Charles Krauthammer was my father. Writing that sentence in the past tense is still a shock to me, and it evokes a sadness far too deep to express in words. My father and I were very close. I feel the pain of his absence every day, as does every son who loved his father. There were a thousand secret private things between him and me that I alone had known and that I alone will miss about the man who was my dad.
But my father belonged not only to me, but to so many more: his friends, his colleagues, his readers, his viewers, the country and indeed the world. He played a large role in the political life of this nation, and though he was far too self-effacing to say so himself, his thinking, his ideas and his convictions shaped generations of political thinkers.
For almost four decades, he wrote a weekly column syndicated in the Washington Post and hundreds of other newspapers around the world. He wrote essays for preeminent magazines like The New Republic, Time and The Weekly Standard. He appeared on television to comment on the events of the day throughout his career, culminating with near-nightly appearances on Fox News’ Special Report for over a decade.
Policymakers and politicians in Washington read him, listened to him and often took their lead from him. But my father did not write solely for the cognoscenti and the power brokers. He always told me that he wanted to write and speak so that anyone with intelligence and interest could grapple with and benefit from his arguments. He believed in Einstein’s (apocryphal) dictum that “if you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” That, I believe, is the root of his extraordinary popularity. He didn’t talk down. He thought that unnecessary complexity and heavy-handed erudition got in the way of true insight and knowledge: “You don’t want to talk in highfalutin, ridiculous abstractions that nobody understands,” he said. “Just try to make things plain and clear.” He wished to express the truths he saw in the most universal, accessible, concise and convincing way that he could.
He felt a responsibility to his readers and viewers and, beyond that, to history itself. As he put it:
I left psychiatry to start writing…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 don’t live for it. I wanted to be in the arena because some things matter, some things need to be said, some things need to be defended.
My father was not just going through the motions. He cared deeply about everything he said and everything he wrote. He knew it would play a part in the discourses that shaped real policies, affected real people and determined the future of the country he loved. He did not take that responsibility lightly. In a 2013 interview, he described the sense of duty he felt to pursue his vocation with the highest order of integrity: “You’re betraying your whole life if you don’t say what you think—and you don’t say it honestly and bluntly.”
He always said what he thought, and he championed the ideas he believed in. That is why he will be missed by everyone who appreciated his arguments and insights. And that is why it was so important to me to complete this book for him, and to complete it well. His thoughts mattered. His arguments mattered. His presence in our national discourse mattered. And I hope, through this book, they will continue to matter for future generations of readers.
This book was a long time in the making. Following the success of his lauded collection of columns and essays Things That Matter, my father had intended to write several more books. He wished to write an original work on foreign policy, another on domestic policy and a more personal memoir that would trace his family history as well as his own. But in addition to these ambitions for new writing projects, he felt an ever-present desire to publish another collection. There were many more columns and essays of his that he wanted the world to see. Pieces that had not fit with the thematic organization of Things That Matter, pieces he had written in the time since and pieces that, frankly, he had felt were too personal to include the first time around. These columns and essays needed a home.
In 2016, my father decided he would move ahead simultaneously toward completion of that new collection and an original work on foreign policy. He put together an initial selection of columns and began organizing them into thematic chapters. Meanwhile, he began writing an extended essay for the work on foreign policy and collecting pieces he planned to draw on in composing the other entries for that book.
It was at this juncture that a health crisis struck my father. In August of 2017, he underwent surgery in Washington, DC, to remove a cancerous tumor from his abdomen. The surgery was thought to have been a success in removing the cancer, but a cascade of secondary complications followed. My father spent many months in the ICU and then many more at a specialized catastrophic care hospital in Atlanta, Georgia. Great progress was made in the following months toward restoring him to health. There were extraordinary difficulties and many setbacks, but the light at the end of the tunnel was clearly visible and we were slowly making our way.
Though his energies were intensely focused on his physical recovery, my father devoted what time and attention he could while he was in the hospital to working on the book. My mother and I were by his side for the entire ten months of that hospital sojourn. During that time I concocted an array of digital and physical displays of all shapes and sizes (with assistance from our favorite hospital staff friends, who helped me rewire our TVs and commandeer the building’s wi-fi) to build as practical a workplace for him as we could achieve amongst all the medical gadgets and gizmos. These helter-skelter arrangements worked well enough for my father to get by, and there were times when we were able to talk over his plans and ideas together and I could help him execute some of the details.
