Charles Krauthammer: In His Own Words

Which is fine. There’s no dishonor in falling short of the standard of the greatest columnist of our generation—a man of extraordinary moral and physical courage, of intellectual rigor and probity, with a dry wit and a heightened sense of irony.

But then it occurred to me: At least for now, why not let Charles speak about Charles? After all, he’s better at it than I am. And in the filmed Conversation I had with him three years ago, Charles opened up more than he often did about aspects of his personal background and education.

So here are a few excerpts of that conversation, which I trust you’ll find interesting. I do recommend watching, or listening to, or reading the transcript of the whole thing:

* * *

KRAUTHAMMER: I was at McGill in Montreal. And McGill was this symbol of Anglo dominance, it was an English-speaking university, it was considered the best school in the Commonwealth, outside of the home island Britain, and it was considered an affront to French Canada.

And there was a movement at the time I was at McGill to turn it into a French university to serve the working class. So it was a combination of French nationalism and essentially communism of some sort. The reason it affected me was this, there were large demonstrations, it was called McGill français, it was sort of the rubric, there were other demonstrations over other issues, but the ones that actually happened on campus were over this.

And I remember at the tender age of – I went to college at 16, so I was probably 18, and a junior – and there was a giant demonstration to liberate McGill, and at the head of it arm in arm was the most radical Communist professor at McGill, a guy called Stanley Gray, arm in arm with a guy whose name I forget, the leader of the French radical nationalist, essentially a fascist party.

Extremely anti-immigrant, they didn’t want anybody to come in because they wanted only French immigrants. They were marching arm in arm. Now, normally it takes till middle age to realize that Left and Right are essentially at the extremes, the equivalent, totalitarian, they have different words for them. You know that nationalism, extreme nationalist, extreme socialism they don’t just meet in Berlin in 1933, they can meet at McGill in 1968, or whatever that was.

So I became very acutely aware of the dangers, the hypocrisies, and sort of the extremism of the political extremes. And it cleansed me very early in my political evolution of any romanticism. I detested the extreme Left and extreme Right, and found myself somewhere in the middle. Now, McGill in the 60s was pretty radical, I got involved with student politics, and a bunch of us who were in the middle overthrew the editorship of the newspaper The McGill Daily, which had fallen into the hands of Maoists.

You have to understand Stalinism was considered reactionary, but it sounds like a joke but the paper was unreadable. So we got rid of them. I became the editor because by default nobody else really wanted to do it, and the first article I ever wrote on the day I took over the paper was called “End of the Monolith,” where I wrote the philosophy of this newspaper as of today is to pluralism. We are open to any idea. We are not bound by any one paradigm, that was the sophisticated word of the 60s.

Remember Kuhn’s book, something shifting paradigms, I can’t remember.

KRISTOL: Right.

KRAUTHAMMER: But, and I meant his ideology, and so that was – because I was a pluralist I was considered, of course, an irredeemable rightwing radical. But anyway, because of this peculiar political culture that I came out of, I was cleansed of romanticism very early on. And that’s a gift because my – you know, then I went to Oxford, studied political philosophy, and I found myself not attracted to Rousseau, repelled by that kind of philosophy. Marxism, Hegelianism, interesting, but they were repulsive as a matter of human nature and how to live humanely.

And found myself attracted to John Stuart Mill, not exactly en vogue in the 1960s.

KRISTOL: No.

KRAUTHAMMER: So I’d always been this kind of Social Democratic, bleeding heart, liberally oriented, but a believer in liberty, and that is sort of what carried me through, and eventually I went from being sort of a Great Society liberal to more a small-government conservative. That was me changing over the years.

But that is what launched me in the right path. I never, I think I wrote in my autobiographical introduction to the collection that I wrote the other year that I never had a Marxist phase. If I did it lasted a weekend, and it must have been a hell of a weekend because I don’t remember it.

