Special. Charles krauthammer ms point. Our friend and colleague passed away six months ago, leaving behind his wife, robyn, and son, daniel. Charles had been working on aleh book called the the point of it all. He asked his son to finish it. I was surprised how the book begins, considering its a topic charles really didnt want to talk about when jaime interviewed him a few years back. Is there a way we could talk about your family . You are married, youre happily married, you have a kid. You dont want to do that at all . It is a great, interesting topic, but ive never done it. Ive written 2 millionon words, and you dont see any of it. Theres a reason. Okay. An all right, lets lets start again. I dont deny that i have a wife. Yada, yada, yada. En but i never wrote about he. Except for once, i never wrote about daniel. When he was born, i wrote a column about his birth. And it was a good column, and it was nice, and then, when he was 1, i wrote one on his first birthday. And then i realized, im never going to do this again. This is using him. This is going to be his vision of himself. Through mymy eyes. And i simply wont doim it. So other than a reference to him here or there, i never wrote about him again, ever. Two things in 28 years. Im not a touchyfeely guy. Thats. Probably why i quit psychiatry. If youre not into feelings and emotions, all the back story, then you ought to be doing something else. Bret you see we have that cut to the camera in the middle, because he didnt want to talk about it. This book, though, leads with the column about you. Reveries of a newborn father. June 28th, 1985. Three weeks ago, Daniel Pierre krauthammer, our first, entered the world. It was a noisy and boisterous entry, as befits a 10pound krauthammer. It has been just as noisy and boisterous since. I had been warned by friends and foes that life would never be the same. They were right. He put it in the collection. It was, at the time, i took it over, publishers and editors wanted it to be at the front, and i think my dad wouldve agreed with that. I felt it was. It was the right thing to do. I felt, you know, he expressed a lot of his love by protecting and by not wanting to take any advantage of the thing that was most dear to him for any purposes other than the love itself, which is why i hear friends so much talking about me or my mom. I am the one making the calls, and i love him for that protection, but i would rather celebrate him then, you know, be sheltered myself. Bret yeah. But when you see him steering me through, what do you think . Daniel it so interesting to me, because, you know, he saa touchyfeely guy, and on the one hand, its very true. You know, the most wry and ironic and funny, you know, he doesnt get mushy and softly on the outside about anything, but i think, at its core, he was all heart, and i think everyone who knows him knew that, which i think is why people were so drawn to him. You know, i think one of his Favorite Movie characters of all time was Humphrey Bogart in casablanca. On the outside, all hardhearted and the coldhearted realist, but deep down, he always does the right thing and cares deeply about everyone he loves. And i think, you know, my dad, a lot of the privacy was wanting to keep the most precious, important things to him just to him. Because, you know, i think everyone deals with this, how much do you wear your feelings on your sleeve . Its been very difficult, making the decision to take on the book, to put the very personal things that i put in the book in there, and to talk with you about the book, but now that hes gone from this life, i believe hed say im doing the right thing. What do i do . Seems my job as the father, a verb which must count as one of the nations more inventive creations. How exactly to father. I really dont know. The Womens Movement to which the idea owes its currencys right to insist that the father do more. But more of what . Ive been asking myself that lately as i rock him and hold him and speak to him in the greatest of tones. We both know, we all three know the truth. Nature has seemed to it that anything i can do, she can do better. Mine is literally a holding action. Theti column is poignant on several levels. It captures the awe and uselessness of fathers at the beginning, we have nothing to do, nothing to offer, but on another level, your father was not able to do the 3 00 a. M. Changing in feedings. Daniel i guess where you are going, you know, my father had some bad luck and his life was different in my life was different, but how he lived his life, you know, you dont let things get in your way. Okay, there you go. Daniel he made my life wonderful, and he didnt let what happened to him affect me. Bret did they think of having more children . Daniel i think they mentioned they wanted me to have a sister or a brother, but apparently that was not to be. Bret i was not in the cards. Daniel yeah. Bret your dad called your mother his coauthor in life. Daniel my father and my mother shared an incredible bond andar their lives were intertwid way. They met when they were both grad students at oxford, and his college, which was an all mens college, and my mothers, which was an all womens college, had both just bought a manor house, so my dad, he saw this form, check or you want to live, singlesex, singlesex, coed, check. So that was the beginning of it. So they met there. They began the relationship, and they were apart for a while because my dad went back to america to go to harvard meds school, and my mother went on to practice law in london and in paris, and that candle stayed aflame, and then she moved to the states to get back together with him, and they were married. Bret and between there, there was the accident. Daniel you know, love is love, and i think thats really the whole story from both their point of view, that that was something to deal with, and that was meant to be a fact in life, but thats not what mattered. Bret coming up. Daniel the last thing he said to me about it is dont publish it if it is not worthy. In a land not so far away, people are saving hundreds on the most Reliable Network with xfinity mobile. They can choose from the latest phones or bring their own. And because they get nationwide 5g at no extra cost, they live happily ever after. Again again your wireless. Your rules. Your way to stay closer together this holiday season. Switch and save up to 400 a year on your wireless bill. And get 150 off when you buy a samsung a series phone. Learn more at xfinitymobile. Com. Bret when Charles Krauthammer died last summer, Daniel Krauthammer inherited the job off completing the book his father left unfinished. Charles previous book, things that matter, was a huge best seller. The point of it all would be, in a sense, the final word from influential writer and commentator. Daniel wondered if he was up to the task. Daniel the point of it all started as his next collection, and he also had a book on Foreign Policy and big ideas that he was working on, and those two projects, he was moving ahead with, when his Health Crisis struck, but as things were getting better, we saw, or thought we saw the light at the end of the tunnel, i had jerryrigged all that stuff in