outside operation that could
provide timely information to Members of Congress from a
principled perspective. Such an organization could supply
witnesses for hearings and experts to privately brief senators and
congressmen. They told me that when they were able to put this
together they wanted me to join them in the endeavor. They said
they had been making presentations to businessmen about the
need for such an operation and so I joined in on that effort as
well. A couple of years went by with lots of presentations but no
success.

But the Lord works in mysterious ways. Senator Allott had a
long-time employee by the name of Barbara Hughes. She
handled the mail and the filing for the office. Well, Barbara was
sick one day so an intern handled the mail. She had a chart on
the wall for such times that told the substitute where to direct the
mail. All media letters were to go to Weyrich, the chart said. The
young man opened a letter that began "Dear Senator Allott. You
may remember me. I was news Director at KBTR in Denver...."
The young man saw the call letters and sent the letter to me. The
letter went on to say "I have been hired by Joe Coors to help
him determine where he should put his money so it can further
the conservative cause."  My hands began to tremble. Had
Barbara Hughes been well, I most likely would never have seen
that letter, which was signed by Jack Wilson. I called Jack and
told him he needed to come back to Washington as we had a
story to tell him. He came a couple of weeks later. And we
explained to him how the left operated and how an outside
operation could counter that. He got very excited and said he
would get Joe back to hear the story. Jack told me to get
senators and congressmen to support the idea.

We put together a program that included Sen. Thurmond,
arranged by Lucier, Sen. Cliff Hansen (R-WY), arranged by me,
Rep. Ed Foreman (R-NM), brought in by Fediay, and my
hometown congressman, Henry Schadeberg (R-WI).  In
addition, they met with Walter Mote, Administrative Assistant to
Vice President Spiro Agnew. They all said the same thing. We
need an outside organization to counter the left and these fellows
are the right people to make it happen.

In addition we took Coors to the White House, where Lyn
Nofziger was serving as Ronald Reagan's man in the Nixon
Administration. Again, Lyn endorsed the idea and us. Out of the
blue, Coors asked about the American Enterprise Institute.
Unbeknown to us, Bill Baroody, Sr. had been courting Joe and
had arranged for a private lunch at the Pentagon where
Secretary of Defense Mel Laird had tried to sell Coors on AEI.
Nofziger said, in answer to Joe's question:  "AEI? AEI? I'll tell
you about AEI."  He got up from his desk and walked over to
his library. He pulled a study off the shelf and literally blew a
cloud of dust off of it. "Their stuff is good for libraries. But it is
not timely and nobody around here uses any of it."

Joe told me later that it was at that moment that he decided to go
with us. And sure enough, a few weeks after our meeting, Jack
phoned to say that Joe was willing to take a chance on us. "But
he wants to see your budget and organizational plan. He wants
to be sure you have it all together."

It so happened that Fritz Rench was in town that day.  Fritz had
been my political mentor. A businessman from my hometown, he
and I had worked together on some political projects beginning
in 1960. I told him about Joe's request, and he cancelled his
plans. For the next three days, Fritz pulled out of us what it was
we wanted to do and what it would cost. He got on the phone
and found out what rent on Capitol Hill cost, how much it cost to
buy furniture, the cost of multiple telephone lines, etc.

He put together a prospectus that Coors told me reassured him
that we really knew what we were doing. If he only knew how
and when it was put together.

We didn't know about foundations and how they operated. So
the initial operation was a subsidiary of the Coors Corporation.
It was called The Analysis and Research Association.  As things
progressed, Coors confided in me that he was dissatisfied with
Victor Fediay.  He wanted a new organization. He urged me to
put that together.   By this time we had learned about tax-exempt
501(c)(3) organizations. That is where Ed Feulner came into the
picture. I confided to Ed, then Chief of Staff to Rep. Phil Crane
(R-IL.), on a trip to Taiwan about the situation and urged him to
consider joining the new entity.

That new entity was the Heritage Foundation. I became its first
President. Feulner felt a greater urgency was to organize the
Republican Study Committee in the House. But three years later,
Fritz Rench (from day one until this day a Heritage trustee) and
others made the case to Ed that he should become President of
Heritage. He accepted the challenge.

Look at what Heritage has become.

When I felt the calling to leave Heritage, Joe Coors backed me
in putting together the Committee for the Survival of a Free
Congress (later known as Free Congress PAC), a political
action committee to aid conservative candidates, and then later
on in starting the Free Congress Foundation.  He continued to
support us right up until December of 2002. Of course, he
became a trustee of Heritage and strongly backed it for all of his
days. He took a chance on some young upstart Congressional
staffers and, while he gave us strong moral and financial support,
he never asked for a thing in return. He was as loyal a person as
I have ever encountered in my lifetime. Feulner said he doubts
we will ever see the likes of Joe Coors again. He is probably
right. The point is we could do what we did precisely because
we knew we could count on Joe. No matter what kind of trouble
we got into, or how controversial we became, he was there to
give us support.
 
Thirty some years ago, when the conservative movement was
very small, I cannot overstate the importance of that fact. Coors
told Feulner last December that the Heritage Foundation was his
legacy. With all due respect, his legacy is far greater than
Heritage. I am proud to say that Joe's son, Jeff, has been a
director of Free Congress for 19 years. He was Chairman for
more than a dozen years. He is one of the finest, most principled
God
fearing people I have ever known. Jeff is Joe's legacy.      

Paul M. Weyrich is Chairman and CEO of the Free Congress
Foundation (http://www.freecongress.org).

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