However, this progress—with his work and with his health—did not last. In May of 2018, the news was broken to us that my father’s recovery would not be successful: The cancer had returned with a vengeance. It moved aggressively and relentlessly. Just four weeks later, my father died.
As the end was approaching, my father handed responsibility for finishing the book to me. The last time we spoke about it, he turned to me and said: “If it’s not worthy, don’t publish it.” I made him an oath, and I have taken it more seriously than any other promise I have ever made in my life. I can only hope that my efforts have done justice to the great legacy of the man I loved.
This book is, first and foremost, my father’s. Every word in it, save this introduction and the final entry—my eulogy for him—is his. Its conception and initial construction were his, as are every thought and argument it conveys. When my father handed the reins to me, he had already chosen the majority of the columns that still constitute this book and set aside many more pieces for further consideration, which in turn constitute the majority of the additions made to his initial composition.
There was still much work to do, however, when I took over the project in full after his passing. I read through every runner-up piece my father had considered, and hundreds more—as many as I possibly could in the time I had to complete the project. I added columns, removed some, replaced others and rearranged their order in many places to make his arguments flow in what I believe he would see as the most natural and logical progression.
In this book, what began as two separate projects became one. The first three sections of the book are essentially the collection he envisioned. Divided into 15 thematic chapters, they cover a wide range of his views on the whole gamut of topics, progressing from the ideas he felt closest to in his soul to his thoughts on society at large and finally to the political questions of the day.
What began as my father’s original project on foreign policy and the international order has become Part IV of this book, “Competing Visions: America’s Role and the Course of World History.” In it is the long essay that was to form the core of that work, and now anchors this book: “The Authoritarian Temptation.” It draws the central themes of the book to a summation point and leaves the reader to ponder what my father believed to be the most important questions and challenges facing the politics of our future. It is the one new piece in this collection, never before seen by the public.
Most of the articles in this collection are columns and short essays. But there are several longer entries on arguments that took more than a column’s length to encompass. One is the long essay “When to Intervene,” which lays out my father’s thinking on American involvement overseas—a set of criteria that remained remarkably consistent over four decades. Two long speeches are included: “Three Pieces of Sage Advice” and “Constitutions, Conservatism and the Genius of the Founders.” They explore my father’s thoughts on how individuals should approach their lives within society, and how we ought best to structure our politics by the principles of limited government. Several other shorter speeches dealing with more personal aspects of my father’s life are featured in the book’s final chapter, “A Life without Regrets.”
In this book, as in Things That Matter, every article is featured in its original published form, with three small exceptions. The first is that some article titles have been changed, either to reflect my father’s original wishes (publishers usually choose the titles, and they were not always my father’s first choice at the time) or to convey their content more clearly to the reader. The second is that the punctuation has been changed in some articles to make the style uniform across the entire book—continuing, as my father was fond of declaring, his “war on commas.” And third, in a very few cases a line or two has been edited for clarity or to remove a historical reference or term that has now become so obscure as to be distracting.
One element new to this book is the presence of speeches. Considerably more editing was done for these than for published articles. Introductory, closing and offhand remarks were removed, as were some passages on subject matter unrelated to the sections of the book in which they were placed. Where my father’s written notes for the speech in question were available, some text of the transcript may have been changed to be brought more in line with the initial composition of his message. The titles for all speeches are my own, as my father did not designate any.
To the best of my ability, I have followed the guidelines that my father would have followed himself, had he been able to finish the book. I can only hope it is worthy.
The final section of this book, “Part V: Speaking in the First Person,” is the one section that I know my father would not have included if he were still alive. He did not like to talk about himself, especially in public and in his writing. “I’ve never wanted to make myself the focus of my career,” he said in a 2013 interview. “One of the things I aspire to in all of my columns is I try never to use the word I…to me every time you use it, it’s a failure…I’d rather let the words speak for themselves.”
