Twenty-five years ago this week, I wrote my first column. I’m not much given to self-reflection—why do you think I quit psychiatry?—but I figure once every quarter-century is not excessive.
When Editorial Page Editor Meg Greenfield approached me to do a column for the Washington Post, I was somewhat daunted. The norm in those days was to write two or three a week, hence the old joke that being a columnist is like being married to a nymphomaniac—as soon as you’re done, you’ve got to do it again.
So I proposed once a week. First, I explained, because I was enjoying the leisurely life of a magazine writer and, with a child on the way, I was looking forward to fatherhood. Second, because I don’t have two ideas a week; I barely have one (as many of my critics no doubt agree).
The first objection she dismissed as mere sloth (Meg was always a good judge of character). The second reason she bought. On December 14, 1984, my first column appeared.
Longevity for a columnist is a simple proposition: Once you start, you don’t stop. You do it until you die or can no longer put a sentence together. It has always been my intention to die at my desk, although my most cherished ambition is to outlive the estate tax.
Looking back on the quarter-century, the most remarkable period, strangely enough, was the ’90s. That decade began on December 26, 1991 (just as the ’60s, as many have observed, ended with Nixon’s resignation on August 9, 1974), with a deliverance of biblical proportions—the disappearance of the Soviet Union. It marked the end of 60 years of existential conflict, the collapse of a deeply evil empire and the death of one of the most perverse political ideas in history. This miracle, in major part wrought by Ronald Reagan, bequeathed the ultimate peace dividend: a golden age of the most profound peace and prosperity.
“I recently told an assembly at my son’s high school,” I wrote in 1997, “that they were living through a time so blessed they would tell their grandchildren about it. They looked at me uncomprehendingly…because it is hard for anyone to apprehend the sheer felicity of one’s own time until it is gone.”
I concluded with “golden ages never last.” Throughout the decade, and most especially as it began to wane, I returned to this theme of the wondrous oddity, the sheer impossibility of an age of such post-historical tranquility.
And inevitable ennui. So profound was that tranquility, so trivial the history of that time, that my colleague George Will and I would muse that if this kept up—an era whose dominant issue was a president’s zipper problem—he might as well go back to the academy and I to psychiatry.
Of course, it didn’t keep up. It never does. History is tragic, not redemptive. Our holiday from history ended in fire, giving birth to a post-9/11 decade of turbulence and disorientation as we were faced with the unexpected resurgence of radical eschatological evil.
Which brings us to the age of Obama, perhaps—mirabile dictu—the most exhilarating time of all. There is nothing as bracing for democracy as the alternation of power, particularly when it yields as serious, determined and challenging an ideological agenda as Barack Obama’s. This third wave of transformative liberalism—FDR, then LBJ, now Obama—is no time for triangulation. This is not incrementalism. We’re not debating school uniforms. When Obama once declared Ronald Reagan historically consequential and Bill Clinton not, he meant it. Obama intends to be the Reagan of the new liberalism.
It’s no secret that I oppose nearly everything Obama has proposed. But after the enervating 1990s and the tragic 2000s, the prospect of combative and clarifying 2010s, of sharply defined and radically opposed visions, is both politically and intellectually invigorating.
For which I’m tanned, rested and ready. And grateful. To be doing every day what you enjoy doing is rare. Rarer still is to be doing what you were meant to do, particularly if you got there by sheer serendipity. Until I was almost 30, I’d fully expected to spend my life as a doctor. My present life was never planned or even imagined. Near the beginning of these 25 years, an intern at The New Republic asked me how to become a nationally syndicated columnist. “Well,” I replied, “first you go to medical school…”
The Washington Post, December 18, 2009
Thank you for the great honor, and particularly for the honor of being recognized in such august and distinguished company. As you heard, the achievement for which I’m being recognized, indeed my entire career as a writer and editor and columnist, is a second career.
I never wrote a word, I never published a word before I was 30. And the reason I bring this up is because I want to speak to the young students here tonight about choice, about choosing a life.
