Edward Harrison Crane, or Ed Crane as he was known to all, was a libertarian giant, one of the great advocates of what “liberal” once meant in the United States. He believed in peace, liberty, and prosperity, and he devoted much of his life to creating effective intellectual and policy institutions to make Americans genuinely free.

To him and many others, his moment first appeared to come with the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan. A half century ago, Ed recognized that America needed a more effective liberal movement, in the best sense of the word. The US suffered stagflation at home and the Cold War abroad, but Reagan’s candidacy encouraged a renaissance of free-market thinking. Indeed, it became easier to talk about libertarian ideas when the Gipper occupied the White House. To be sure, Reagan remained a politician, more inconsistent in his policies than rhetoric, and faced determined resistance in Washington and beyond. Nevertheless, the president’s soaring message, even when belied by his more pedestrian actions, offered the equivalent of air cover for Cato’s scholarly soldiers. It was an exciting time to promote classical liberalism in Washington.

Despite many victories for freedom along the way, especially internationally with the fall of the Soviet Union and liberalization in many other countries, the Cato Institute is needed more today than at least since the Great Society was launched and the Vietnam War was raging. In fact, perhaps since the New Deal. Even Ed didn’t fully realize the prescience of his partnership with Charles Koch to found Cato almost a half century ago.

Ed pulled me, like many other libertarian scholars and activists, into a movement I was barely cognizant of. I was attending Stanford Law School at the time, in the midst of a gradual awakening to libertarian ideas. I was far more interested in politics and policy than law and enjoyed a surprisingly high profile on campus. Williamson Evers, a Stanford graduate student who was working with Cato, based in San Francisco at the time, found me and said I should meet some folks, leading to a 1978 visit with Ed, David Boaz, and Charles Koch, and an offer the following year to join with Ed Clark, the Libertarian Party presidential nominee, whose 1980 campaign ended up in Ed Crane’s hands.

The offer was tempting, but at Stanford I also met Martin Anderson, a libertarian-leaning scholar who was in charge of domestic policy in Reagan’s incipient presidential campaign. That led—luckily or providentially, take your pick—to an opportunity to join Reagan’s campaign, an offer that even Ed acknowledged I could not turn down. I ended up in the White House, and when Cato moved to Washington in 1981, I reestablished contact with Ed, inviting him to the White House for lunch. It was an exhilarating though still often frustrating time to be pushing libertarian ideas, and with Anderson’s return to the Hoover Institution in early 1982 I began looking for an exit, which Ed offered. Later that year I left to edit Inquiry magazine, recently spun off from Cato, and formally affiliate with Cato, which soon turned into my primary position.

Cato was David amid a city filled with Goliaths, including many large, mainstream think tanks that cashed generous checks from the US and foreign governments, as well as companies and other private interests seeking public favors. The Institute had a special sense of mission and esprit de corps, and offered me the opportunity to venture far and wide in policy battles across the spectrum.

I opposed draft registration, which I had battled alongside Martin Anderson in the administration. With a young Ian Vásquez I told intransigent foreign aid professionals why the US should stop underwriting governments and other institutions in the name of development. I consumed Roy Childs’s foreign policy publications while still at the White House and later worked with Ted Galen Carpenter in battling the warfare state—and celebrating the end of the Cold War. I got to know Peter Ferrara, who did early, pathbreaking work on Social Security. I wrote copiously about the threats posed by Clintoncare and Obamacare. I even ended up on television discussing the NCAA and paying “student” athletes, so starved was Washington for independent thinking.

At Cato’s center was Ed. Indeed, for many Cato was known as Crane and the Others. That was always an exaggeration, of course. David Boaz, whom we tragically lost in 2024, was another indispensable Institute and libertarian paladin. And the ever-expanding policy staff was critical for developing and spreading Cato’s message. However, Ed cared passionately about policy even while growing the Institute. He was involved in the hiring of every analyst deeply interested in our ongoing work. Perhaps most fundamentally, he was willing to accept the financial and other costs of principle. For instance, criticizing corporate welfare won few friends in the business community. Opposing the Gulf War lost conservative support. Opposing the Iraq War led to even deeper isolation and more widespread vilification. Cato initially was almost alone in pushing to end the War on Drugs. Yet through these and other travails Ed stood firm. Even Cato’s opponents acknowledged its steadfast commitment to principle, unusual for Washington.

The ultimate and most important beneficiaries of Ed’s efforts are the American people. Most have never heard of, nor will ever hear of, Ed Crane. However, because of his efforts they are freer and more prosperous. Cato has subsequently grown even more influential and successful, preparing for battle at precisely the moment when liberal principles and values are under siege both at home and abroad. Much was achieved by Ed. Much more must be achieved in the coming years by the institution that outlives him and the staff who carry on his work.

