I miss Charles. I’ve missed him for the past 10 months, ever since his operation. As he wrote in his farewell letter, “That operation was thought to have been a success, but it caused a cascade of secondary complications.” Charles fought those complications in the hospital. This meant that he and his wife Robbie and son Daniel, who were constantly at his side, had to step back not just from public life but from private socializing with friends.
So we missed him over these months. But we looked forward to seeing him again. As Charles put it in his note, “It was a long and hard fight with many setbacks, but I was steadily, if slowly, overcoming each obstacle along the way and gradually making my way back to health.” That spare sentence does not begin to capture the amazing courage and determination with which Charles conducted a fierce and prolonged struggle to overcome the obstacles in his way.
It seemed until recently that Charles would once again prevail. But it was not to be. The cancer returned. The fight was over.
So Charles Krauthammer is gone. It is hard to believe. When more time has gone by, we will miss him, I suppose, somewhat less acutely. We will, I imagine, be more grateful for his life and less bereft over his death. But we will still miss him.
I originally intended in this piece to write a bit about Charles’s thinking on America and Israel. Charles’s hardheaded realism was in many ways like that of our Founders—and that of the Zionist founders as well. And so I planned to show how deep and compelling was his understanding and defense of the two exceptional nations that he loved.
But as I began to write, what I had to say about these topics struck me as pretty obvious, and in any case well said by others. More important, what overwhelmed me as I sat down to write was my appreciation of Charles the man. Charles was, to be sure, a major public figure who contributed a great deal to his country and his people—as much perhaps as any writer of his generation. But it is Charles the man who was unique.
Capturing his remarkable qualities of character and soul far exceeds my descriptive abilities. The good news is that those qualities come though in his own writing. When you read through the essays collected in the volume Things That Matter—particularly the pieces in the first section (“Personal”), but also many of the political and historical essays—you can’t help but see, if a bit obliquely and indirectly, Charles the man. If you read more widely among Charles’s writing, or if you watch or listen to longer interviews with him, you see even more. What you see strikes any sensible person as extraordinarily impressive.
One impressive thing about Charles was that he knew Casablanca virtually by heart. If I were to think of Charles in the context of Casablanca, I’d think of him as Rick Blaine on the surface but with more than a touch of Victor Laszlo underneath. (I guess this description might apply to Rick Blaine himself, which may be why Charles so loved the movie.) In any case, the fact is that beneath Charles’s hardheaded, almost clinical realism was an appreciation for a kind of nobility. A nobility Charles demonstrated in an understated way.
Charles had also, of course, an appreciation for the more mundane pleasures of life. He loved baseball. The single most moving tribute to Charles was, I thought, not any of the intelligent and eloquent essays written about him, but the moment of silence in his memory at Nationals Park just a few hours after his death. The baseball players with caps over their hearts, the fans in the stands standing in silence, the photo of Charles on the scoreboard in the stadium he so enjoyed frequenting . . . that was something else.
And just as one is moved by Lou Gehrig saying at Yankee Stadium on July 4, 1939, that he considered himself “the luckiest man on the face of the earth,” so Charles’s final paragraph in his farewell letter will speak to us as long as we respect personal courage and appreciate human excellence: “I leave this life with no regrets. It was a wonderful life—full and complete with the great loves and great endeavors that make it worth living. I am sad to leave, but I leave with the knowledge that I lived the life that I intended.”
Charles Krauthammer lived the life he intended. It was a courageous life, a loving life, a fulfilling life, an American life . . . and a Jewish life.
I happen to have read something recently about Marc Bloch, the great French historian and hero of the French Resistance, killed by the Gestapo in 1944. Bloch wrote a testament a few years before, asking that at his funeral a friend would read these words: “I have not requested that the Hebrew prayers be recited over my grave, even though their rhythm has accompanied so many of my ancestors, as well as my father himself, to their final resting place. . . . As one much greater than I requested, I would readily have on my tombstone no other motto than these simple words: Dilexit veritatem [he loved the truth].”
Charles Krauthammer loved the truth. Indeed, in his final letter he wrote, “I believe that the pursuit of truth and right ideas through honest debate and rigorous argument is a noble undertaking.” But when, before he underwent surgery last August, he left instructions for his funeral in the event the operation was not successful, he requested that it be a simple and traditional Jewish service. And so, in accord with his intention, the Hebrew prayers were recited in synagogue and over his final resting place.