When you are at this stage you are at right now all of life is open to you. But soon you are going to suffer the agony of excellence. With so many talents and so much excellence, at one point in your life soon you’re going to have to choose. And every choice means an exclusion; every time you open a door, you’re closing a door.
If you decide to be a nuclear scientist and you think you won’t ever be able to be a Shakespearean scholar, well, I’m here to tell you that that’s false. I started my life out as a doctor, I spent seven years as a doctor and a psychiatrist. And then one day at the end of those seven years I realized that this was not what I was born to do and to be. So I said goodbye to my last patient, I turned in my beeper and I quit.
At the same time, my wife, who was a lawyer, decided that she didn’t love the law and she quit as well. We left our home and we came to Washington to seek our fortune. She became an artist and a sculptor, and I became a writer and a columnist. And things have turned out rather well.
The moral of the story is: Don’t be afraid to choose, and don’t be afraid to start all over if you have to. T. E. Lawrence once said, at least in the version of his life by David Lean, “Nothing is written.”
And by that he meant: Life is open, everything is choice, nothing is inevitable. So the message I have to you young people is: Don’t be afraid to choose. Choose what you love. And if you don’t love what you’ve chosen, choose again.
Adapted from the author’s speech accepting the Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement in Washington, DC, June 19, 1999
From 2001 to 2006, my father sat on the President’s Council on Bioethics. During a session debating the creation of cloned human embryos for research, he made a statement that Dr. Leon Kass, the chairman of the council at the time, described as “the single most profound thing ever said in that room.”
This statement is included here not for its specific point about embryonic research guidelines (my father believed reasonable people of good will could disagree on the exact legal boundaries of such research), but rather for the moral injunction it made to always treat every human life as an end in and of itself, never as a means to be used by others. And for how it showed my father’s commitment—even above his own life’s interests—to preserving the principles he believed in for the world that would outlive him.
—Daniel Krauthammer
The Subject: Ethical issues regarding the creation of cloned human embryos for research purposes, in hope of developing transplantable tissues that could alleviate various chronic diseases and disabilities.
The Question: What do we owe the patients with these diseases and disabilities? What should people who oppose creation of embryos for research purposes say to such patients?
Charles Krauthammer: Well, as it happens, I am one of those patients. Mary Ann Glendon has talked about all of us being patients or having relatives who are patients. I have a very obvious connection with this issue. I am one of those in whose name people have spoken and said this research has to be permitted so that I can walk or people like me can walk. Spinal cord injuries are always on the list, so I am acutely aware of this issue. But I am not only a patient.
I am also a father. And what I would say to myself, and I have said to myself about this issue, and I think we ought to say to other people who suffer from similar problems and disabilities, is that we have children. And we want to raise them in a world—we want to bequeath to them a world, a moral universe, in which we think they ought to live. And that we may be jeopardizing the moral quality of that universe, the humanity of that universe, by cavalierly breaking moral rules that we have observed for generations in order that people like me can walk.
So I think there is a serious moral issue here. And I think the assumption that all that people who suffer from disabilities want is a cure at all costs is a misreading of their own humanity.
Transcript: The President’s Council on Bioethics, Meeting No. 2, Second Session, Washington, DC, February 14, 2002
An occasion like this is not a time for pronouncements. Those are for print (and television), and I certainly make enough of them every week. This is a time for speaking as one would with friends, and I am here among many friends. So forgive me for being autobiographical, but some of my checkered past requires explanation.
I started life out as a doctor. I am not sure whether I am still a doctor, an ex-physician or a retired psychiatrist—I have decided that I am a psychiatrist in remission. Doing very well, thank you. Have not had a relapse in 25 years. Sometimes I am asked to compare what I do today as a political essayist in Washington with what I did 25 years ago as a psychiatrist in Boston. There is not very much difference: In both lines of work I spend my days studying people who suffer from paranoia and delusions of grandeur—except that in Washington they have access to nuclear weapons. Which makes the stakes higher, and the work a little more interesting.
