Charles Krauthammer: A life in full
Those who knew and worked with Charles Krauthammer, who died Thursday, are filling columns of commentary and much air time about him, and those of us who did not know him are learning that he was an even greater man than the one we saw from afar — kinder and funnier.
But even from a distance it was clear that his was an extraordinary life. Almost everyone knows of the swimming pool diving accident that, when he was a young, strapping man, crippled him for life. What he said about that was, in itself, astonishing.
First, that he knew what had happened to him in the instant that it occurred. He was, after all, in medical school at the time and had the textbook on spinal injuries with him at the pool.
Second, that every human being has a moment, or moments, like this in life — when you are down, flat on the mat, and the curtain seems to be falling. The measure of a human being, he said, is how you respond.
That may not be an original thought, but when you think of someone saying that about being consigned to a wheelchair for life, it is mighty, and humbling.
And he faced his final illness, when the curtain was falling, with the same singular stoicism and grace.
Mr. Krauthammer finished medical school and became a psychiatrist, feeling that this was the way to combine medical science and the life of the mind. But it was politics and political commentary that drew him and he turned away from what surely would have been a secure and peaceful life to seek his future in Washington and see if he could cut his own path there. Thanks to another great opinion writer who gave him his break, the brilliant Meg Greenfield, he did just that.
Since the end of World War II, five writers have shaped the scope and tone of opinion writing in the United States: Walter Lippmann, who was a public philosopher and master of Olympian detachment and prose; James Reston, who whispered to power players and played their thoughts back to his readers; William F. Buckley, who was a knight errant for conservative ideas and manners when both were totally out of fashion; George Will, who articulated the mainstreaming of Reaganism and libertarian conservatism; and Charles Krauthammer, the man who arrived at conservatism by reasoning through experience and data. His was the conservatism of plain sense and real life — truly empirical.
Mr. Krauthammer was a liberal Democrat when he came to D.C. He worked for Walter Mondale and The New Republic. A front row seat for the march of folly changed him. He changed his mind about many things. For baby boomers, he was pivotal. By showing us that we could change, but base our change on conviction, he became the patron saint of growing up.
This “courage to change” (ReinholdNiebuhr’s phrase) marked him, though he became a man of the right and Fox News, as, always, a truly independent voice — true, above all else, to his own inner light. There was no received wisdom with this man. He did his own thinking. If you cannot do that, he said, you are wasting your life.
Charles Krauthammer became famous as a young man and he had staying power because he possessed three primary attributes as a commentator:
First, he spoke plainly, even bluntly. Second, he was tough-minded. He was never sentimental and he never postured or engaged in virtue-signaling. This was what drew Ms. Greenfield to his work.
And third, he was more interested in insight than cuteness, or cleverness, or shock value. He came at his opinions from study, observation and his own center. This gave him a great clarity — an ability to cut through the blather to the heart of a question.
These qualities made him, of all things, a TV star. You tuned in because you knew he would have something to say that was both commonsense and new.
He also had wit: He said of a Donald Trump debate performance that he had not heard so many incoherent thoughts strung together since he left psychiatry.
That such a mind was matched to a heart just as large is rare in any profession, land, or time.