KRISTOL: But that’s interesting, because it is something, so I think the American equivalent of that is really a generation older, because I’ve met people of my parents generation who sort of, they saw up close in the 30s and 40s messianic political views on the Right and the Left, and they really decided there was much more merit than conventional wisdom ascribed to Mill, Tocqueville, Raymond Aron, you know, the kind of anti-romantic practical pluralist kind of liberalism.

Now, by the time I went to college, it was sort of, that was sort of boring, and even if you were—even if you didn’t like the Left or the Right somehow that seemed less, you know, that was just taken for granted in a way, we read Mill, but—

KRAUTHAMMER: Right.

KRISTOL: But I think you’re right seeing the European alternatives up close gives you much more of an appreciation for that kind of Anglo American—

KRAUTHAMMER: Exactly, so we had sort of a delayed historical experience in Quebec. But the interesting thing is you end up with this non-romantic, non-messianic view of human nature, exactly where the Founders started.

KRISTOL: Yeah, that’s a good point.

KRAUTHAMMER: And that’s what attracted me because growing up in Quebec in the Anglo school system, the Protestant school, I learned all of colonial history. I can name all of the Prime Ministers, I can tell you about Australia, South Africa, I can tell you about Britain, of course, the Wars of the Roses, I knew every damn monarch.

I didn’t know a thing about America, that’s all self-taught, that came later when I was in college, and when I was at Oxford. But the Founding to me as a result of that, the Founding documents were enormously attractive, it wasn’t like I learned them rotely as a child, I discovered them later as an adult, and that’s exactly the kind of, you know unromantic, unsentimental view of human nature, of the weaknesses, of the way you construct outside institutions to contain, to channel what is ultimately selfishness into creating a system that would balance itself, and moderate itself.

* * *

KRISTOL: Any professors have a huge influence on you or teachers, or other writers, thinkers, either in school or in college, Oxford?

KRAUTHAMMER: It was never the hands-on professorship. It was reading Mill, and then reading Isaiah Berlin’s Four Essays on Liberty, two of which are about Mill that made me sort of understand why I was attracted to him. So it very starkly, in sentences that were a hundred words long, and Isaiah could go on and on, he was a very comma heavy guy. You were waiting to get to a period so you could breathe.

KRISTOL: That influenced your terse style?

KRAUTHAMMER: No, I think—Yeah, I write very short sentences.

KRISTOL: You do, I think it’s very effective, yeah.

KRAUTHAMMER: But I mean, that sort of fleshed it out in a modern way. And I thought, when kids come to me and say, “What should I read?” I say, “Read Berlin, and then read the original, and John Stuart Mill, and then you read the Founding documents.” And you’re well on your way.

So that was the influence.

KRISTOL: That’s interesting.

KRAUTHAMMER: In terms of professors, there was a wholly different story, but I had a professor of philosophy at McGill, who was a man called David Hartman, well known many years later for running the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, which was an attempt to mold Judaism orthodoxy and modernity at the same time, which was sort of a noble endeavor.

But he taught Maimonides, and I took his course, and became sort of a disciple. I had been raised in an Orthodox Jewish home, I studied all of the text word by word, and I was living in the—

I was living in the trees. I never got a view of the forest. And all of a sudden there’s the greatest of all Jewish philosophers, essentially an Aristotelian, so I already knew Greek philosophy, and I encounter Jewish Aristotelianism, what’s this about? And it sort of renewed my commitment to Judaism.

I had felt it small, peripheral, sectarian as all sixteen-year-old college students do. I had discovered the world, and was going to leave all of this behind, because I was too sophisticated for it. And then in my third year I took Hartman’s course in Maimonides, and I’m thinking this is pretty serious stuff.

KRISTOL: Impressive.

KRAUTHAMMER: It stands up to the Greeks, stands up to the philosophers of the age, and it gave me sort of a renewed commitment to and respect for my own tradition, which I already knew, but was ready to throw away. And I didn’t throw it away as a result of that encounter.