This is only a half tongue-in-cheek accounting of the reason I am here. When I left psychiatry to start writing—a movement that my late father wryly noted was not very well calculated for upward mobility—I did so not out of any regret for the seven years I had spent in medicine, years that I treasure for deepening and broadening my sensibilities, but because I felt history happening outside the examining-room door. That history was being shaped by a war of ideas and I wanted to be in the arena. Not for its own sake. I enjoy intellectual combat, but I do not live for it. I wanted to be in the arena because some things matter, some things need to be said, some things need defending. That has been my vocation for the last 20 years.
That is the why I’m here. But it does not tell you the how. The how is very simple. My award, my achievement, my entire career as a writer is owed to one person.
When I was in medicine, restless and unfulfilled, there was one person urging me to take the risk to do what I really wanted to do, to do what I was meant to do. One person who was not just ready, but urging that we give up all the certainties of our life together, our professions—hers as a lawyer, mine as a doctor—our friends, our community, our home, and that we come to Washington, a place we had never been and where we knew no one. It was not “wither thou goest, I go.” It was at her urging, with her encouragement and with her support that we set off on the road that brought us here. And when here, I began writing and she left behind her training in the law to do what moved her—produce paintings and sculptures of remarkable beauty and soul.
Her own beauty and soul have sustained me these many years. I was merely the scribe. This prize rightly belongs to my dear wife, Robyn.
Adapted from the author’s speech accepting the inaugural Bradley Prize from the Bradley Foundation at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, October 7, 2003
I have been uncharacteristically silent these past ten months. I had thought that silence would soon be coming to an end, but I’m afraid I must tell you now that fate has decided on a different course for me.
In August of last year, I underwent surgery to remove a cancerous tumor in my abdomen. That operation was thought to have been a success, but it caused a cascade of secondary complications—which I have been fighting in hospital ever since. It was a long and hard fight with many setbacks, but I was steadily, if slowly, overcoming each obstacle along the way and gradually making my way back to health.
However, recent tests have revealed that the cancer has returned. There was no sign of it as recently as a month ago, which means it is aggressive and spreading rapidly. My doctors tell me their best estimate is that I have only a few weeks left to live. This is the final verdict. My fight is over.
I wish to thank my doctors and caregivers, whose efforts have been magnificent. My dear friends, who have given me a lifetime of memories and whose support has sustained me through these difficult months. And all of my partners at the Washington Post, Fox News and Crown Publishing.
Lastly, I thank my colleagues, my readers and my viewers, who have made my career possible and given consequence to my life’s work. I believe that the pursuit of truth and right ideas through honest debate and rigorous argument is a noble undertaking. I am grateful to have played a small role in the conversations that have helped guide this extraordinary nation’s destiny.
I leave this life with no regrets. It was a wonderful life—full and complete with the great loves and great endeavors that make it worth living. I am sad to leave, but I leave with the knowledge that I lived the life that I intended.
The Washington Post, June 8, 2018
By Daniel Krauthammer
Before my father underwent surgery last August, he wrote a set of final directives to be followed in the event that the operation was not successful. His instructions for this funeral were spare and simple. He wrote the following:
I would be shrouded and ritually bathed at our synagogue, as is the custom. I would be in a plain pine coffin. The ceremony would be presided over by Rabbi Fishman. The only speaker that I designate is my son Daniel….I would like the ceremony to be very simple with just three liturgical features….I leave everything else up to my wife and son to decide. They will be guided by Dr. Fishman as to what is the usual Jewish practice.
This simple document is emblematic of the man my father was. The grace, dignity, equanimity, understatedness and clearmindedness with which my father faced the possibility and the eventuality of death—in this document, in the last ten months he spent in hospital and in the 46 years since his accident—are the same attributes with which he lived his extraordinary life.