In his treatise On Rhetoric, Aristotle divided the modes of persuasion into three categories: Pathos—the appeal to the audience’s emotions. Ethos—persuasion by the force of the speaker’s character, reputation and credibility. And logos—the use of reason, evidence and logical argumentation to convince the other side.
My father was a master of logos. He relied on it almost exclusively. He was methodical, exacting and airtight in the step-by-step progression of his thinking through an argument. He particularly disdained appeals to pathos and pulling the heartstrings of an audience. Indeed, these types of appeals were often the target of his withering criticism. He was a doctor by training, and it trained him, as he often said, to look at the evidence and follow where it led. He had no patience for actions and policies motivated by guilt or compassion or self-righteousness if the practical end result was a bad one. He was a deeply good man possessed of deeply good and noble intentions in his personal life. But he firmly believed that good intention as national policy was at best foolhardy and at worst dangerous.
The mode of argument he rarely engaged with at all was ethos. He wanted his arguments to stand on their own regardless of the speaker. That came from a profound sense of humility, I think—a humility stemming from his own awareness of how little anyone truly knows in the grand scheme of things.
But while he eschewed any privileged place due to his standing, others did not. Sometimes the word of a respected and honest voice matters. And over nearly four decades of working in and writing about politics, he earned a place unique to only a few political commentators in modern history. He was respected by those who agreed with him and those who did not. He was too humble to ever fully embrace it, but he earned the right—as few have—to use ethos in making his arguments. That is why I have included as entries in this book some of the very few occasions, in both articles and speeches, where my father spoke entirely in the first person, imparting his beliefs, his thoughts and his wisdom directly from his own experience to the audience. I know he would never have chosen to highlight these rare moments in a book such as this. But I also know people want to read them. They reveal something of the depth and strength of my father’s character, the clarity of his own moral principles and the essence of what he felt truly mattered in life—and, of course, his great sense of humor. No one will ever again be able to hear new arguments from him based in logos. But they can look to the example of his ethos and find lasting wisdom there for ages to come.
In particular, I have included some entries in this book that deal with my father’s physical disability. As many of his readers and viewers know—but many others do not—my father suffered a diving accident when he was 22 years old that severed his spinal cord and left much of his body paralyzed. With a degree of fortitude, strength and dignity that I can scarcely comprehend, he went on to live his life as he intended it and never let his physical limitations alter his path or define his identity. He did not hide his disability, but neither did he highlight it, especially in the public eye. “Everybody has their cross to bear—everybody,” he once explained. “All it means is whatever I do is a little bit harder and probably a little bit slower and with a little more effort.”
He believed that all individuals should be judged by their character and the worth of their deeds and works in life, not by characteristics given to them by accidents of birth or fate beyond their control. “It’s very easy to be characterized by the externalities in your life,” he once said. “I dislike people focusing on it. I made a vow when I was injured that it would never be what would characterize my life.” He fulfilled that vow and succeeded in defining his own life to an extent I think few of us could ever hope to achieve.
For this reason, I was hesitant and careful about including anything in this book that focused on my father’s disability. But I eventually came to the position that the extraordinary power of his example is not something that should be lost to the world. A very few times in his long career, my father wrote columns that touched on the idea that all individuals should be able to define their lives by what they choose and what they do—not what happens to them. Several of these columns are included in this book, spread throughout the chapters without being specially called out, which I know is exactly how he would have wanted it. Their power is such that I overcame my reservations about including them. My fervent hope is that my father would approve of my decision.
When my father was composing his final public statement before his death (included at the end of this book as “A Note to Readers”), I helped him, taking dictation and assisting in the editing.
Reading through a draft, he said to me, “This uses I a lot. I don’t like using I.”
“Yes,” I told him, “but I think this is the right place to do it.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “This time is different.”
I hope, and I believe, that were he here and able to see the pieces I have selected for this book, he would tell me that I made the right choice. That because he is now gone, “this time is different.”
When the time came to choose a title, I began the process by asking myself: What is this book about? I remembered the importance of that question to my father when he published Things That Matter. When it was released, I read it cover to cover in just a few sittings. I wrote my father a long letter telling him how incredible and magisterial a work I thought it was, and detailing exactly why I thought so. He wrote back to me the following:
I couldn’t wait to tell you how extraordinarily powerful and moving your letter was. And how unbelievably discerning and penetrating. You made me see things I couldn’t even see myself.
