Paul M. Weyrich, the conservative thinker and strategist whose iron principles, articulate fervor and organization-building skills were instrumental in propelling the right wing of the Republican Party to power and prominence in the 1980s and ’90s, died Thursday. He was 66 and lived in Fairfax, Va.
Lee Edwards, a friend of Mr. Weyrich’s for four decades and a distinguished fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative research group that Mr. Weyrich helped found, confirmed the death, at a hospital in Northern Virginia. The family did not release a cause, Mr. Edwards said, but Mr. Weyrich had many health problems, including diabetes. His legs were amputated at the knee in 2005, and he had broken his back in a fall some years earlier.
A writer, a lobbyist and an organizer on behalf of conservative causes and especially social conservatism, Mr. Weyrich (pronounced WY-rick) was one of the far right’s most unbending ideologues. He was widely credited with coining the phrase “moral majority” as a rallying label for social conservatives. It became the name of the religion-based political organization that was led by the Rev. Jerry Falwell.
A deacon in the ultra-conservative Melkite Greek Catholic Church, Mr. Weyrich openly fused his faith and his politics.
For more than a quarter of a century, Mr. Weyrich was one of the Republican Party’s leading antagonists from the right. President Ronald Reagan, he said, had overemphasized economic issues and kept social issues “on the back burner,” as he wrote on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times in 1984.
In 1989, he testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that the first President Bush’s nominee for secretary of defense, John G. Tower, was unqualified for the post because he was a drinker and a womanizer, issues that eventually doomed the nomination. More recently, he accused the current President Bush of profligate domestic spending, and he was a critic of the Iraq war, asserting that a war conducted to spread democracy rather than to protect vital national interests deviated from conservative principles.
Perhaps more than anything, Mr. Weyrich was a nondeviator in his unswerving faith in small government, free-market economics, the right to life and the sanctity of the family. One possible exception: as a lifelong train enthusiast, he was an ardent advocate of government support for Amtrak.
Mr. Weyrich started the Heritage Foundation, a Washington research organization whose express aim is to influence Congress, in 1973 with Ed Feulner, helped by $250,000 from the Colorado beer magnate Joseph Coors. Both he and Mr. Feulner were Congressional aides at the time.
It was Mr. Weyrich’s conviction in making such sweeping statements — and the prickly, impatient, let’s-get-it-done manner with which he did business — that made him an architect of the conservative movement of the last part of the 20th century.
Richard A. Viguerie, the conservative direct-mail pioneer, said in a telephone interview that Mr. Weyrich was the least known of the four pillars of modern conservatism, the others being Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley Jr. and Ronald Reagan.
Paul Michael Weyrich was born in Racine, Wis., on Oct. 7, 1942. His father, Ignatius, was a German immigrant who worked for 50 years stoking the furnace in a Catholic hospital and who raised his son to treat religious and political matters alike with deep seriousness.
Mr. Weyrich attended the University of Wisconsin but did not graduate, supporting himself at first as a reporter for television and radio and at The Milwaukee Sentinel. He eventually became the news director for KQXI in Denver, and from there he went to Washington as an aide to Senator Gordon Allott, a conservative from Colorado.
A year or so later, Mr. Weyrich attended a meeting of aides to Congressional liberals that was also attended by lawyers, lobbyists and Brookings Institute fellows. What he witnessed was a revelation, he said. The subject of the meeting was President Richard M. Nixon’s failure to move forward on fair housing legislation.
From that moment on, he said, he devoted himself to creating the same system for the right.
Mr. Weyrich’s survivors include his wife of 45 years, Joyce; two daughters, Dawn and Diana, and three sons, Peter, Stephen and Andrew.
David D. Kirkpatrick contributed reporting.