I knew Ed casually since the 1970s and have written and lectured for the Cato Institute since 1985. But we only became close friends after 2001, when I was almost 60. That is when he welcomed me into the Cato fold as a refugee from conservative chores. Nearly all of my favorite research and writing on economic policy issues (aside from when I first began writing for Reason and National Review in 1971) got an exciting restart at Cato. My working time during each day has ever since been more enjoyable and fulfilling, and I have not quit. If I forgot to thank him, I am doing it now.

Believe it or not, the top of a fumbled Wikipedia bio says, “Ed Crane (politician).” Anti-politician might be more accurate. Unlike voluntary market agreements, politics asks voters to choose between two mislabeled packages of political promises. Then they end up stuck with the whole bundle for years, regardless of what is actually inside it. Unlike goods and services bought in a free market, there is no warranty for political nonperformance and no right to sue a politician for fraud.

It is true that Ed was active with the Libertarian Party in the 1970s, guiding presidential campaigns and chairing the Party at times. But he saw it as a way to educate more people about libertarian policy options (like privatization of Social Security and school choice) rather than to actually unseat the partisan duopoly with all its codependent interest groups. Of course, the whole idea of a Libertarian Party seems improbable, like a common pact and loyalty oath for a bunch of individualists. I did speak at the first Libertarian Party convention in 1972, however, but that may have been a mistake. I thought they told me some libertines were having a party.

I am a Wikipedia editor, though a lazy one, so I plan to remove “politician” as their definition of Crane’s astonishing career and replace it with “public policy entrepreneur.”

Ed Crane’s famed wit and charm could never disguise the vital historic significance of the grand legacy he built for us and our grandchildren: the Cato Institute. We will miss him but always remember his company with a chuckle.

As European libertarians looking at America around the turn of the millennium, Ed Crane and David Boaz seemed to us like the Richard Cobden and John Bright of modern times.

The 19th-century Manchester radicals institutionalized the campaign for free trade and inspired every European country—from France to Germany—to create its own miniature Anti–Corn Law League. In a similar way, the Cato Institute showed us it was possible to turn libertarianism from ragtag activism into a serious, well-funded institution with intellectual credibility. We all wanted a mini-Cato back home.

To me, the appeal was obvious. Having come out of the libertarian underground movement, I noticed that the Cato Institute managed to earn broader intellectual respect even though it held the same radical ideas we did. This institution seemed to have discovered a formula not just for winning debates but for winning people.

Later, when I joined the Swedish free-market think tank Timbro, I quickly realized that the Cato Institute was treated as the gold standard—combining intellectual credibility, policy relevance, and fundraising capacity while, most importantly, remaining true to its original mission.

Ed’s principled leadership—even when the whole country was against him (as during the Iraq War)—is a core reason Cato did not succumb to the siren song of power in Washington, DC, as some had feared and as so many other think tanks did.

At Timbro, there were frequent references to Cato in internal discussions, documents, and even—as I vaguely recall—a drinking song.

On the first page of Timbro’s 25th-anniversary publication, we tried to borrow some of Cato’s good reputation with a picture of our CEO, Mattias Bengtsson, alongside a smiling Ed Crane and a description of Cato as “one of the world’s most exciting think tanks.”

That’s right. Not just important or influential, but exciting—the place where building a free society was an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage, as F. A. Hayek had famously called for.

I cannot begin to list all the other Western European think tanks that have also been inspired by the Cato Institute. When the Iron Curtain fell, the same thing happened in Eastern Europe, where many came to libertarian ideas through Milton Friedman and Hayek but learned what to do with those ideas through Cato.

Today, there are about 40 serious free-market think tanks in former communist countries throughout Europe, up from roughly zero. That would not have been possible without Cato’s work to “deliver the truth about freedom around the world,” as Mart Laar—the prime minister who reformed Estonia’s economy and received Cato’s 2006 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty—put it. Everybody wanted their own mini-Cato, and they still do.

There is a very moving moment in the story of the great 19th-century French economist Frédéric Bastiat, when he realizes that he is not alone in his struggle for liberty. When Bastiat discovered Cobden and the Anti–Corn Law League in the 1840s, he wrote that he had finally found the very method “by which a principle can be made to triumph, not through a single day’s clash, but through a slow, patient, stubborn struggle.”

Bastiat saw that Cobden had built something far greater than a campaign for a single issue; he had built a machinery for freedom—something he now desperately wanted to bring to his own country.

There are many, many of us, all around the world, who are the Bastiats to Crane’s Cobden.

Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!

—Shakespeare

I am deeply saddened by the loss of a wonderful human being, a loyal and loving friend, and an incomparable champion of liberty, the great Ed Crane.

