The Magazine

Anne Brunsdale, 1923-2006

Feb 13, 2006, Vol. 11, No. 21 • By CLAUDIA ANDERSON
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BACK IN THE STONE AGE, before the vast right-wing conspiracy and even the Reagan Revolution, there was a conservative Washington (just barely), and one of its fixtures was a handsome, smiling, slightly angular blonde woman named Anne Brunsdale.

Anne, who died recently at 82 at a nursing home in Colorado, was a Minnesotan of Norwegian descent. She studied political science and Far Eastern area studies at the University of Minnesota, then took a second master's degree in comparative government at Yale. In 1950, she moved to Washington to work for the young CIA and stayed six years. During that phase, she was married briefly to the conservative luminary Willmoore Kendall.

Her real Washington career, though, began a decade later, after a detour back in Minneapolis with an investment firm. By 1970, Anne was heading up the publications department for the then-unheard-of American Enterprise Institute, a wonderfully nonbureaucratic, unstuffy collection of scholars and public-policy intellectuals. Anne trained a cadre of young editors (including me) to an exacting standard, before moving on in 1977 to become founding editor of AEI's Regulation magazine.

In the Carter and early Reagan years, conservatives were forcing a shift in the conversation about government. The response to any given public problem was no longer automatically a top-down federal program designed in Washington and paid for out of taxes. Concepts like deregulation, privatization, public-private partnerships, and cost-benefit analysis were being advanced--nowhere more rigorously and creatively than in Regulation.

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