A life well lived need not follow a single storyline. Lew Lehrman’s life has been well lived in many fields of endeavor, as he acknowledges by entitling his memoir The Sum of It All. 

It’s a title of many meanings. Lehrman is consumed with sums, both in business and in advocating balanced budgets and sound money. Yet, he takes his inspiration from Winston Churchill’s view of the primacy of history. As Lehrman writes, “whatever the merits of science and religion—though we justly revere the arts and humanities—history is the sum of it all.” 

There is much to summarize in Lehrman’s 86 years. He has lived four distinct and consequential public lives. He co-founded the Rite Aid drug store chain. Since the 1970s, he has joined the lists of policy debates as a champion and friend for a who’s who of conservative, free market, and pro-life institutions. He ran for governor of New York against Mario Cuomo in 1982, losing narrowly. As a historian, he’s written volumes on Churchill and Abraham Lincoln, championed the legacy of French economist Jacques