I’ve been kicking myself for two days now, because in interview after interview, I have had no idea how to answer the question “What is this book about?” And there you put it in one simple absolutely stunning sentence: “Everything that matters depends ultimately on politics.” As soon as I read it, I stopped reading your letter, wrote it down…with a few paragraphs of elaboration—and emailed it to myself so I won’t lose it.
I thought then, and still think now, that he gave me far too much credit. After all, he had written this same summational sentiment in the book’s introduction:
While science, medicine, art, poetry, architecture, chess, space, sports, number theory and all things hard and beautiful promise purity, elegance and sometimes even transcendence, they are fundamentally subordinate. In the end, they must bow to the sovereignty of politics…because in the end, everything—high and low and, most especially, high—lives or dies by politics…because of its capacity, when benign, to allow all around it to flourish, and its capacity, when malign, to make all around it wither.
Sometimes it takes the fresh eye of someone reading for the first time, looking from the outside in, to point out what was clearly there all along, hidden in plain sight. And so I wondered to myself, if my dad could ask me to lend my fresh eye to The Point of It All, what could I point out for him that was clearly there all along?
There is, to begin with, a great deal of concordance and overlap in the core message of the two books, most of all because my father’s core beliefs stayed constant and ever-present in his writings throughout his entire career. Seemingly unrelated columns in completely different sections of each book subtly harken back to each other and sow common themes: the preference for quiet dignity over showy self-aggrandizement, for humility in the face of the unknowable over the pretended mastery of human nature, and above all, an appreciation for the supreme importance of getting politics right. He makes you aware, even as you’re reading about the beauty of math or the proper appreciation of baseball, that all such higher achievements are dependent on tyrants being kept at bay and free thought kept alive.
How do we keep it alive? In Things That Matter, my father’s focus fell largely on the threat of politics gone wrong. “The entire 20th century,” he wrote, “with its mass political enthusiasms, is a lesson in the supreme power of politics to produce ever-expanding circles of ruin.” The ever-present backdrop behind all “things elegant and beautiful” he explores in that book is the specter of totalitarian desolation. The book highlights a century of struggle by liberal democracies against three great ideologies of totalitarian nihilism: Nazism, communism and radical Islamism. “Politics is the moat,” he wrote, “the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at bay, and everything burns.” He urged us to stand ever watchful on those walls and admonished us never to take them for granted. It is fitting that the great historical figure he chose to celebrate most in that book was Winston Churchill, the man who above all others in the 20th century manned those walls and rallied the free world to their defense in the face of the barbarian hordes.
But what do we do inside those walls? How do we construct our politics to ensure they stay benign and don’t turn malign? It is on these questions that my father focused his attention in The Point of It All. The core political focus of this book is on the nature and the future of liberal democracy and limited government, particularly on designing and maintaining government in such a way that it carves out space for individuals to define and pursue for themselves the things that truly matter to them.
My father’s political philosophy, he wrote, was one of “restrained, free-market governance that gave more space and place to the individual and to the civil society” and to “the mediating structures that stand between the individual and the state…bonds of family, faith, fellowship and conscience.” These ideas are explored most fully in Chapter 15, “On Liberty,” named after the most famous work of my father’s favorite political philosopher, John Stuart Mill. He was a student of Mill, as well as of Tocqueville, Jefferson, Madison and “the sublime texts of the American founding.” These political theorists of the 18th and 19th centuries are, fittingly, the most celebrated historical figures in The Point of It All. Their ideas, my father believed, laid what is still the “indispensable foundation” upon which our successful politics was built and our civilization has flourished.
In a column that appears in the final chapters of this book, my father wrote:
Democracy is…designed at its core to be spiritually empty. As Isaiah Berlin wrote 30 years ago in his essay “John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life,” the defining proposition of liberal democracy is that it mandates means (elections, parliaments, markets) but not ends. Democracy leaves the goals of life entirely up to the individual. Where the totalitarian state decrees life’s purposes…democracy leaves the public square naked.
The politics of liberal democracy—“the most free, most humane, most decent political system ever invented by man”—establishes the walls that protect our society from would-be oppressors, tyrants and totalitarians of all varieties. But it does not define what lies inside those walls. Or at least it ought not, my father believed.
