About Charles
The Point of It All
Books
Commentary
Remembering Charles
Charitable Causes
Â
Charles wrote for the right reasons. Lord knows — and presidents, from right to left, can attest — he didn’t seek invitations to White House dinners or other badges of approval from the powerful. He sought, rather, to provoke us to think, to enlarge our understanding, at times to make us laugh. Like few others, he succeeded, week after week, Friday after Friday, year after year.
For decades, Charles’ words have strengthened our democracy. His work was far-reaching and influential - and while his voice will be deeply missed, his ideas and values will always be a part of our country.
Remember Charles Krauthammer. I will never forget him. The State of Israel and the Jewish people owe him an extraordinary debt of gratitude. We will remember him.
More than just a political pundit, Charles Krauthammer has been a true public intellectual of our age. Like the Harvard-educated psychiatrist that he is, Charles seems to know our country and our culture better than we know ourselves. He’s helped not only conservatives, but all Americans, reason together through our biggest questions with eloquence, brilliance, and charity.
He had a beautiful mind, and he had a wonderful, wonderful way about him. Simply put, I loved this man. I loved his work. I would marvel over not just what he said, but how he would say it.
Charles will be remembered as one of the greatest public intellects of his generation. A true renaissance man, there was no topic too complex for Charles to probe; no party or politician too powerful to challenge. It was Charles’ integrity in his prose and thoughtfulness in his commentary that attracted countless loyal readers and viewers, myself included.
Although he was a gentleman in every sense of the word, cordial, congenial and unfailingly courteous to strangers, Charles did not suffer fools gladly.
Charles Krauthammer, who died Thursday at about 5 p.m. ET, announced his impending departure from this world in the straightforward, clear-eyed, elegant manner that fans had come to expect from him. The loss to America is dwarfed by the loss to his family and friends, but nevertheless it is enormous.
Any Krauthammer commentary was grounded in facts—whether the lessons of history, as in the Middle East, or the dynamic facts of a legislative struggle on Capitol Hill.
Conservatism has lost a giant, a man who not only defended our civilization but represented what’s best in it. He will be missed, and never replaced. RIP.
We’ve collected and excerpted the remembrances of some of the many journalists whose lives he touched.
The prevalence of bloviating, uncivilized screamers makes Charles’s self-effacing reserve especially refreshing. Slyly irreverent yet respectful and civil, he has a classic education and is literate when those attributes are being devalued. He is an inspiration: We wish we knew what Charles knows.
[T]he greatest columnist of our generation—a man of extraordinary moral and physical courage, of intellectual rigor and probity, with a dry wit and a heightened sense of irony.
​
[W]hat overwhelmed me as I sat down to write was my appreciation of Charles the man. Charles was, to be sure, a major public figure who contributed a great deal to his country and his people—as much perhaps as any writer of his generation. But it is Charles the man who was unique.
It turns out Charles wasn’t stating the obvious in 2013. As he did so often over his long career, he was seeing things before the rest of us. He was making an observation simple, profound, and prescient.
It was a far more personal offering than most of his written work and, despite a full catalogue of essays and columns that influenced the thinking of world leaders, it was one of the most memorable pieces in a long and distinguished career.
He was such a good man... In that sense he was truly a role model for me.
In so many ways, Charles showed us how political discourse should be: balanced and rational, measured and informed, with emphasis on facts over feeling.
There are people you meet throughout your life that you just know will leave an impact forever. Charles Krauthammer was one of those people... This place will not be the same without his brilliant wit and analysis.
His always principled stand on the most important issues of our time has been a guiding star in an often turbulent world, a world that has too many superficial thinkers vulnerable to the ebb and flow of fashion.
[H]e 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 Charles more as a diagnostician of our public discontents.
In an age when political commentary is getting shallower and more vituperative, we will especially miss Charles’s style of writing — calm, carefully constructed arguments based on propositions and evidence, tinged with a cutting wit and wry humor but never malice.
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.
I realized that night: That’s not only what I think; that’s how I want to think. That’s how I want to write. I want to be like Charles Krauthammer.
I can say I’m not sure anyone in my lifetime has ever done that better. It is a key role of the intellectual explicator, which is what Charles was nonpareil—to help you understand what you think. He was the most extraordinary person I have ever known, and I have been blessed to know many.
