On August 10, 1996, just one day before the Republican National Convention, several hundred of the country's most conservative activists and donors met secretly at a resort on Southern California's Coronado Island. It was the same spot where, nearly four decades earlier, Marilyn Monroe had filmed Some Like It Hot--a coincidence probably lost on this crowd, members of the Council for National Policy who were fleeing temptation. Only the purest of the movement had gathered at Coronado: men like Oliver North, Pat Robertson, and Larry Pratt (whom the press had recently drummed into exile for his alleged ties to white supremacists). In the past, the group's clandestine revival meetings had spawned liberal warnings of a right-wing conspiracy.

But this morning, the council would plot against its own internal enemies: GOP apostates. And the chief conspirator was Paul Weyrich, the man who founded the Heritage Foundation, orchestrated the party's alliance with evangelical Christians, and, more than any other figure, organized the right inside the Beltway. "I will tell you that this is a bitter turn for me," Weyrich confessed. "I have spent thirty years of my life working in Washington, working on the premise that if we simply got our people into leadership that it would make a difference.... And yet we are getting the same policies from them that we got from their [Rockefeller] Republican predecessors." It was time, Weyrich concluded, to contemplate the once unconscionable: another revolution, this time against "our people."

Neither The New York Times nor The Washington Post covered or even noticed the meeting. But within weeks, the internal purges had begun; even Newt Gingrich, the man who had brought Republicans to power, was no longer safe from attacks on his right. The fight resembled that of the old left, with Leninists killing Stalinists killing Maoists; or, in this case, Friedmanites killing Buckleyites killing Burkeans.

What Weyrich was proposing was something new in American politics: a Republican politburo. He used his tottering conservative TV network, National Empowerment Television--which he dubbed "the means of communications"--to "denounce" party members who compromised on even the most obscure GOP commandments. He accused Senate Judiciary Chairman Orrin Hatch, a man he had once touted for president, of having "psychological problems." After Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott supported the chemical weapons treaty, Weyrich released an open letter to the public, declaring: "I can't have friends who sell out their country."

If Weyrich were the only conservative purging Republicans, he would be no more than an interesting character--a minor, albeit compelling, player in the history of the conservative movement. Yet he has become, in many respects, a case study of the conservative mind--a metaphor for the right's deep-seated inability to accept the compromising nature of power. Since January, conservatives have orchestrated a coup against Gingrich, sabotaged William Weld's nomination as ambassador to Mexico, and watched as some of its most faithful, including Ronald Reagan's son, defected from the party. The conservative Weekly Standard, which proclaimed a "Permanent Offense" in its September 1995 debut, now frets "Is There a Worldwide Conservative Crack-up?" What had taken the left nearly a century, the right has managed in less than three years: self-immolation.

To most of the outside world, of course, this is the moment of conservative conquest. In the last three years, Republicans have reformed welfare, cut taxes, balanced the budget, passed a line-item veto, and banned gay marriage--all despite a razor-thin majority in Congress and a Democrat in the White House. These are not piecemeal compromises: they are major legislative triumphs all but unthinkable just four years ago. The trouble is that after thirty years of attacking government from the outside, the right cannot seem to maintain its stability on the inside. The habits of suspicion, pessimism, and antagonism run too deep. And nowhere do they run deeper than in Paul Weyrich--a man trying his hardest to destroy the very Republican establishment he spent his life building.

When Weyrich arrived in Washington, D.C., in 1967, with his bright pink sport coat and Barry Goldwater glasses, there were only a handful of conservative institutions. The politics of the radical right was still, as Daniel Bell had noted a decade earlier, the politics of frustration--"the sour impotence of those who find themselves unable to understand, let alone command, the complex mass society that is the polity today." Inside the Capitol, where the 24-year-old Weyrich worked as press secretary to Colorado Senator Gordon Allott, he was a minority within a minority, a right-winger among Rockefeller Republicans; outside the Capitol, he was heckled by anti-Vietnam demonstrators as he entered the building. "How can you judge me?" he once screamed back. "You don't even know me!" But the taunts continued. For conservatives, recalls William F. Buckley, founder of National Review, "Washington was an utterly inhospitable place."