Rather, in that open civic space unmolested by government, individuals must define their own meaning and pursue their own happiness by their own free will and in free association with one another. “The glories yielded by…successful politics lie outside itself,” he wrote. This is the great gift of liberty and the font of all of man’s higher loves and endeavors in life.
It is also a great responsibility, one that places the burden on individuals and society to find purpose and direction for life. Such a task is not always easy or natural or attractive. Liberal democracy does not provide ready-made romantic causes or noble callings for its citizens to follow. “Dying for it is far more ennobling than living it,” my father wrote.
Our way of life, our liberty and our successful politics are not automatically self-sustaining, my father understood. And they are not the default of the human condition. Quite to the contrary, the allure of “political romanticism” of all kinds is always present, of a “politics of certainty” that offers (and eventually dictates) supposed absolute truths that give meaning to life. My father believed that down the path of such politics—whether of the far right or far left, extreme nationalism or extreme socialism, religious fanaticism or intolerant atheism—lay the ruin of all things beautiful and human, as evidenced most profoundly in the destruction wrought by these political romanticisms in the 20th century. And in the final essay in this book, his original piece “The Authoritarian Temptation,” my father identified some of the coming century’s great potential threats to liberal democratic society. In an author’s note for a column celebrating his favorite contemporary political theorist, Isaiah Berlin—whose great work Four Essays on Liberty my father described as “perhaps the finest, and surely the most accessible, 20th-century elaboration of [the classical liberal] tradition”—my father wrote:
Berlin and his Four Essays are indeed needed again. The triumph of limited government has turned out to be far more uncertain and ephemeral than it seemed in the heady “holiday from history” days of the 1990s. Today, a quarter-century after the dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, marks the rise of a new appeal to a decidedly illiberal political model. I deal with it in “The Authoritarian Temptation.”
My father wished for “the public square” to remain open for individuals to freely chart their own path towards truth. The first article he ever published—for the McGill Daily in 1969—was a critique of “monolith[ic]” thinking and “deadening one-dimensionality.” It championed pluralism, whose “underlying assumption…is that no one has a monopoly on truth.”
So what is the point of it all? Of life, of our existence on this planet, of our membership in the vast complexity of humanity? Politics should not say. But, somewhat paradoxically, keeping politics out of it was the point of my father’s life’s work. He fought for “a vision of limited government that, while providing for the helpless, is committed above all to guaranteeing individual liberty and the pursuit of one’s own Millian ‘ends of life.’ ”
In his private life, my father found meaning in what mattered to him: “Lives of the good and the great…the elegance of nature, the wonders of space, the perfectly thrown outfield assist” and all the other things that he wrote about within the pages of this book with joy and wit and fascination. He “[did not] claim these things matter to everyone. Nor should they.” All individuals, he believed, should choose and pursue what matters to them.
But in his life as a public figure, he appreciated both the absolute necessity and the essential fragility of politics done right to the very survival of that individual freedom to choose. “The lesson of our history,” he wrote, “is that the task of merely maintaining strong and sturdy the structures of a constitutional order is unending, the continuing and ceaseless work of every generation. To which I have devoted much of my life.” He found meaning—and his life’s calling—in playing his part in that task. And playing that part in the American context.
The United States of America was, to his mind, the greatest and most miraculous endeavor mankind had ever undertaken in its long quest to get politics right. “America,” as he described her, is “founded on an idea, and the idea is liberty. That is probably the rarest phenomenon in the political history of the world.” And in his heart, my father felt a deep and abiding love for her: “Anybody who, like me…is the son of immigrants,” he said in a 2015 speech, “you know firsthand in your bones what a blessed place America is, and how proud every son of immigrants—like every American—is of the role we have played…in protecting our friends and protecting liberty.” He believed that America was, as Lincoln put it, “the last best hope of Earth.” And he did what he could in his life to guard her and her noblest ideals.
