Like many longtime readers of Charles Krauthammer, I was heartbroken to see his farewell column in the Washington Post in June. I was fortunate enough to spend two years as his research assistant, and since then I have relied upon his writings to make sense of the world.
After Charles’s passing, a group of his former research assistants came together to reminisce and compare notes about our experiences working for him. Knowing how he was revered by his readers, we wanted to share our observations of his writing process. As New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote, there was “no greater master of the form.” While we will never read another new column from Charles, our hope is that others might get a sense of how he worked and from that understand how he might approach an issue.
As any writer knows, it is not always easy to come up with an idea. Charles, who filed a weekly column for more than 30 years, was no exception. Sometimes he knew in advance exactly what he would write; other times, he would discard a hard-written and time-consuming column at the last moment so he could write a new one, just hours before deadline.
Most of the time, however, things were somewhere in the middle. He would think over an issue until he felt he had something to say, he would gather research, and he would create an outline. Mike Watson, his last research assistant, observed that he would go where his writing took him. “He would try to have two ideas in his outline so that he could pick the one that he found the most interesting as he edited down from the initial draft.”
When thinking about the column, it also helped him to picture his audience. “Charles said he often imagined he was at a dinner party—in a friendly audience, but mixed with those sympathetic and skeptical of his position,” according to Hillel Ofek, his assistant from 2007-08. In reading his columns, that tone of respectful argumentation is evident throughout. “The style is almost conversational (‘Why, you ask . . . ’),” said Peter NeCastro (2011‑12), “but never pompous.” Beyond that, he “wrote to make you see,” said Borden Flanagan (1997-99), “the crux of an issue, the most important levers of power at work in a situation, the salient ground in human nature of these.”
To that end, columns would frequently have their origins in a fact or quotation that was hiding in plain sight. “He homed in on minute details that revealed a greater principle hiding behind them or that gave his arguments more color,” Watson said. Jeffrey Bloom (1993-94) seconded that observation: “He was a master at finding a quote buried deep in a New York Times or Washington Post story and building a column from it.”
Any editor who worked with Charles knew that he had not truly finished fine-tuning his piece until the last second before the deadline passed. Words—and their meanings—were of profound importance to him. No one ever cared more than Charles about the placement of a comma. This was not merely because he was a master wordsmith (though he was). It was because he knew that his words held meaning for millions of people, and it was his responsibility as a public figure to take great care in how he expressed himself.
Such precision was part of his method of persuasion. While he was not one to pull his punches, Charles knew that if his column contained a minor factual error or some superfluous flare of hyperbole, it would weaken his case. He wanted each column to be as precise and logical as possible and his readers to make no mistake about the thrust of his argument. Bloom noted that “he wanted the facts in the columns to be unimpeachable so people couldn’t distract from his arguments by contradicting a fact, however minor it might be.”
Writing with precision did not mean being mechanically confined by the rules. Like many good writers, Charles delighted in sometimes bending—or breaking—certain conventions to make his point. Jonathan Fluger (2009-11) remembered sparring with him over the proper application of a grammatical rule. “I want it to sing!” Charles told him.
A final observation about working for Charles: One of the first things we all learned was that Charles insisted that calls from his immediate family be routed to him without delay. This was a rule that did not always apply to the luminaries who rang.
There was a reason for this. “Charles’s sense of responsibility was to his family and to the country that was its shelter and home,” said Flanagan. “This afforded him the intellectual independence to see what he saw and say what he said.” We who had the privilege to work for Charles learned from his example the right way to write about Washington and, more important, the right way to live here too.