KRISTOL: Yeah, that’s terrific. And then you went to medical school, and I’ve noticed, I didn’t know you then that clearly shaped, I don’t know if it shaped you, or you had a sort of scientific interest, inclination, but certainly you can see that in your writing too, a kind of, sort of guided by the facts, experimental, I don’t what the right way to say it is, but a kind of –

KRAUTHAMMER: My real interest in life is physics. I mean, apart from anything I’ve ever done, if—And the reason I didn’t go to a career in physics is because, very simply I wasn’t a genius, and I knew it pretty early, and there were geniuses, I saw some, and I read some.

And I remember a friend of mine who was very smart—we were the two best science students in my high school. In my high school, everybody ended up at McGill, everybody went. There were 28 of us in the graduating class; 27 went to McGill, the other was already pregnant so that was not an issue.

I wanted to be a physicist, he did too, and one day he said, “You know, we’re not going to make it. We’re the physicists who end up testing steel for General Motors.” So I didn’t see that as my future, so I gave up. But I loved mathematics and physics, that was always my interest.

But I didn’t have it. So, I had this dual interest in science and interest in political philosophy, and I was very unable to decide. I was also young in college; I graduated at 20. So I wasn’t sort of ready to make a life choice, under my father’s influence I had taken all of the pre-med requirements, but I did that all in my freshmen year. So I didn’t take another science.

KRISTOL: Is that right?

KRAUTHAMMER: I didn’t take another science for the rest of my, I became, I switched over to political science and economics, and I never looked back. So, I applied to medical school again to please my father, and I’m from a family of doctors, and my brother became a doctor.

And you know, who knows? If other things don’t work out, I can make a living. So I got accepted, but I said no—

KRISTOL: You got accepted without taking a science course since your freshmen year? That’s impressive.

KRAUTHAMMER: Well, I did—They all accepted me—

KRISTOL: You must have remembered something for the medical boards.

KRAUTHAMMER: It was a time when they were looking for sort of quirky applicants, and I came in under the quirky quota.

They said, I was accepted to Harvard Medical School on the condition that I take—I was short, I never took a biochem course—so they said you got to take a biochem course. So in my senior year I signed up for a course, I never attended any labs, so I’m working out of 80 percent, and I studied the week before, and I got enough to get through, so I fulfilled a requirement, but that was it.

So, I applied to both, I got accepted to Oxford, I went and started political philosophy. I had a little John Stuart Mill crisis of conscience, he had one when he was 20, I had mine at 21, I thought, “What am I doing here? Abstraction. The world is happening out there.” So I decided, all of a sudden I quit, I had a three-year scholarship, I quit after one year, picked up the phone, I called Harvard Medical School, and I spoke to the registrar, this is August, at the end of my first year and said, “I’d like to accept that – the deferred.”

They said, “Well, you know, it’s impossible, except for one thing we had somebody drop out of the class, it starts on Monday, if you’re here Monday you’re in.” So I left immediately.

KRISTOL: Is that right?

KRAUTHAMMER: I took a toothbrush, I didn’t pack, I went straight to Boston, I registered for the year, I woke up the next morning, and I thought, “Oh my God, what have I done?” Because there’s no going back, you cannot, that was it.

So I was committed to this course. Now, in retrospect, I spent seven years in medicine, in retrospect it was a very good thing. But I knew from the beginning it was not for me.

KRISTOL: Is that right?

KRAUTHAMMER: But nonetheless, there are two things about it, the one you mentioned, you get a real appreciation for empirical evidence, for how to think through, you know differential diagnosis, how do you approach indeterminate knowledge? All of these things.

KRISTOL: Yeah, I was instructed the—You get a real location of the limits of what you can know, or the kind of—

KRAUTHAMMER: That’s where—

KRISTOL: This is judgment calls and—

KRAUTHAMMER: Exactly. You’re left in medicine in places where you have to make a judgment call. But you need to have, even the judgment call you have to ground it in empirical evidence.

So it influenced me, but it influenced me in a second way. I found that some of my friends who went from Harvard to journalism school to journalism hadn’t lived in the real world. Now, I didn’t intend this, and I don’t think it’s a heroic thing, but seven years in medicine, in hospitals, 24 hours a day, can toughen you up, and takes a bit of the callowness out of you. People are suffering, and they’re all over the…and they’re in every room you go into.

