‘Looking around the room,” said master of ceremonies, William E. Simon Jr., “I don’t think there has been so much brainpower in one place since the time Karl Rove got stuck alone in an elevator.” The event, hosted by the Washington-based Philanthropy Roundtable, was a dinner honoring James Piereson and the John M. Olin Foundation.

Mr. Piereson joined the Olin Foundation in 1981 and became its executive director four years later. He worked with the foundation’s late president, William E. Simon Sr., and its board in supporting a remarkable array of initiatives to buttress the economic, political, and cultural institutions upon which our liberty and private enterprise are based. Industrialist John M. Olin (1892-1982) intended that the foundation be eventually phased out, and its work will end with the close the year.

The founder and director of the James Madison Program in American ideals and institutions at Princeton University, Robert George, gave the invocation. He was filling in for the Reverend Richard John Neuhaus, who was described as “otherwise occupied” – in Rome for the funeral of Pope John Paul II.

The editor of the Weekly Standard, William Kristol, read a note from his father, Irving, who was unable to attend. The note began, “Having been present at the creation of Jim Piereson as a philanthropist, I take special pleasure in witnessing, if from a distance, this dinner in his honor. It is such occasions that give an incomparable sweetness to longevity.”

William Kristol described becoming friends with Mr. Piereson at the University of Pennsylvania in 1978. Their offices were next door to each other, and the scholars became friendly as conservatives in a liberal department. Speaking of Mr. Piereson’s move to the Olin Foundation, Mr. Kristol said, “Penn’s loss is the country’s gain. It was a good trade.” He cited Mr. Piereson’s intellectual curiosity, saying he never lost interest in the ideas he was funding.

The foundation’s chairman, Eugene Williams Jr., said that John Olin had been concerned that the foundation not morph into something different than the he wished. “We all know what has happened to the Ford Foundation,” Mr. Williams said.

“Tonight we are feting Jim Piereson but fretting that he has worked himself out of a job,” said the American Enterprise Institute, president Christopher DeMuth. “We don’t know who the next John Olin will be nor whether he will be smart enough to hire someone like Jim.” He said an epitaph for the Olin Foundation might be “Organization Has Consequences” (echoing Richard Weaver’s book title “Ideas Have Consequences”). He said its lessons have been to invest in institutions, people, and big projects: “They concentrated on sustaining institutions with reliable management and proven performance, and on bankrolling individuals of singular talent such as Allan Bloom, Irving Kristol, and Heather MacDonald, and a long line of postgraduate fellows.”

The final speaker was Mr. Piereson himself, who noted, “John Olin set this foundation in motion in 1975 – a year when the prospects for the future seemed darker than at any time since the Great Depression. American power was in retreat around the world; Soviet power was on the march. Socialism, indeed, or at least some form of it, seemed the wave of the future. Our cities were ungovernable, it was said; perhaps it was true of the nation as well. Our institutions and very form of government, some said, were inadequate to the challenges of modern times. Our economy was burdened by both inflation and unemployment. Americans were told by experts that they must adjust to a declining standard of living. The American Century, as Henry Luce had called it, was over.”

“Today, thirty years later, as the foundation closes, the conventional wisdom of that period has been turned on its head. The experts were wrong about every important issue of our time. The historic events of recent decades are familiar to us all, from the fall of communism to the rise of free markets and the spread of liberty and democracy around the globe. Today, in contrast to the past, there are complaints that the United States is too powerful in the world, that the economy is too strong and efficient, that Americans are too proud and self-confident about themselves and their institutions. This is an exchange that John Olin would have gladly accepted.”

Mr. Piereson went on to say, “In some small way, perhaps, the modest foundation that [Olin] established contributed to this historic turnabout,” and it was in the world of ideas where the Olin Foundation made its mark.

He cited Robert Frost’s preference for revolutions by half or “semi-revolutions.” Mr. Piereson said what is called a conservative revolution was more a renewal – “a renewal of faith in American institutions, a deepened respect for the past, a recognition that a free and prosperous future must be built on our inherited institutions and ideals. And because it was a renewal rather than a revolution, it could draw on the varied currents of the American experience, could proceed from many directions in different fields, in different kinds of institutions, and through the efforts of people with different views.”

“Perhaps the best way to think of the John M. Olin Foundation is not as a charitable foundation, but as a source of venture capital for the conservative movement,” wrote National Review political reporter John Miller in the program booklet that evening. (He is writing a book about the foundation, tentatively titled “A Gift of Freedom.”) Mr. Miller cited the 1982 conference of law students that was the springboard for the creation of the Federalist Society; a grant that helped Allan Bloom write an article for National Review that became the basis for the best seller “The Closing of the American Mind”; support of a John M. Olin fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Dinesh D’Souza, to write “Illiberal Education”; Francis Fukuyama’s delivering his “end of history” lecture at Allan Bloom’s Olin Center in Chicago and being criticized by Samuel Huntington (known for “The Clash of Civilizations”), the long-time head of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic studies at Harvard.

Among those present at the event were Philanthropy Roundtable president, Adam Meyerson, who gave welcoming remarks; Roger Kimball and Hilton Kramer of the New Criterion; Daniel S. Peters of the Ruth & Lovett Peters Foundation; the Wall Street Journal editorial page editor, Paul Gigot; Olin senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Max Boot; William F. Buckley Jr.; Norman Podhoretz and Neal Kozodoy of Commentary; the Manhattan Institute president, Lawrence Mone; the pollster Frank Luntz; the executive director of the John Templeton Foundation, Charles Harper; the president of the Hoover Institution, John Raisian; the president of the Federalist Society, Eugene Meyer; and publisher Alfred Regnery Jr.

Looking on the crowd at the reception before the dinner, author Diane Ravitch said, “The counterculture is all here.”