The Glamour of Good: Kate O’Beirne

W.B. Yeats’s “Beautiful Lofty Things” – a posthumous love letter of sorts to some outsized figures who shaped the poet’s life – ends with wistful longing for “All the Olympians, a thing never known again.” With those eight words, the bard summons a haunting constant of our existence: the knowledge that some human lives are so colossal and rich that they impoverish the whole earth upon their leaving it.

Kate O’Beirne, who died this week and whose funeral was yesterday at the Arlington Diocese’s St. Thomas More Cathedral, was just such a visitor from the Pantheon. She was a massive one-woman media presence, variously, the Washington editor of National Review; a deputy assistant secretary in the Reagan administration; a daunting conservative presence on the CNN show “Capital Gang”; author of a popular column called “Bread and Circuses,” also for National Review; a vice-president of the Heritage Foundation; and president of National Review Institute.