And you learn a little bit about tragedy, about limits, and also it cuts you down a little bit because you make mistakes, you lose patients. I mean, they die on you, or one actually killed herself, one of my patients when I was a psychiatrist, and it humbles you. And that living in the world of human pain, which is not what you intend when you go to medical school, but that’s what happens necessarily, I think, was a good thing in my later career, unintended, but nonetheless good.

* * *

KRISTOL: Anyway, so Israel, when did that become central to your interests?

KRAUTHAMMER: From the beginning of my consciousness. Growing up in the 1950s and 60s, this was the hope. And this was an—it’s hard for us to remember now. But in general culture, apart from Jewish culture, it was considered a wonderful thing. Think about how Americans celebrated the movie Exodus, came out in the early 60s I think, and how they saw Israel as a fellow democracy, sort of intrinsic support for it. It was one of the great stories.

KRISTOL: Kind of miraculous after the Holocaust.

KRAUTHAMMER: Miraculous after the Holocaust. And the reason I think that people misunderstand Israel, and see it now in colonial, imperialist terms is because it’s a unique event in human history.

The British colonization of North America, New Zealand, Australia, the Dutch in South Africa they came to places that they had never been to. That’s colonialism. You put your people in there. You takeover, you marginalize the natives if you can, you may not succeed, in South Africa, that’s colonialism. So they see the Jews arriving in what’s called Palestine, and that’s the parallel, the only one they understand.

They can’t put their heads around the fact that this is a people returning to their home. That they never gave up title to. They never gave up their longing for. It was repeated in their rituals three times a day, it wasn’t like once a year, let’s remember the homeland.

KRISTOL: Right.

KRAUTHAMMER: This is sort of part—They’re waiting for redemption, unable to redeem themselves, continual habitation, uninterrupted in the 2,000 years of exile, and what happened was other people moved into parts of the house while they were away.

So the obvious solution is you divide it, and that’s sort of what Zionism has returned to, and it was prepared to do. The Partition Plans that the British had in the 1930s were accepted by the Jews, rejected by the Arab, the Partition Plan, and the founding of Israel by the UN, 1948, the Jews accepted it, the Arabs rejected it.

They launched a war to exterminate the Jews, they failed, this is just the force of arms that allowed Israel to survive. But that’s the story, but because nobody can believe—I mean, every other people exiled in ancient times disappears, we can’t even read the Etruscan language, and Carthage was reduced, sown with salt, you don’t hear any Carthaginians are rising, saying, “You know, I’m a Carthaginian, and I want to do this and that.”

I remember a Palestinian leader saying that he was a Jesubite, these are the people who proceeded the Jews, which is a farce. There are none. The story is in history when you get exiled you disappear, you get absorbed. That’s the story throughout all of human history, including the Ten Tribes of Israel, it’s even the story of the Jews, half of them, the majority of the Jewish state, and there were two states at the time, was exiled in 586, 722 BC, and they disappeared in Assyria, were never seen.

Everybody is always looking for the Ten Tribes, because they assume if the Jews have survived, the Judean of 586, there’s still two, you know when Lewis and Clark were sent West they were sent to Benjamin Rush in Philadelphia so they could learn certain things, and among the things that Rush was supposed to instruct them—this is in Jefferson’s own hand—was the habits and the language of the ancient Israelites, thinking that the Indians could be the Ten Lost Tribes.

So, the point I want to make is nobody can understand. I think a greater miracle than the creation of Israel, which is a state succeeding a previous state 2,000 years later, which has never happened, is the revival of the Hebrew language.

KRISTOL: Yeah, it’s amazing.

KRAUTHAMMER: There’s never been a revival of a dead language. I hate to use the word, but that’s the colloquial, Latin and ancient Greek nobody speaks it. And the idea that you could recreate, I mean Barbara Tuchman, the historian, The Guns of August historian, said Israel, “The Jews are the only people in Israel who live in the same land, worship the same god, and speak the same language as they did 3,000 years ago. Nobody else can say that.”

