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Remembering Charles Krauthammer

By Tws Staff

Charles Krauthammer, who died Thursday from complications of cancer, was a contributing editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD from the magazine’s founding in 1995. He was also a Washington Post columnist, a Fox News contributor, and a Pulitzer Prize winner. We’ve collected and excerpted the remembrances of some of the many journalists whose lives he touched. Here at TWS, Stephen F. Hayes remembers Krauthammer’s tribute to his brother, Marcel, who died in 2007; William Kristol recalls an interview he did with Krauthammer a few years ago, and Michael Warren shares an anecdote from a Krauthammer’s appearance at a TWS summit.

At the Washington Post, columnist George Will remembered his former colleague:

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Dictating columns when not driving himself around Washington in a specially designed van that he operated while seated in his motorized wheelchair, crisscrossing the country to deliver speeches to enthralled audiences, Charles drew on reserves of energy and willpower to overcome a multitude of daily challenges, any one of which would cause most people to curl up in a fetal position. Fortunately, with more brain cells to spare than the rest us have to use, he could think about doing what was no longer habitual, and about national matters, too.


Commentary editor John Podhoretz—a founding editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD—tells of how he recruited Krauthammer to come to TWS and the challenges of working with such a perfectionist. He continues:

Charles existed so apart from his quadraplegic disability in the minds and experiences of those of us who knew him—because of his willed insistence that it be so, a willed insistence that was all the more powerful because it was unspoken—that any anger I might have felt at the imposition of his writerly arrogance seemed entirely permissible … until the moment that I remembered. I would remember he could not put pen to paper. I would remember he wrote by dictating. I would remember it was a goddamned astonishing fact of facts that he could do any of this, let alone do it with such easy brilliance. Think of it. He read widely and paid attention to everything—a man who had some difficulty turning a page. He wrote weekly, this man who could not write.

At Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro speaks for a younger generation of conservatives:

I met Krauthammer twice, both times briefly. Once, we met in his office; I was with several other columnists and reporters, and we were all rather awestruck to be in his presence. He traded baseball jokes with us as he asked about the news of the day. That was another funny thing about Krauthammer – he wasn’t a news junkie. He was a thought junkie. The headlines of the day simply mattered less to him than the philosophies and worldviews that could be only faintly spotted through the murky waters of daily politics. That’s why Krauthammer seemed to be so clear – he was speaking and writing from a deeper place. It’s also why he was so prescient: the waves of politics varied, but the bottom of the ocean was stable.


Nash Jenkins, congressional reporter for Time, tweeted a touching account of his own family’s experience with Krauthammer. Jenkins’s father had met Krauthammer at a Washington event in 2016 and chatted for a while. Then, in 2017, Jenkins relates, his father was paralyzed in a surfing accident in Nicaragua. Jenkins shared the letter his father received from Krauthammer. (But do read the whole thread, starting here.)

At Vox, Jane Coaston reminds us that Krauthammer was not a partisan but loyal to his own beliefs and ideas:

His point of view was rooted in the idea that American foreign and domestic policy should be proactive, not reactive. But unlike many conservative pundits today, Krauthammer’s work was not linked to any one personality or administration, but to specific ideas to which he stayed loyal throughout his life.

Many other notable figures—journalists, politicians, and others—tweeted their memories:

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