Ed was an instrumental positive force in my personal and professional development. So many memories, so many experiences, such wonderful moments, either while sharing a panel at international conferences, having open discussion on various topics in his office at Cato headquarters, or being a guest at his home, together with his children and the great Kristina.

Ed, almost singlehandedly, was responsible for spreading the work of the Cato Institute, and the principles of liberty, prosperity, and peace, in my native Mexico. I am immensely proud of the incredible and lasting work we did in my country. The three-day intellectual fest “Liberty in the Americas: Free Trade and Beyond,” held in Mexico City in May 1992, brought together some 53 proponents of liberty across the Americas to discuss a wide variety of topics and challenges over the course of three incredible days—including Milton and Rose Friedman, who attracted unprecedented attention in the media among high-ranking officials, business leaders, and the community at large during the course of their visit.

Ian Vásquez had just joined Cato at the time, and we were both assigned lead roles in making the conference happen. Ian has since become one of my dearest friends.

Ed’s vote of confidence was a source of pride and personal joy—and the amazing success of this gathering was followed by two highly successful Cato monetary conferences, in 1994 and again in 2001; with three impactful visits by José Piñera during his tenure at Cato, supporting and advising the then-Zedillo government and Mexico’s leaders on the benefits of individual pension accounts; with Ed’s enormous help in a memorable Mont Pelerin Society regional meeting in January 1996 in Cancún, which I then had the opportunity to organize; with his kind invitations to join Cato Club 200 retreats in Playa del Carmen and Los Cabos; and so much more.

I always felt at home every time I visited the Cato Institute. It was always a homecoming—whether attending anniversary dinners (applauding Walter Williams!), or the fantastic biennial Milton Friedman Prize dinners, or all sorts of conferences where I had the privilege to speak, or even in impromptu visits, whereupon I would proceed to knock on Ed’s office door to say “hola” without a prior scheduled meeting. Often, after engaging in chitchat, Ed would follow with “…please join Kristina and me for dinner tonight (or this weekend) at our home.”

Again, so many memories, so many experiences, so much more that reflects an eternal debt of gratitude to the great Ed Crane. But two anecdotes, among a large number of shared moments, stand out.

In the fall of 2001, during the course of the Cato monetary conference in Mexico City, I was able to arrange an invitation to join then-President Vicente Fox for dinner at the presidential residence in Los Pinos. It was a small but commanding group, which included Robert Mundell, José Piñera, my dear friend Judy Shelton, Minister of Finance Francisco Gil Díaz, our central bank governor Guillermo Ortiz, Ed Crane, and myself, among others. We talked about Mexico, dollarization, free trade, pension reform, and other policy topics. All of a sudden, Ed finally intervened and uttered something to the effect of: “It pains me to think of the gigantic waste and exorbitant opportunity cost of not legalizing drugs—so much taxpayer money down the drain, so many lives lost, when will we ever learn?” You could have heard a pin drop in the dining room. No comments ensued, which to me, and perhaps to all present, was an admission that the truth had been spoken—even though sometimes the truth hurts.

My second memory, forever cherished in my relationship with Ed, was a visit that my late, great father, Roberto Salinas-Price, and I made to Cato headquarters in September 2011, just a year prior to my father’s passing. Our visit was to inform Ed that we wished for three of the most prized items in my father’s remarkable book collection to be contributed to and exhibited at the Cato Institute—first editions of The Wealth of Nations, The Federalist Papers, and Cato’s Letters. After a long, delightful conversation I still treasure, we said our respective goodbyes, whereupon my father turned to Ed and said: “Ed, I love the Cato Institute … but I am doing this for you, and because of you.”

Another dear friend of mine whom I met because of my relationship with Ed, the extraordinary Lesley Albanese, would later turn our family wishes into a moving and beautiful reality. Today, those three editions stand out brightly in the Institute’s library, with a plaque memorializing my parents—a testament to our friendship, our bonds, and our shared values in defense of liberty.

For this, for so much more, gracias, gracias, gracias, Ed. You were, always, sine qua non—to me, and to so many others.

We will miss you, now and forever.

Ed Crane’s passing marks the end of an era for the modern libertarian movement. Few individuals have done as much over the past century to build, shape, and sustain the institutions that give classical liberal and libertarian ideas a durable presence in American public life. As the longtime president of the Cato Institute, Crane did not merely advance a set of policy positions; he helped construct an intellectual infrastructure for liberty, one grounded in limited government, individual responsibility, free markets, and peace. Generations of scholars, policymakers, and policy advocates operate today in a space that exists in no small part because of Ed’s vision and determination.

