A life in liberty

Edward Harrison Crane III was born in View Park, a hillside neighborhood above Los Angeles, on August 15, 1944, the middle of three children of a physician father and a homemaker mother. He read Ayn Rand in high school, and at the University of California, Berkeley, where he took a B.S. in finance in 1966, he kept company with Hayek and Friedman while his classmates read Marcuse.

In 1964 he captained three Berkeley precincts for Barry Goldwater. The campaign’s defeat pointed him past Republican politics toward something more uncompromising. After an MBA at the University of Southern California, he became an investment manager in San Francisco, rising to vice president at Alliance Capital Management and becoming a chartered financial analyst. Then, around 1975, he left finance, and roughly eighty percent of his income, for the cause that would occupy the rest of his life.

Crane found his vocation in the young Libertarian Party. He managed the 1972 vice-presidential campaign of Tonie Nathan, who became the first woman to receive an electoral vote, and by 1974 he was the party’s national chairman. Colleagues called the disciplined operation he built “the Crane Machine,” and him “Boss Crane”; his ambition, he liked to say, was to put libertarians in suits and ties.

He managed Roger MacBride’s 1976 presidential bid, recruited the Los Angeles lawyer Ed Clark to run for governor of California in 1978, then served as communications director for the 1980 Clark presidential ticket, which reached the ballot in all fifty states and drew more votes than any Libertarian ticket before it.

In January 1977, with five hundred thousand dollars from Charles Koch and a name supplied by Murray Rothbard (after Cato’s Letters, the eighteenth-century essays on liberty), Crane opened the Cato Institute in San Francisco with a staff of three. He moved it to Washington in 1981 and, for thirty-five years, made it a permanent intellectual home for limited government: privatizing Social Security, championing term limits, opposing the Gulf and Iraq wars against the wishes of donors, and arguing early for marriage equality and open immigration.

He acquired Regulation magazine in 1989, and in 2002 founded the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty, a half-million-dollar award given every two years. Cato grew from three people to more than a hundred, and the Washington Post called him “the lion king of button-down libertarianism.”

His tenure ended in a fight over Cato’s independence. The death of chairman William Niskanen in 2011 put the institute’s unusual shareholding in play, and a 2012 dispute over control of the board was settled by dissolving the share structure and remaking the board. He stepped down as president on October 1, 2012, and was named president emeritus.

He went on to found the Purple PAC in 2013 to back libertarian-minded candidates, served on the board of the Institute for Free Speech, and kept his place in the Mont Pelerin Society. He remained a fixture of the liberty movement until he passed, surrounded by loved ones, at his home in Falls Church, Virginia, on February 10, 2026, at the age of eighty-one.