We live in an age that often promotes and idealizes introspection, self-reflection and catharsis. The opening up of one’s emotions and declaring of one’s deepest feelings to the world. Taken to excess, as is all too often the case, these can amount to self-indulgence. My father did not subscribe to this mindset. If there was one thing that he was the complete opposite of, it was self-indulgent: intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, in every sense that I can think of.
He did not disregard the self. Actually, I think it’s safe to say he had quite a high self-regard, as I’m sure many of you can recount—especially my mother. But to him, the self just wasn’t all that important. Not because of any inherent sin or moral failing of being self-interested. But quite simply because, ultimately, it is not very interesting. Why focus endlessly inward when there is so much more to explore and understand and experience on the outside: the universe, our world, all the fascinating people in it, the complex activities we busy ourselves with, and the transcendent bonds of love and family and friendship we are able to forge with one another. And so he chose to focus all his gifts, all his exquisite qualities outward to the world beyond himself. We who knew him are all the recipients and beneficiaries of the strength, the warmth, the generosity and the wisdom that he radiated.
Everyone who came into contact with him—whether it was through a close friendship or just reading and watching his thoughts from afar—felt the force and power of his personality. In almost any room he entered, at any dinner table where he ate or any TV news panel where he sat, it seemed he would almost immediately become the central hub of the conversation and of everyone’s attention. Not because he made it all about himself, but in fact because he did precisely the opposite. He would ask you what you enjoyed, what you were fascinated by, what you were pondering and what you were doing with your life. He would connect with you on exactly that topic and then beat a trail with you to a deeper insight that you didn’t even know was there.
And he did it with such fun and verve and acerbic wit and deadpan hilarity. He was, to put it simply, a cool guy. People just wanted to be around him. And it was because he wasn’t putting on a show for anyone. He wasn’t trying to look smart or to impress you. And he didn’t take himself too seriously. He simply said what he believed, and he did what he loved because he genuinely enjoyed it. He brought that joy to most everything he did in life and he shared it generously. Whether he was talking with a young intern about how to launch her career, trading baseball statistics at the ballpark while scarfing down hot dogs, or debating political philosophy on national television. He did it effortlessly, with grace and—very often—with a mischievous twinkle in his eye.
And that twinkle would also appear—more often than not—whenever he beat the odds or got around an obstacle he didn’t think should stand in his way. Such an event, of course, was not uncommon in his life. If there’s one thing my dad did with astounding consistency, it was beat the odds. He was able to do that because he was armed with immense courage and self-possession. He quite simply willed himself to accomplish things that most people would assume to be impossible.
That was the great lesson of his example: to build the life that you want, that you intend. Don’t be defined by what life throws at you and you cannot control. Accept the hand you are dealt with grace, and then go on to play that hand as joyously and industriously and vigorously as you can. What gives life meaning isn’t how the outside world defines you. It’s what you make of yourself, what you give to the world and what you build with the ones you love. You can make your life extraordinary. It is possible.
Even more remarkably and uniquely, my father lived this exemplary life with great sweetness and gentleness. It was in his very bones, fundamental to his nature. He was just innately kind and caring. And not in a showy or ostentatious way. Just in his own, quiet, subtle, but deeply moving way. And he bestowed this kindness without discrimination to anyone worthy of it, whether it was a prime minister or a 10-year-old schoolmate of his son’s still in short pants.
As many of you are no doubt aware, my father was a huge movie buff. It was a shared passion of ours, something the two of us bonded over from my earliest childhood right up until his final days. He had an encyclopedic knowledge and recall of his favorites. Above all, perhaps, Lawrence of Arabia, which—along with Casablanca and North by Northwest—he could recite line for line. One of his favorite lines comes early in the movie, when Lawrence meets Omar Sharif’s character for the first time. Sharif has just come upon Lawrence and his guide trespassing at a well in the middle of the desert. Sharif shoots and kills Lawrence’s guide, then confronts Lawrence and asks him what his name is. “My name,” Lawrence replies, “is for my friends.” “My name is for my friends.”
