Washington is a town of proudly practical men and women of action, and
sometimes the action gets severed from thought.
Charles was a reflective person
in a not very reflective town.
I'm not suffering from any derangement syndrome
having to do with the Beltway.
I'm just trapped, unfortunately, in reality.
And all of us are. And in the end, reality wins.
Charles with a thinker. He was deep.
He had the greatest of all temperaments for a
columnist, which was he was a person of complete intellectual integrity.
I got off the the Trump train on the day he announced for the presidency. I heard him
say Mexican rapists, and I went ballistic.
But I took the view that when he was sworn in,
if you love your country, you got to hope it succeeds. And success means that the president succeeds.
I was publisher of The Washington Post in 1984,
and I used to have breakfast every Thursday morning
with Meg Greenfield, a remarkable person who was who
was the editorial page editor of The Washington Post
for 25 years or so.
And Meg was always looking for young people with
strong political opinions on both sides who could write.
It was Meg who found George Will as a columnist.
I think I first met Charles in the early 80s, maybe 1984.
He wrote a cover story for the New Republic about me,
calling me the best eighteenth-century mind in America
or something of the sort.
And I invited Charles to lunch at a little fish restaurant on upper Connecticut Avenue and was thunderstruck
when he came in in his motorized wheelchair because I
had no inkling, he never haven given anyone an inkling, that he was a paraplegic.
So Meg started talking to me in 1984 about Charles Krauthammer and said that she thought what
he'd been writing in the New Republic was amazing.
Back then, there weren't that many weekly columnists. The syndications generally
told you you had to write twice a week.
Charles said, "Well I think really having one idea a week is the most you can expect of any columnist."
And he proved them wrong.
Hundreds of newspapers did subscribe to Charles.
After a while, I think people actually took for granted what Charles did.
At age 22, Charles returned from Oxford
to go to Harvard Medical School.
He had a diving accident.
When taken to the hospital
immediately, he left behind at the swimming pool two books.
One was on spinal cords and the other was a novel by André Malraux, "Man's Fate."
Suddenly this brilliant young man was faced with something life shattering.
He could no longer use his legs, he could no longer use his hands as he had before.
Charles with the help of good friends at Harvard Medical School was able to complete his studies.
No small achievement laying on your stomach for months on end.
It is a testimony to how smart he was but above all how strong he was.
He changed his life expectations several
times, first becoming a psychiatrist, then becoming
somebody involved in politics and in a political campaign.
And then of all things, becoming a writer and such a great one.
He had to learn how to form his thoughts and then how to get them down just as he wanted.
I guess as editor, I knew him often through the eyes of the copy desk,
so that vision of Charles was a little bit scary.
He really didn't like having his copy changed and he cared about every word and he cared
about his headlines.
It's hard to overstate the impact of Charles's column over the years.
He made the case for a lot of the policies he favored and a lot of the issues he cared about much more cogently
and much more strongly than the people, than the policy makers arguing for the same policies.
Charles was a neoconservative. A leading neoconservative.
Much more confident and ambitious than I was
about America's efforts to spread democracy and freedom around the world.
And Charles was always a good strong writer but he made his reputation off of
Barack Obama.
When Obama was reelected, Charles said, "Oh great, I got another good four years to go."
He didn't just criticize Obama, he did it with a flare.
And I would have to say, you know that was a good point, Charles, you scored well.
I don't agree with it, but that was a hell of a good point you just made.
And he'd have that little gleem in his eye.
What people do not know about Charles,
partly because he had this kind of sober mean, is that he was very amusing and amusable.
I'm Charles Krauthammer responding to my mail. Some of it very nice. Some of it very not nice.
This is Louise Butler: "Krauthammer continues to prove
that smart is the new sexy." Now this is the kind of mail I like.
Charles loved his family and doted on his son, Danny Krauthammer, who
made him and Robyn just impossibly happy from the beginning.
Charles was always glad to see people, always posed certain impossible challenges. I would be excited
about some biography I'd read, and Charles would hand me a book on quantum physics.
So many of our conversations over the years were about baseball.
Charles and I mostly talked about baseball. You get your fill of talking about politics.
When I heard he was ill was the first time he was, his column disappeared.
He went in for surgery 10 months ago. In his usual understated way, he said to me,
"Wouldn't be that big a deal for a lot of people, but I'm not a good surgical candidate."
But it hit me so hard when he disclosed
the situation.
This was this was somebody too special to lose.
Reading back through some of his columns and his book, I came across this wonderful thing he wrote about
the Voyager 1 and 2 that we sent out, and he said,
"You know, what did we pick and try to show alien life
that there was intelligent life on Earth?"
We could have picked Bach, we could have picked all kinds of things. What did we pick?
The speeches of a U.N. secretary-general who, as Charles said, turned out to be a Nazi.
He said it makes you want to think send out Voyager 3, you know, recall previous message.
And I started thinking, well we ought to just
send one out with some of Charles's columns, and that would show
that there's intelligent life on Earth.
So he's left us with a lot of great columns
that we can enjoy.
I feel like the Friday page will always be missing something.