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.