Yet even then, the city tempted Weyrich. "All of a sudden lobbyists were telling me how smart and wonderful I was," he told me during one of several interviews over the last three months. "No one had ever been very nice to me before. Back home [in Wisconsin] they'd cross the street before they'd talk to me."

To see how his hero had resisted similar seductions. Weyrich reread Whittaker Chambers's Witness and prayed for strength. Then, one day in 1969, after sneaking into a liberal coalition meeting, he had an epiphany. Before him were a dozen congressional aides, a think-tank policy wonk, and a cadre of Democratic interest groups, all coordinating sympathetic op-eds, studies, and demonstrations in an effort to push through a housing bill. Suddenly Weyrich understood not only his enemy but his life calling: to replace the liberal establishment with a conservative one that would guide the movement, at last, out of the wilderness.

With the help of a Burkean nerd named George F. Will and a former University of Mississippi cheerleader named Trent Lott, Weyrich soon founded his first cloister of true believers: the Conservative Lunch Club of Capitol Hill. While his colleagues "sold out" over price and wage controls, in 1973 Weyrich and his growing band unleashed the House Republican Study Committee and its Senate counterpart, the Steering Committee. With his hair greased back a la Joe McCarthy, he warned his enemies: "We are different from previous generations of conservatives. We are no longer working to preserve the status quo. We are radicals, working to overturn the present power structure of the country."

If anything embodied that power structure, it was the Brookings Institution, a liberal think-tank that for decades had stoked the New Deal with ideas. In 1970, Nixon speechwriter Patrick Buchanan sent a memo to the president, pleading for "a conservative counterpart to Brookings." Three years later, Weyrich answered his plea: with a $250,000 gift from Joseph Coors of the brewing empire, Weyrich and his friend Ed Feulner founded the Heritage Foundation. In his short stint as president, Weyrich was given to storming around the office, his normally pale skin blood-red, his pants pulled high above his belly, lecturing those around him on how to be a good conservative.

As the fledgling think-tank became more influential, inevitably blurring with the establishment, Weyrich grew increasingly uncomfortable with his creation. Less than a year after what many consider his greatest accomplishment, he resigned to establish the Free Congress Foundation and its PAC, the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress. Together, they served as a twenty-four-hour, right-wing fueling station: funding candidates, churning out newsletters, and holding conferences. "It may not be with bullets," he told Richard Viguerie, the right's kingpin of direct mail, "but it is a war nevertheless. It is a war of ideology, it's a war of ideas, it's a war about our way of life."

Soon there were more enemies: hippies, aristocrats, communists, Washington doyennes, Ralph Nader, Vatican II, the IRS, the Warren Court, the women's movement, Ted Kennedy, Harvard University, and The New York Times. And there were traitors, too: Nixon and Kissinger and Rockefeller. Even Buckley was suspect. A college dropout whose father tended a boiler at night, Weyrich sneered at the effete, erudite godfather of conservatism.

By 1978, Weyrich's PAC helped sweep into Congress a new, radical breed of populist conservatives. The most notable, it turned out, was a brash, young man from Georgia named Newt Gingrich whom Weyrich had trained years earlier at a campaign seminar in Milwaukee.

Finally, on the verge of realizing his right-wing utopia, Weyrich harvested what his friend Morton Blackwell termed "the greatest track of virgin timber on the political landscape": evangelicals. "Out there is what one might call a moral majority," he told Jerry Falwell in Lynchburg, Pennsylvania, in 1979. "That's it," Falwell exclaimed. "That's the name of the organization." Weyrich, who had converted from Roman Catholicism to the Eastern Orthodox church after Vatican II, did more than coin the name; with a handful of activists, he engineered the alliance between the Republican Party and the growing number of evangelicals angry over abortion rights and federal intrusion in parochial schools. Less than a year later, Ronald Reagan walked into the White House.

By 1981, while his friends were still basking in their newfound power, Weyrich began to experience sudden bouts of pessimism and paranoia--early symptoms of the nervous breakdown that afflicts conservatives today. One hour Weyrich would enter the Republican White House to strategize, the next he would flee outside to condemn its policies. All around him, he complained to the editors of the Heritage Foundation's Policy Review, his friends had gotten "high-paying jobs and expensive mortgages, and [begun] to be part of the problem."