And that, you know, the Chinese or Japanese you can’t. This is the most amazing phenomena. And that’s why when people want to, you know excoriated for its depredations they have to go to the fundamental point, it’s a return, and that’s what the Jews have been longing for, and they were able, in a miracle to pull it off against tremendous odds.

KRISTOL: And for you, so that was from the beginning, it wasn’t like the ’67 War woke you up or something like that?

KRAUTHAMMER: No, I mean all of us would put our little coins in the box at school, and once a year we’d get a book, a coloring book, and you’d get little stamps, and the stamp, you’d buy a stamp for a half a dollar or twenty-five cents, it was pre-inflation, and you’d put a stamp in your picture book that was trees, and when all the trees had leaves, the leaves you stuck in with your little stamps, you’d send it off to Israel, they’d plant a tree in your name.

There must be a Krauthammer trees out there, I haven’t seen one of them.

KRISTOL: Yeah, right.

KRAUTHAMMER: It was sort of part of our lives. And from my parents, who had come from Europe, survived the war, they were not in the Holocaust, and the families did rather well, there are very few losses, unlike most families. It’s not driven by Holocaust, it was just, my father was a Zionist before the Second World War.

KRISTOL: Oh that’s interesting.

KRAUTHAMMER: When the Second World War broke out, September 1, 1939 my father was attending a Zionist convention in Geneva. Some people say it’s a compensation for the Holocaust, they know nothing, it began in the 1850s, it was always there, but as a political movement, a revival of Hebrew, a revival of nationalism.

And then going back to the land. It’s at least a hundred years before. So, it was always in my family. My father was a religious Zionist. It was always part of our lives, and it was always considered a wonder, and a blessing to be living in a time, you know there were a hundred generations in-between, where there was a Jewish state.

KRISTOL: I know, I was surprised—It’s been so important to your life, both Judaism and Israel that I pickup Politico, or I go online, and I read, I think it was Politico, was it? It was just a few years ago, and there was a big headline, “Krauthammer: ”—

KRAUTHAMMER: I don’t believe in God.

KRISTOL: “I don’t believe in God.” Right.

KRAUTHAMMER: Yeah.

KRISTOL: Wow, that was fairly bold.

KRAUTHAMMER: It was fairly bold, a lot of stuff on Twitter, “Krauthammer is an atheist, I knew it.” “That explains a lot, you know.”

KRISTOL: Right.

KRAUTHAMMER: Mondale, all these things he’s done in the past. Look, I called the guy and said, “You can’t really put a headline like that because you know what the second half of the sentence was.” The sentence, I said—He asked, “Are you religious?” I said, “I don’t believe in God, but I fear Him greatly.”

I said, “Without the other half, you really haven’t sort of given the essence is that I’m sort of, I’m sort of uncertain.” I believe in uncertainty, and surely have an uncertainty about theism. It would be like saying, “Churchill: Democracy is the worst form of government.” Closed quote. You got to add, “except for all the others.”

KRISTOL: Right.

KRAUTHAMMER: So, the point I was trying to make is I’m not, I’m not a sort of traditional theist. I can’t say I believe in even the God of Judaism, or Christianity, Islam, sort of the—I’m not sure I can believe in a God of history, who is really interested in our little lives, and who listens to us.

But I’m not—I mean, the one theology that I reject more than any other—I’d be willing to accept a lot of others—is atheism. Especially the village atheist who is so sure there is nothing that he wants to prosthelytize, humiliate, and unfaith people of faith. That I find appalling.

For two reasons, intellectually, I think it’s sort of the most illogical of all because there’s so much in the real world, in the physical world that we cannot explain, and can never explain, and we simply have to confess that the human beings they are inexplicable. I’m willing to call them transcendent, I have no idea what they are, but I fear it, in other words.

People who say the universe has always existed. What does that mean? It violates every principle of our own logic causation. You look at the atoms of the table, the seats we’re sitting on right now, well predate all of history, they go back to the big bang, so you’re going to tell me that this sort of spontaneously happens?