Krauthammer’s writings shaped an entire generation of young conservatives – conservatives who were looking for thoughtful, reasoned explanations of the issues of the day. Krauthammer was a moral and political bellwether.
I was captivated by his clarity, his mordant wit, his breadth of knowledge, his incisiveness, his willingness to entertain all arguments, and his adamantine defense of democracy, freedom, and pluralism.
There was a lot to do. Charles did it with consummate skill for the next quarter-century. He now rests with the fathers, and I imagine Abraham is pleased to have his company, much as the rest of us miss him. Especially on Friday mornings.
If the great theme of his work is the defense of what we proudly used to call Western civilization, the great theme of his life is the cultivation of a civilized mind. With every commentary, he taught us how such a mind worked.
If you were his friend and he inspired you and graced your life as he did mine, count this blessing and then try to create more students of Charles. We need them, desperately.
I never stopped being intimidated by him. But he was deeply kind, even sweet in his way. I got to know him a little bit better over the years that followed, and the more I saw of him the more thoroughly impressive he was: a mensch in every sense.
I first became aware of Charles’ beautiful mind when I read a commencement address he delivered to McGill University, his undergraduate alma mater. His words had such an impact that I can still recall where I was when I read it, although nearly a quarter century has since elapsed.
Charles Krauthammer was in a very real sense a dinosaur — a man who loved to debate (often ferociously) but never felt the need to raise his voice or use a foul word. His class and intellect would never indulge such a thought. He was also efficient while engaged: He sliced and diced opponents with facts eloquently and elegantly presented.
I don’t know how to describe it to non-baseball fans. But there’s a way of communicating the pleasures of the action unfolding on the field with just a smile and a nod. I’ve only been able to do this in my life with my dearly departed father and a few close friends. And Charles.
Baseball was a profound experience with Charles. He said that he loved baseball precisely because it was a slow, “complex, cerebral game that doesn’t lend itself to histrionics.” Complex, cerebral, and no histrionics. Just like Charles Krauthammer.
Krauthammer said in that long-ago interview that in the immediate aftermath of his paralysis, he thought, “The terrible thing is that people are going to judge me now by a different standard... I decided if I could make people judge me by the old standard, that would be a triumph, and that’s what I try to do.” Krauthammer did it. And he became a model for other journalists with disabilities, including this one, to attempt the same.
His writing on U.S. politics inspired and sustained a generation of conservative policymaking; even those who strongly disagreed with him could not deny his influence. His legacy–particularly with regard to the Iraq War, for which he cheered–is worthy of the sort of serious consideration at which he was so preternaturally good. But I will remember Charles Krauthammer first and foremost as a man of deep compassion.
Krauthammer was very much like a Founder. Whether they agreed with him or not, those who knew him commented on his grace, civility, and humor. He combined the character of George Washington, the prudential mind of James Madison, and the wit of Franklin.
There was no modern political writer of comparable skill and insight, no one whom you rushed to read on Fridays to see if you had “gotten” what went on in the preceding week or to see what magnificent insight into the cosmos, baseball or chess he had in store for you. There was Charles, and then there was everyone else.
Charles was a voice of persuasion, of rational discourse, one that cleared the air of the acrid smoke slowly choking us all. While the rest of us debated to win, Charles wanted to convince…..A man of great wit, commanding enormous breadth and depth of knowledge, dedicated to presenting the truth as he sought to persuade others with reason…. He was a man of character, a man of honor, and always, above all, a true gentleman in the best sense of that word.
If liberals are sincere when they say that they wish conservatives were more independent-minded, intellectual and civil…then we need to recognize and mourn for the void that has been ripped into our public discourse by the death of Charles Krauthammer…. Because Krauthammer could alienate both sides with his opinions, he provided that invaluable service to virtually everyone who read enough of his columns to eventually disagree with him.
We who had the privilege to work for Charles learned from his example the right way to write about Washington and, more important, the right way to live here too.
He believed the things he believed fully and strongly and they were his principles because he had given them a great deal of thought. And I think that's one of the many, many things that distinguished him.
It's hard to overstate what the loss of Charles Krauthammer means for the conservative movement, but also for the state of rational, intellectual, civil political discourse.
