In 2013, Charles Krauthammer was the featured speaker at The Weekly Standard “summit” at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado. His performance was scintillating. He surprised the crowd with his sense of humor. He took questions.
Since I had introduced him, I was assigned to help him avoid being mobbed by hundreds of enthusiastic admirers. But when I told Charles I would lead him out of the auditorium, he waved me away. He said the attendees had paid to hear him and he wasn’t going to brush them off. For nearly an hour, he chatted with them and, as he sat in his wheelchair, had his picture taken with them at his side.
This became a ritual wherever he spoke. The crowds wanted more than his words and presence. They wanted to be beside him, to idolize him up close, and share a few personal sentiments. Charles was a star, but neither the Hollywood nor the rich nor the royal type. He was loved for his intellect, his ideas, and his conservatism. In return, he was never condescending. He was gracious.
My point here is to reveal a bit of the private Charles Krauthammer. He was the smartest person I’ve ever known and certainly the nicest. There were a multitude of kind things—not just gestures—he did for people, often strangers. He was generous with his time. Knowing he was a psychiatrist, people consulted him. I did. He offered advice but no psychotherapy. He had long ago rejected Freud.
I have another point, but first a little chronology. I met Charles at the New Republic in 1985 when I was hired to write about the White House. He’d been hired a few years earlier the mythical way, only in his case the myth was true. Abandoning psychiatry and medicine, he’d come to Washington and landed in a speechwriting job for Walter Mondale. He also freelanced. He sent a piece to the New Republic, a respected liberal magazine. It was unsolicited—“over the transom,” as it’s called in the trade. It was written in what we now know as the Krauthammer style: direct, unnuanced, blunt, and brilliantly argued. He soon was hired at TNR and got a weekly column at the Washington Post. Fox News came later. And in 1985, he wrote an attention-grabbing essay in Time.
It was called “The Reagan Doctrine.” And it exemplifies my second point about Charles: He was politically and intellectually courageous. Though Reagan was president, Washington had been a liberal town since the New Deal and still is today. Permanent Washington—the press, the bureaucracy, much of the lobbying community, thousands of leftovers from Capitol Hill and prior administrations, and plenty of “experts” and hangers-on—is liberal.
“The Reagan Doctrine” wasn’t. It “proclaims overt and unashamed American support for anti-Communist revolution,” Charles wrote. “The grounds are justice, necessity, and democratic tradition. . . . It is intended to establish a new, firmer—a doctrinal—foundation for such support by declaring equally worthy all armed resistance to Communism, whether foreign or indigenously imposed.” Help went to anti-Communist guerrillas in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, and Angola, and a few other places.
Charles didn’t have to name the doctrine after President Reagan. He could have dubbed it the “Freedom Doctrine” or the “Self-Determination Doctrine.” But he didn’t. He boldly named it after a conservative interloper in liberal Washington. There was an outcry. Charles was accused of fishing for an invitation to the White House and other sins. He wasn’t fazed.
Nor was he queasy about challenging the politically correct view of torture. Indeed, he wrote “The Truth About Torture” in The Weekly Standard in 2005. In this persuasive piece, he wrote that torture is not impermissible, as Senator John McCain would have it. He wrote: “Question: If you have the slightest belief that hanging [a man] by his thumbs will get you the information to save a million people, are you permitted to do it?” Charles said the answer is “certainly” yes. He defended two exceptions to the no-torture rule: when a defiant prisoner can stop a ticking bomb or a high-level terrorist knows of plans to kill many people. When secret prisons for captive terrorists were exposed, Charles said the “gnashing of teeth . . . was considerable. I myself have not gnashed a single tooth.”
Then there were the Krauthammer attacks on the United Nations. Only hard-line conservatives embrace the old slogan “Get the U.S. out of the U.N. and the U.N. out of the U.S.” Yet Charles was sympathetic to that view. “The idea of the ‘international community’ acting through the U.N.—a fiction and a farce respectively—to enforce norms and maintain stability is absurd,” he wrote in “Decline Is a Choice,” probably his most famous piece in these pages.
I think of Charles as the exception to the practice of conservatives pulling their punches. It’s not that they change their beliefs. They soften them or don’t mention them. They fear Washington’s intolerance. Charles Krauthammer didn’t. He went where ideas and facts took him. He was brave.
