David A. Keene, a conservative activist who advised presidential candidates and led two of the most influential right-wing groups in the country, the American Conservative Union and the National Rifle Association, died on March 8 in Baltimore. He was 80.
His death, in a hospital, was from pancreatic cancer, his wife, Donna Wiesner Keene, said.
In a five-decade career in politics, Mr. Keene was never a household name. But he had the ear of Republican presidential hopefuls from Ronald Reagan to Mitt Romney, and the grass roots groups he led, including the conservative union — sponsor of the yearly Conservative Political Action Conference, known as CPAC — helped push the party’s politics further rightward.
In recent years, as an opinion editor and columnist for the conservative newspaper The Washington Times, Mr. Keene generally supported President Trump and defended his second-term appointees, including Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, from criticism that they were unqualified. In December 2024, he wrote that Mr. Patel was “the one man who might be able to investigate how the once-vaunted F.B.I. has been weaponized.”
Mr. Keene had a precocious start in the conservative movement in the 1960s as the national chairman of Young Americans for Freedom, a youth organization inspired by William F. Buckley Jr., the oracle of National Review magazine.
That position earned the 23-year-old Mr. Keene an invitation to the White House in the late ’60s to meet President Richard M. Nixon.
“Unbeknownst to me,” Mr. Keene recalled many years later on a podcast hosted by former Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana, “there had been a big fight about whether some right-wing nut” — that is, Mr. Keene — “should be allowed to meet with the president.”
The Oval Office meeting led to a job as political assistant to Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, who resigned in 1973 after admitting that he had evaded taxes.
Mr. Keene went on to work as an organizer in the South for Reagan’s insurgent challenge to President Gerald R. Ford — who, in Mr. Keene’s view, was not a true conservative — for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination. Mr. Keene later advised the presidential campaigns of George H.W. Bush, in 1980; Bob Dole, in 1988 and 1996; and Mitt Romney, in 2012.
He was chairman of the American Conservative Union, founded in the mid-1960s by Mr. Buckley and others, for nearly three decades, from 1982 to 2011. He expanded CPAC from a gathering of a few hundred to a jamboree of more than 10,000 right-wing activists.
It became a must-attend event for Republican presidential contenders, who offered stemwinder speeches denouncing taxes, big government, abortion, socialism and Democrats. In 2011, Mr. Trump, who was then a real estate developer and reality TV star, addressed the conference in his first big political speech, teasing a presidential run that he made good on four years later.
The Wisconsin-bred Mr. Keene, a raconteur who loved to gab about politics, fly fishing, hunting and more politics, including with liberal acquaintances, was known for his affability even when taking on highly contentious issues, such as gun rights.
His brand of conservatism leaned toward libertarianism, which meant he sometimes made common cause with groups that were anathema to others on the right. He joined with the American Civil Liberties Union to oppose parts of the Patriot Act, the law that expanded government surveillance of Americans after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
In his last years overseeing CPAC, Mr. Keene welcomed a group of gay Republicans, outraging opponents of same-sex marriage and homosexuality. The Heritage Foundation and Liberty University, founded by the televangelist Jerry Falwell, boycotted the event.
His outreach a bit beyond the fold was of a piece with a bipartisan poker game he hosted for more than a decade with Ken Bode, a PBS moderator and former aide to Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota, the Democratic presidential candidate in 1972. The rules required equal numbers of Republican and Democratic players (and even the token journalist).
“David was really unusual,” Richard Viguerie, a conservative direct-mail pioneer, said in an interview. “He probably had more friends in various parts of the political arena than anyone else other than Bill Buckley.”
In another strange-bedfellows partnership, Mr. Keene advocated alongside liberal groups for prison reforms, including ending mandatory sentencing and expanding inmates’ rights to file lawsuits.
He acknowledged that his interest in the topic stemmed from his experience with his son David M. Keene, who served 10 years in prison after a 2002 road rage incident in which he fired a pistol at another driver.
The elder Mr. Keene felt the sentence was too long, but after his son’s release — which came during Mr. Keene’s stint as president of the N.R.A., from 2011 to 2013 — he told The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that “there should be consequences” in such a case.
“That should tell people where we stand on punishing firearms crimes,” he added.
Mr. Keene’s leadership of the N.R.A., which had grown increasingly militant in opposing gun restrictions, coincided with the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, in which 20 children and six adults were murdered. As President Barack Obama called for “meaningful action” to strengthen gun laws, Mr. Keene appeared with the N.R.A.’s executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre, who blamed video games and the news media — not firearms — for school massacres and urged arming adults in schools.
In the biography section of his website, Mr. Keene wrote that he “worked tirelessly to keep the U.S. from adopting Obama gun control legislation in 2013.”
In 2021, he fell for a stunt in which he was asked to give a speech defending gun rights at a high school graduation in Las Vegas. He spoke to 3,044 empty chairs — he was videotaped at what he was told was a rehearsal — but those chairs represented the number of students nationwide who would have graduated that year had they not died from gun violence. The speech was turned into an anti-gun video, in part by the parents of a victim of the shooting at a high school in Parkland, Fla., in 2018.
David Arthur Keene was born on May 20, 1945, in Rockford, Ill. and grew up in Fort Atkinson, Wis., the middle of five sons of Dorothy (Trenholm) and Arthur W. Keene Jr. His father was a machinist and union organizer and later the owner of a tavern, Keene’s Tap. His mother served as president of the women’s auxiliary of the United Auto Workers.
His first brush with politics was handing out literature for John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign. He became a conservative in high school when a librarian recommended a book by Friedrich Hayek, the Austrian economist who opposed government intervention in markets.
At the University of Wisconsin, Mr. Keene majored in political science and founded a chapter of Young Americans for Freedom, becoming its national chairman while studying at the University of Wisconsin Law School. He received his law degree in 1970, a year after he ran unsuccessfully for the State Senate — his only foray as a candidate himself.
His marriages to Karlyn Herbolsheimer and Diana Hubbard ended in divorce. He married Ms. Wiesner Keene, who held jobs in the Reagan and both Bush administrations, in 2004.
Besides his wife and his son David, Mr. Keene is survived by four other children from his second marriage, Tracey Wilson, Kerry Bankert, Elisabeth Keeton and Taylor Keene; his brothers Charles and James; 10 grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. He lived outside Washington in suburban Maryland.
Mr. Keene became opinion editor of The Washington Times and then a columnist there after leaving the N.R.A. in 2013. In his writings, in the age of Trump, he aimed broadsides at liberal targets and sought to keep center-right Republicans from wavering from the party line.
But he also bemoaned the fact that the conservative movement had become hospitable, in his opinion, to conspiracy theorists, racists and “lunatics.” Writing about the CPAC gathering in 2024, he noted that the alt-right influencer Jack Posobiec, in speaking to the group, called for the overthrow of democracy as the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon clenched a fist and muttered, “Amen.”
“I wondered, listening to this nonsense,” Mr. Keene wrote, “how it has come to this.”
Trip Gabriel is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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