And they say, “Well, it’s the laws of quantum mechanics, they imply that this has to happen.” Well, where do these laws—You always go back to the origin question? Where do the laws come from? The idea—So the feeling I have is I think it was Newton who once described himself as, I feel like a snail on the shores of an ocean, being charged with figuring out the tides.

A snail is not going to be able to figure it out. We clearly are not capable, no matter what we say or do, and how much wordplay we engage in can penetrate the mysteries. Einstein, of course, was the sort of, the great propagator if you want, or the great philosopher of this view of the deity, or of transcendence, or metaphysics. You know he said when he rejected quantum mechanics, he said, “God does not play dice with the universe.”

What he meant, he didn’t mean it was the God with the beard, who hands out commandments, he meant there’s a beauty, there’s an inherent logic, and a simplicity which is what always impressed him which sort of made him tremble to the universe, that is so impressive, and that tells you that there, I don’t know if it’s a being, it doesn’t have to be a being.

But simply to say this is where our logic stops, and where you have to have respect for what’s beyond it, so that’s, I mean that’s a long way of saying, “I don’t know.” It’s sort of a complicated agnosticism.

But the other thing that goes with it is a deep respect for people of faith. My father was, and perhaps it’s because of filial devotion that I’ve just retained that. It’s not an act of will, I just always respected the way he lived his life, and the beauty of it.

Now, it turns out to me that faith is a gift, and I don’t have it. And I don’t think you can will it.

KRISTOL: Right.

KRAUTHAMMER: I’d sort of like to will it, it would make things a little more clear for me, but you can’t will it, it either comes to you or it doesn’t. So I don’t have it, but it doesn’t mean, and the other humbling thing is that some of the greatest minds in history, I think overwhelmingly were theists of one kind or another.

Who am I to say that Thomas Aquinas and Augustine, and Newton who was a believer were fools, like atheists do? So I have respect for them, in a sense I feel a certain absence in my life by not having it.

But I do find it hard to believe in a God of history, or a God who takes a personal interest in one. I respect people who do, and I’m waiting for the call. My line is always open, or maybe I’m thinking of it the wrong way. I should call Him? But I get a busy, I don’t know what to –

He’s busy.

KRISTOL: He’s busy, but I’ll say if He wants to call—

KRAUTHAMMER: He knows where I live.

KRISTOL: Exactly, He knows where you live.

KRAUTHAMMER: But there’s a tradition, this sort of Jewish agnosticism. It’s called Yiddishism, or Yiddish Guide, and you find it, these great Jewish scholars, especially in the modern times around the YIVO, the Yiddish Institute.

KRISTOL: Yes.

KRAUTHAMMER: These are people deeply committed to the tradition. The other thing is I feel an obligation to Jewish history, to carry it on, to respect the text, to study them, to transmit them. So in that sense I’m deeply Jewish, without the belief. It’s not an easy thing to carry off, but it’s very engrained in me because of my history.

But I was, it was a review of a concert, a Jewish concert, a cantorial concert where they quote is one of these Yiddishists, who was famously atheistic, but very involved in the tradition, great scholar. And he said, “Great is the God of my unbelief. I shall care for Him forever.”

And that was, the second half is a flip.

KRISTOL: Yeah, that’s fantastic.

KRAUTHAMMER: On a phrase from Psalms, where God looks after us, and he says, “My job—” as sort of an atheistic Yiddishist, “is to look after God.”

KRISTOL: Of the tradition.

KRAUTHAMMER: To look after the tradition, the legacy.

KRISTOL: Yeah.

KRAUTHAMMER: The values, the ethics, you know the academies where they have real debates, and they’re willing to tolerate uncertainty. My job, you know it’s sort of a kind of arrogance, but it’s a huge, it’s also deeply humble.

KRISTOL: Right.

KRAUTHAMMER: The tradition is larger than me, and larger than my particular thoughts about God, and I should respect that, and I’m going to devote my life to keeping that tradition going.

* * *

I do intend to write at more length about Charles. But I suspect these excerpts convey more of his character and personality than anything I have to offer.