What distinguished Crane was not only his strategic acumen but his unwavering commitment to principle. At a time when political incentives often reward compromise of first principles, he insisted that the case for individual liberty be made clearly, confidently, and without apology or trimming. He believed that both ideas and institutions matter and that changing the world requires both intellectual seriousness and organizational persistence. His work helped move libertarian thought from the margins toward the center of major debates over economic policy, civil liberties, and the proper scope of government.

Like any consequential figure, Crane was not without controversy. This should not obscure the magnitude of his achievements. The organization that he built with the help of the late, great David Boaz, and the ideas they championed will continue to shape public discourse for decades to come.

Ed Crane leaves behind a movement stronger, more confident, and more intellectually grounded than the one he helped launch. For those who value a free society, his legacy is not only a record of past accomplishments but a standing challenge to carry forward the work of defending liberty with the same courage, clarity, and conviction that defined his life.

Ed Crane was larger than life. I remember him for his wit and approach to management, for his adherence to principle, and for his intuition about people and politics. Ed’s leadership style attracted brash intellectuals with high IQs who didn’t come to Washington to make friends. People like him. As the Washington Post wrote in 1997, “the institute has managed to irritate just about everyone in Washington at some point.” He had a reputation around town as a charming rascal, a man who refused to play by the rules, whose puckish surliness somehow won friends on both left and right. One remark emblematic of Ed’s style was his quip that he had the new Cato building at 1000 Massachusetts Ave. NW oriented facing away from the Capitol “so Congress can kiss my ass.” People heard this kind of thing all the time from Ed, and to so many of us, it was electrifying. Everyone, from interns to board members, looked forward to his bimonthly memos, which were consistently hilarious, incisive, and brilliantly written. Seriously—find your old copies and reread them.

Working for Ed was demanding, but it was also fun. There was a period sometime in the late 2000s or early 2010s where there were eight or nine married couples, including mine, in which the spouses had met working at Cato—this at a time when the Institute was about 100 employees. It was a tangible reflection of the “work hard, play hard” energy at Cato. Two of his five “tips for success” were “work hard” and “have a sense of humor.” He lived those principles.

He was unshakably committed to libertarianism. Ed would collaborate with Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey or the head of the Sierra Club, depending on the issue. Cato lost a lot of money because its foreign policy scholars opposed the first Iraq War, and it lost a lot of money a dozen years later because its foreign policy scholars opposed the second Iraq War. From the tobacco settlement to Fannie Mae, there are dozens of cases where Ed passed on big checks because he wouldn’t bend the knee or simply told the truth.

His political judgments were often insightful. For example, he and former Cato chairman Bill Niskanen rightly judged in 2003 that “neoconservatism has mostly been a movement with a head but no body. One rarely runs into a neocon on the street.” He also was tremendously sagacious about human beings in general. One former board member told me that when Ed started the first Cato Club donor event, he agreed to cut Cato a check but didn’t want to attend. Ed responded by saying, “I’d rather you attend than take your money. Come and I’ll pay your way in.” The board member went, and recounted to me how rewarding it had been to meet other people who thought like him, and how right Ed was in thinking it was important to bring people together in that way. Every donor to whom I’ve told this story emphatically agreed.

Ed of course played the central role in bringing libertarianism into the mainstream of American political life. But he also created an esprit de corps that lives on in Cato scholars and donors alike.

Ed Crane was arguably the most important person in building the libertarian movement we now know. There had been previous—and valiant—attempts by others, but they largely fizzled out for a variety of reasons: lack of financing, reluctance to change approaches to addressing issues, insufficient faithfulness to the ideas libertarians hold dear, and simple bad luck, among others.

Ed was involved with a number of libertarian institutions and publications throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, some under his direct control and some he oversaw indirectly. His lasting legacy, though, will be cofounding the Cato Institute. In 1977, libertarian ideas were in the ascent due to the failure of the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, and stagflation, all of which reduced public trust in government. In short, Cato was founded at a propitious time. That wasn’t an accident—it was ideological entrepreneurism at its best.

Cato slowly but surely grew and became one of the most important public policy institutions in the United States—indeed, the world. Ed’s vision of creating a think tank that would compete with others in the battle of ideas has been realized, perhaps more successfully than even he had envisioned.

Only 20 months ago, we lost David Boaz, Ed’s longtime right-hand man, the person who oversaw Cato’s policy work on a day-to-day basis. He made sure that our output met Ed’s exacting standards and became the foremost voice of his generation for advancing libertarian ideas through his own work. 

Without Ed, there very well may not have been a Cato Institute at all, and without David, there wouldn’t be the one we know today. I am extremely grateful to both of them for that and for giving me a shot to be a part of it. I will remain so forever.