Ed Crane was a great American. That was the term of superlative praise that Ed used to describe the people he most admired. By “great American” he meant a person who respected the right of others to lead their lives as they chose; even better if the person promoted that classical-liberal idea and showed a certain disdain for anybody, especially those with political authority, who would presume otherwise.

You didn’t have to be American for him to call you a great American. Like the Founders, Ed took the libertarian principles espoused in the Declaration of Independence to be universal. He cofounded the Cato Institute on those principles, making Cato enjoy worldwide appeal. From the start, Cato was a global think tank, a sort of lighthouse to libertarian activists, scholars, and others scattered internationally.

Ed was—as his longtime executive vice president, the late, great David Boaz, would never tire of saying—a visionary. He was somebody who saw the potential of bringing classical-liberal ideas under one roof, presenting them in a serious and policy-relevant way, and making them a force to be reckoned with in national politics and beyond.

Ed was an effective leader of both Cato and the wider movement he created because he cared so deeply about freedom. He was a natural libertarian, and people could sense as much. That, combined with his keen instincts about politics and the sheer force of his supremely confident personality, contributed to Ed’s legendary ability to raise money and to get things done, and to Cato’s ability to “punch above its weight,” as the Wall Street Journal put it. More than one major donor told me over the years some version of “You don’t want to let Ed down.”

Those of us who worked at Cato under Ed shared that sentiment. He didn’t lecture us about how important our work was; he just exhibited the belief that there was no greater mission than to promote freedom, and he expected the same from us. I don’t know that Ed ever read the play Cato by Joseph Addison, popular at the time of the Revolution, but it was as though he had internalized one of its lines: “’Tis not in mortals to command success, but we’ll do more, Sempronius—we’ll deserve it.”

I was exceedingly fortunate to have worked many years with Ed. For some reason, he hired me in 1992 even though I was not long out of college and had no policy experience. But I believed in promoting classical-liberal ideas and policies around the world. By that time, Cato had already organized major conferences in China and the Soviet Union, the first of their kind in those communist countries, under the direction of Jim Dorn. Ed was tremendously proud of the pioneering role Cato played there. So, by the early 1990s, Cato had already been doing important international work. It was the only place I knew of where I could promote libertarian ideas globally. If it had not been for Cato, I would not have come to Washington.

It didn’t take long for me to see that the platform Ed built was powerful. My first assignment was to organize Cato’s biggest conference yet in Mexico City with our Mexican friend and colleague, Roberto Salinas León. We brought together Milton Friedman and the hemisphere’s leading classical liberals, many of them in positions of power as the wave of market reforms was underway. The event generated a media frenzy, with thousands of international citations, and it gathered the heads of the new free-market think tanks in the region that had looked up to Cato for many years and that have since formed a libertarian network in Latin America. Only Cato could have organized such a large-scale and high-profile event, and it did so because of Ed’s leadership.

As Cato’s international work grew, Ed’s support of those promoting freedom around the world continued. He called on donors to fund numerous scholars or think tanks in the developing world. Over the years, we went to conferences (many of which were organized by Jim Dorn or by me) in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Moscow, St. Petersburg, London, Paris, and other places where, among other things, Cato lent support to local libertarians.

Without fail, Ed would express his admiration for those promoting freedom under the most difficult conditions. When I recommended that we make Peruvian legal expert Enrique Ghersi a Cato adjunct scholar, Ed didn’t hesitate in approving, adding: “That guy risked his life for liberty.” (Enrique was a key member of Mario Vargas Llosa’s presidential campaign in 1990; he ran on a libertarian platform, and that took place under the threat of the violent Shining Path guerrilla movement.) When Ed passed away, I received a note of condolence from Berta Soler, one of Cuba’s leading dissidents and head of the Ladies in White, honoring Ed’s legacy, “which has influenced generations both within and outside the United States.”

I will miss Ed dearly. He took ideas seriously, cared about people committed to classical liberalism, and never took himself too seriously. In fact, he was reliably funny. When addressing donors at the dawn of the social media age, for example, he would brag about how many followers Cato had on Twitter, adding, “…and I don’t even know what Twitter is.”

Thank you, Ed, for changing my life and that of countless others around the world. You were a great American.