Krauthammer was brilliant, likable and wise

what happened. I knew why I wasn’t able to move, and I knew what that meant.” It meant that life was going to be different than he and wife Robyn had anticipated when they met at Oxford.

Paralyzed from the neck down, he completed medical school, did an internship and, one thing leading to another as life has a way of doing, became not a jewel in the crown of the medical profession, which he would have been, but one of America’s foremost public intellectuals. Nothing against doctors, but the nation needed Krauthammer more as a diagnostician of our public discontents.

He left two books at the pool. One was a text on the spinal cord. The other was Andre Malraux’s novel “Man’s Fate.”

During the 1980 presidential campaign, Krauthammer wrote speeches for the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Walter Mondale, who did not realize — neither did Krauthammer — that the campaign harbored a thinker who soon would be a leading light of contemporary conservatism.

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, Krauthammer 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.

Krauthammer died at 68. So, 19 years ago, did Meg Greenfield, the editor of The Washington Post’s editorial page. For many years, Greenfield, Krauthammer and this columnist met for Saturday lunches with a guest — usually someone then newsworthy; now completely forgotten — at a Washington greasy spoon whose name, the Chevy Chase Lounge, was grander than the place.

Like Greenfield, Krauthammer was one of those vanishingly rare Washingtonians who could be both likable and logical. This is not easy in a town where the local industry, politics, thrives on unrefuted errors.

Medicine made Krauthammer intimate with finitude — the skull beneath the skin of life; the fact that expiration is written into the lease we have on our bodies. And his accident gave him a capacity for sympathy, as Rick Ankiel knows.

Ankiel was a can’t-miss, Cooperstown-bound pitching phenomenon for the St. Louis Cardinals — until, suddenly and inexplicably, he could not find the plate. Starting the opening game of a playoff series at age 21, the prodigy threw five wild pitches and his career rapidly spiraled far down to... resurrection as a 28-yearold major-league outfielder, for a short but satisfying stint in defiance of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s dictum that there are no second acts in a life.

As Krauthammer wrote, Ankiel’s saga illustrated “the catastrophe that awaits everyone from a single false move, wrong turn, fatal encounter. Every life has such a moment. What distinguishes us is whether — and how — we ever come back.”

The health problems that ended Krauthammer’s life removed him from the national conversation nine months ago, so his legion of admirers already know that he validated this axiom: Some people are such a large presence while living that they still occupy space even when they are gone.