Jameson Campaigne Jr. was born in Oklahoma City and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana. The namesake of the conservative editor of the Indianapolis Star, Campaigne was a “cradle conservative,” making connections growing up with Henry Regnery, M. Stanton Evans and Don Lipsett.

He attended Williams College, and graduated in 1962 with a degree in philosophy. At Williams he helped found an conservative club, affiliated with the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which was active inviting speakers to campus like William F. Buckley Jr. and distributing conservative reading lists to students that challenged the views of liberal professors. He was a founding member of Young Americans for Freedom and served on the YAF national board from 1963-1975, the longest tenure of any board member. He was managing editor of Henry Regnery Publishing from 1962-1964, then joined the Barry Goldwater presidential campaign in Washington, D.C. In the fall of 1965, he and a partner took control of Calumet Newspapers, a south-side Chicago newspaper chain. In 1973 he joined Open Court Publishing Company as manager of their scholarly book division. In 1976, he formed his own publishing company, Green Hill Publishers (now Jameson Books).

A founding member of the Philadelphia Society, which he has served as a trustee, and a board member and secretary of the American Conservative Union since 1973, Campaigne is a life-long conservative activist. He has served on the four-person steering committee that elected Phil Crane to Congress in 1969, and later, after working in the Reagan campaigns of 1968 and 1976, on the 1980 Illinois Reagan for President campaign board.

An idea broker and activist, Campaigne has published over a hundred books under his own companies and at Open Court and Regnery that would not otherwise have reached an audience.