“When Charles first revealed to me that he read the G-File,” Jonah Goldberg wrote Friday, “it filled me with a kind of embarrassed dread.”
That happened with many who also wrote columns: Anything Krauthammer read would have to be perfect, as his opinion meant more than that of most people, the result of the sense of a great moral presence, of one who lived more than one life.
[Also read: The irreplaceable Charles Krauthammer]
This was the result of one great decision made in the moment at age 22 when he realized he had broken his neck in an accident: He would stay at his school and finish his courses and graduate with the rest of his class, and on time. He seemed to understand that if he let go for one minute, it would be fatal. He would lose his momentum and not get it back. In that case, he wrote later, disaster would turn into ruin. So he stayed with his schedule, and disaster did not.
Someone should make a film someday of Krauthammer’s critical three years as a patient, as the ingenuity of a collection of deans and professors brought the whole of the school to his bed.
“Within a few days,” he wrote in Things That Matter, a collection of columns, “a hematology professor, fresh from lecturing to my classmates on campus, showed up at my bedside and proceeded to give me the lecture, while projecting his slides on the ceiling above me.”
Lucite plates were hooked up with books facing downward, while every few minutes nurses turned pages. He was allowed to take tests orally, while secretaries wrote down his responses, as he wouldn’t start writing for another three years.
In his second year, he was transferred to a hospital connected to Harvard University, where he lived a double life as doctor and patient, putting on a white doctor’s coat and making the rounds with his classmates, with his own doctors “persuading (ordering?) skeptical attending physicians to allow their patients to be examined by the student in the wheelchair, with his exotic medical instruments” allowing him to increase his mobility.
Then, at midnight, he went back to his own room, becoming a patient, or pumpkin, again.
Part of the charm of this particular regimen was that it was so demanding, not to mention exhausting, that it left little time and/or energy to brood on his accident, and what it had cost him, and by the time it was over, his spirit at least had been healed.
The same thing had happened to President Theodore Roosevelt, who in 1884 had fled to the uncivilized badlands of the Dakotas to keep himself from dying of grief, after his adored first wife and his mother had died in the same house within hours.
Theodore’s fifth cousin Franklin, had his own darker days, going, like Krauthammer, from radiant health into helplessness, as it were, overnight. His protective mother urged him to live a quiet life at Hyde Park in the country. He responded, eventually, by running for president. Biographers said that the strain later killed him, but “ruin” was conquered again.
If the badlands helped to make Theodore Roosevelt and Warm Springs helped to make the World War II leader, Charles Krauthammer’s self-chosen ordeal helped make him the man who awed other writers. Sometimes a disaster cuts off a career in the making. Sometimes it makes it blossom.
