Over the course of his 34 years at The Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer wrote some 1,600 columns on subjects that ranged from his passion for chess, his frustrated love of the Nationals, his affection for dogs to, above all, politics. That is, politics in the most elevated sense of that word — not simply mundane partisan maneuvering, but the grand design of the Constitution and the role of America in the world. As Krauthammer explained in the introduction to his 2013 collection of columns, “Things That Matter,” “Politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything because, in the end, everything . . . lives or dies by politics. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. . . . Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians.”
Krauthammer was, by his own account, an improbable, accidental columnist. But for four decades he served as an unswerving bulwark against the barbarians — endlessly erudite, charming, independent-minded and, as the following inadequate excerpts will demonstrate, remarkably relevant.
On column writing
“An anniversary of sorts,” Dec. 18, 2009
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 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 Dec. 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 . . .
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.
On family and mortality
“Ten pounds of poetry,” June 28, 1985
Three weeks ago Daniel Pierre Krauthammer, our first, entered the world. It was a noisy and boisterous entry, as befits a 10-pound…