To be honest I never quite understood the line or why my dad liked it so much. But in the final weeks of his illness, we watched the movie again together in his room. And the line suddenly filled with new meaning for me in the light of my father’s approach to life. The line, first of all, is a courageous stand for truth and against tyranny. “My name is for my friends.” Those who were not worthy, those who wielded power without just authority or with impure intention, were never able to pressure my father to bow to them, to betray his principles or those he loved. But the line also has a more subtle meaning. It is an affirmation of a certain philosophy of love and friendship. “My name is for my friends.” My father didn’t feel the need to broadcast his identity, didn’t have to tell people who he was or declare his friendships out loud. He let his actions speak for themselves. Those who were his friends—knew it. Those whom he loved—knew it. That was what mattered. Not some supposed inner truth that you held cooped up on the inside, or some empty declaration you made to the outside. But what you did for others, the actions you took in the world.
At more points in my life than I can count, I have been told a story by a friend or acquaintance or stranger about some way in which my father acted with extraordinary generosity toward them and literally changed the course of their lives. It was always done quietly, either anonymously or in a manner that almost no one else would ever know about. And it was always to help them do something major in their lives: to get an education, to switch careers and get a new job, to sustain a faltering livelihood or to survive a serious illness.
The few times my father did do something that was publicly visible, it was in order to use his own celebrity to further the causes that he cared about. Particularly so when it came to charities and institutions that furthered Jewish learning and culture, which were central to his identity.
I’m sure there are many people in this room today who were recipients of his acts of generosity. Most of which neither I nor anyone else will ever even know about.
But I feel that I am surely the luckiest recipient of all in this room. The list of things for which I am grateful to my father is far too long, and runs far too deep within me, to even attempt a summation in this speech. As with so many of his greatest qualities, it was the purity and simplicity of his love for me that was his greatest gift. His love was full, unadulterated, unconditional and all-encompassing.
A few weeks before his passing, I was recounting memories with my dad in his room. He asked if I remembered the first time I saw the Statue of Liberty. He proceeded to tell me the story: When I was about six years old, he was taking me on a long drive from Washington, DC, to Long Island, New York, to visit my grandmother, crossing the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge en route. As we crossed, my dad told me to look out the window so that I could get a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty, which I had never seen before. But I just couldn’t manage to see it over the bridge guardrail. So, he told me to take the pillows I had been using to nap on during the long drive, to prop myself up on them, to make sure my seatbelt was firmly tightened and then to sit up as straight and tall as I could. At that moment, he started to brake the car, slowing us down so much that we had half a bridge’s worth of almost-stopped traffic piling up behind us. Everyone was honking and yelling and trying to pass us. But my dad didn’t care. He was making sure I had the longest, clearest possible view of the Statue of Liberty across the whole crest of the highest point of the bridge.
As he told the story, the memory came flooding back to me. And not only that memory, but so many others just like it. Dozens, hundreds, thousands if I truly wanted to count. It was perfectly indicative of the father he was. He would literally do anything if he thought it would make my life just a little bit better.
And the most precious thing he shared with me was his knowledge. He was the greatest teacher I ever had. He never dictated answers. He opened my mind to the most important questions and helped me find pathways to deeper understandings. Everyone in this room is wiser for having listened to him, as is the whole country, perhaps even the world. But I count myself luckiest of all to have been able to learn from him. He did so generously, openly, lovingly, always sensitive to helping me along my own path, but never directing which road I should take. It was through these pathways he opened up for me that I found my own core bedrock beliefs.
I hope that one day I will be as good a father as he was. And as good a husband. Along with me, my mother was the luckiest recipient of his love and generosity. But he was just as lucky to have her. Perhaps luckier. My father once said in an interview that my mother was “the co-author of [his] life.” I cannot think of a truer or more beautiful description. They built their life together. As one. Intertwined and inseparable. His accomplishments are hers. And her accomplishments are his. Neither of their lives could have or would have been remotely the same without the other. It was a life built, shared and enjoyed as a loving partnership.