In his column “The Arrow of History,” my father asked the question: “Do you think history is cyclical or directional? Are we condemned to do the same damn thing over and over, generation after generation—or is there hope for some enduring progress in the world order?” His answer: “I don’t know—no one knows—if history has an arrow.” He was right, of course. No one knows the future or the destiny of mankind. But one thing I do know is that if history does have an arrow toward progress, it is not by random chance. It is because of the great efforts and works and sacrifices of good men and women trying to make the world a little bit better for their children to inherit. My father was such a man.
As my father’s son, I will of course never escape my bias in judging his work. But I do feel I’ve been on this earth long enough and spent enough of my years with my nose buried in books and newspapers to say with some standing that my father’s voice was a uniquely insightful and powerful one in our national discourse. I truly believe that the world will be a better place the longer his voice, and its echoes, are heard and read.
My father’s writing, as displayed in this book, is not just thought-provoking but also—and even more impressively—feeling-provoking. Not the feelings of pathos meant to close one’s mind to reason and shut down debate. But rather the emotions of awe, reverence, respect and wonder evoked by the intelligent exploration of the majesty, complexity and expanse of human experience and the universe we inhabit. His writing opens the mind, combining passion with intelligence, beauty with concreteness. In the modern world, those two halves of the human self are all too often completely divorced. Art is rendered meaningless by its self-indulgence and disconnectedness, and politics is rendered mundane by its tawdry intrigues and game-playing.
But when my father writes about the majesty of the cosmos or the elegance of a chess move, I can feel the reality and the weight of their beauty. And when he writes about the importance of democratic institutions in the face of tyranny over the mind, I feel a deeper meaning to politics that is all too often lacking in our day-to-day debates. By intertwining art and politics in this way—in both the style and content of his writing—he elevates each of them to a higher level.
One aspect of my father’s writing that I’ve always particularly appreciated is how well he ends his pieces. He often draws his argument to a summation point, but then adroitly leads it into a final parting question or uncertainty that the reader is left to ponder. There is no doubt about the immediate policy stance he’s advocating, but he subtly acknowledges that a deeper moral or philosophical question still remains. It is so artful and thoughtful a style, one that has always reminded me of my favorite films, novels and other artworks. They don’t tell you exactly how to think; rather, they lead you right to the edge and then, having enlightened you as much as any wise sage can, let you leap off into the unknowable on your own to think about the hard questions that do not—and cannot—have a final answer.
It has always struck me that my father’s writing, in both substance and style, reflected his fundamental instinct for and belief in humility: that the most important and profound things are exactly those about which we can never achieve full understanding. In things beautiful and poetic, he describes that beauty as emerging from its incomprehensibility—whether it be the graceful curveball of a rookie pitcher or the love of a parent for a child. He held back from pretending to understand it fully or analyzing it down to the point of losing its majesty. Similarly, in politics, he abhorred ideologies that claimed to fully understand human nature or how entire complex societies should be reorganized to work better—or even worse, “perfectly.” It was from this “philosophical skepticism,” as he put it, that his political conservatism was born. And it made his brand of conservatism feel uplifting, I think, in a way that conservatism can often lack. It’s not just the argument that “it works better,” but that there is something good and noble in embracing the Socratic dictum “I know that I know nothing” and organizing man’s political life with reverence for those unknowns.
In this book, as in Things That Matter, my father applied this worldview to a breathtaking range of subjects: not just foreign policy, not just domestic, not just social issues, not just issues of art and taste. To everything. And all of it animated by common principles that give it both enlightening reason and moving beauty. His writing broadens one’s thinking and stirs the emotions and shows their essential connection. That is why I think his books will last far beyond the immediacy of today’s politics. This is the kind of book I imagine a parent would give to a child 10, 20, 30 years from now and say, “Here. This is a book that will make you think. And make you feel. Read it.”
That is the ultimate purpose of this book. Yes, it is for all those who heard and read my father and miss him. But even more, it is for those who never had the chance to see him in life. In an interview my father gave in 2013, he spoke about his feeling of purpose in life:
There’s a great line by Tom Stoppard, who said about his own life as a writer and what he tried to do, he said something like, “You know…you put words together all your life, and every once in a while, you get them in the right order and you give the world a nudge.” So I just hope I get the words in the right order every once in a while and give the world a nudge….It’s what I exist to do, really.
He gave the world much more than a nudge in his lifetime. And I believe his words will continue to push the world in a better direction for ages to come.