My father once told me a few years ago that he was getting more and more complaints from friends about how he and my mother didn’t go out as much anymore and weren’t seen around town as often. With a boyish smile, he said to me, “They all think we’re kinda turning into hermits. What I think that they don’t get is….we just enjoy each other’s company. We’d kinda just rather hang out with each other.”
They were married for 44 years. Their last anniversary was this past Wednesday. My father passed away on Thursday. It was as full and complete and loving a partnership as I could ever imagine. No language I know possesses words of sufficient depth or power to express my gratitude for having had as parents two people capable of such profound love and generosity.
Just as my father’s emotional energies seemed always focused outward, so too was his mind. His raw intellectual horsepower, which as we all know was impressive almost beyond measure, was guided by a spirit of inquiry, of openness, of thoughtfulness. He was incredibly intelligent, yes. But even more importantly, he was wise. Unlike many who are described, or self-described, as “intellectuals,” he was exceedingly aware of just how little he—or anyone—actually knew, in the grand scheme of things.
His passion for deep understanding led him to what may have been his most firmly held belief: that the very nature of human understanding is limited, that we must have not only humility, but also reverence in the face of the great unknowns that lie before us and that we will never know.
When I first read his book Things That Matter, I wrote my dad a very long letter explaining to him exactly why I thought his book was so extraordinary. He responded to me in kind, and I will now read for you an excerpt from his letter:
Even more stunningly discerning—and here’s where I didn’t even see it myself—was [your] rather stunning phrase, describing the underlying philosophical core of my writing as being an “appreciation, even a love of the unknowable.” Exactly. Precisely. And it unifies everything. It really is like a grand unified theory that I would never see myself. And then of course it is in accordance with the single piece of literature that had the most profound effect of my entire life, The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges. Which is precisely about the appreciation of, the love of and the terror of the unknowable—in the hope that, as he puts it so poignantly in one passage, just some person somewhere anytime in history should have had the knowledge, the revelation, that has been denied to me and always will be.
My father’s outlook on the nature of human knowledge shaped many of his remarkable intellectual pursuits. He was drawn to subjects that pushed the human brain to the limits of complexity and perfection—a new unified theory of quantum-relativity, an elegant checkmate in five moves, a perfect double play—and it was at these limits, at the very cusp where human comprehension slips into the realm of the unknowable, that he found beauty, profundity and transcendence.
This humility gave him an intellectual lightness and playfulness that was magnetic to be around. He had an aesthetic, almost romantic appreciation for good ideas and their artful expression.
But this outlook, this appreciation for the inherent limitations of human knowledge, also informed his most deeply and seriously held beliefs.
In politics, it led him to a profound championing of democratic pluralism, of the liberty of the individual, of the right of each mind to find its own way, free of the pretended singular truths of any imagined perfect society.
In religion, it led him to a suspicion of anyone claiming absolute certainty and a monopoly on ultimate truth—both from the religious purist and from the adamant atheist. And it led him toward a deep respect and appreciation for the accumulated wisdom of mankind, for the millennia-worth of religious evolution and philosophical debate we inherit from history and upon which we build our own ideas, and particularly for the sages and traditions of his own beloved Jewish heritage.
It is into the embracing arms of that accumulated wisdom that he wished to consign himself when he knew the end was close at hand. To what we do here to honor him today: to this simple ceremony, these ancient practices, which have been crafted and honed and debated and repeated by generation upon generation of his ancestors for thousands of years.
My father has now made the step into the greatest unknown of them all. He did not know what lay ahead for him, nor did he pretend to know. And neither do I.
I do not know if I will ever see my father again. But I do know that he will always be with me. In my heart, in my mind, and in my soul, until the day I draw my final breath. I love him, and I will miss him.
Adapted from the speech given by Daniel Krauthammer at the funeral of Charles Krauthammer, Chevy Chase, MD, June 24, 2018