his hospital room to work on his computer so he got back to working on the book, on organizing it, starting to lay it out more, and when we got the final prognosis, it was only a few weeks we had, and he entrusted it to me to finish it for him, and the last thing he said to me about it, dont publish it if it is not worthy. And i took that to heart in a way that is more important to me than anything. Bret he chose most of the pieces, but you chose some, too. Daniel he had put together a majority of the pieces that are in the book now, but i also read through, quite literally, everything he ever wrote, and also speeches, transcripts, interviews, and found some very important pieces, filled in some important, kind of profound areas that needed to be in the spirit bret this is like a puzzle you are putting together here, and moving pieces around. Daniel yeah. It felt a little bit a rubiks cube. I was trying to get all of the right colors in the right places, but a piece moved. Because the book is so expensive andd covers us on many topics, everything from baseball and chess toe, politics and life and fatherhood, it all needed to have an underlying tissue and core that ran through the whole thing. Bret daniel explains that core in his introduction to the point of it all. 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. Keeping politics out of it was the point of my fathers lifes work. Individuals must define their own meeting. Bret he obviously did not to be defined by his disability at all. Did not want to talk about it, we did not want to shoot it in a way that it even appeared on television. In fact, there were many people who watched fox and never knew that he was in a wheelchair. You were hesitant to include anything that focused on that, but in the end, you chose to do it. Why did you do it . Daniel i tried to do it the way he lived with it. You dont hide it, but you dont say this is what defines me. There were some columns he wrote, and i found them inspiring, and i wanted them to be in the book, which, in the end, was how i think he would have wanted it. This is a statement of principle that charles submitted as a member of president george w. Bushs council on bioethics, during a debate on the creation of cloned human embryos for research. 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. But i am not only a patient, i am also a father, and what i have said to myself about this issue and what i think we ought to say to other people who suffer similar problems and disabilities is we have children, and we want to raise them in a world, we want to bequeath 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 more rules that we have observed for generations in order that people like me can walk. Daniel there was one thing he said actually in your last interview with him. Everyone has their cross to bear, everyone, mine is just more physical. Ander that really touched me, because i think everyone doese. Have something, and a lot of it, we cant see. Here we are onin a the set. [laughter] bret was there ever a time growing up that you said to the other kids, dads can do this, my dad can do this, he lamented at some point . Daniel notik really. How was it . Okay. Daniel of course you are aware of it. But some kids fathers arent there. Some kids fathers are absent or bad fathers peer, hole, i count myself the luckiest son in the. It was all on purpose. Daniel he was really in many ways a Camp Counselor to my childhood. Pass it around. Pass it around. Daniel he always made sure i was outdoors doing something. Okay, now listen up. Does everybody here know howt to play . Yeah we are not going to play it. Daniel whether it was skiing or swimming or learning archery, and i think this was very much how he grew up, always outside. We would go to my grandmothers house in long beach, and we would have two weeks of krauthammer, play stickball, all of the things he did when he was a kid. That was a huge amount ofga fun, and i think he really enjoyed imparting all of that to me. He was also insistent that i learn how to ski. Back down the slopes. Daniel we went out ski vacations all the time i was growing up, and he would have a hot chocolate at the bottom of the hill, but be watching him make sure i was learning all the right moves, knew how to hockey stop, and he wanted me to ski elegantly, not recklessly. Like that. Bret for someone with your level of paralysis, you are able to do a lot. W y your car is not exactly an awful lot vehicle. The first 20 minutes of sheer terror. They just cant believe this thing is going to work and we arehi going to go where i intend it to go. And it has the ejection seat. That is that red button. Bret i got in that thing, like, dont touch anything. The radio is fine and the air conditioner is great. Daniel yeah, i grewto up in those vans. It was kind of cool, theyre all of these buttons on the dashboard, but in terms of my dad driving, it was a really, you know, more [laughs] more the aggressive driver of having grown up on canadian ice. Whenever it snowed in d. C. And i everyone kind of, you know, running around yeah, like the sky is falling, hed drive to work without even snowplows coming out yet. Bret i remember, he was leaving the garage one time, ans i walked out, and i waved at him, and he said, bret, just a word to the wise, dont wave at me. Its very dangerous. Daniel got to keep both hands on the wheel and the break. Yeah. Yeah. One k of my probably one of my earliest memories in that van, s the bridge that i never been over, and my dad said, thend statue of liberty, and im looking, andid i cant see comig he says, okay, do this. To take all of the pillows of course id been napping on stuff them under your, sit high and straight in the chair, really tight, and as soon as i i was ready, he then pushed on thehe brakes, slow down to a crawl, and i have this perfect view of the statue of liberty. Meanwhile, hundreds of cars piling up behind us, hawking and yelling and trying to pass us, and my dad could not care less about that. Neither did i he knew i was getting something to make my life more. Spiegelman my son was small, i would take him skiing on weekends. On the east coast, you have to drive a long way to find a place to ski. So the rides are about three hours each way. He is a wonderful mine, curious, and he would say, dad, teach me something. Okay, you pick a topic. Hed say, the constitution. Tell me what you know. So i talked to him for three hours about the constitution. I remember once, he said, history of the jews. Bret [laughs] daniel there was a history of the jews part one and two. I love those memories. We had lots of long car rides. Bret so the time in the car was precious. Daniel a lot of the backes part of my knowledge comes from remembering the way that he told things. He understood it so well and told it in such a cohesive story that kind of grand sense of history. Bret i mean, i knew he could fill to the commercial break, but i did not know he could fill three hours daniel i know. We could fill an audiobook recording that day, but no, i would be the sole audience for that. But yeah, he knew an immense amount about a lot of things. Bret after the break. Ng it reaches a point we have a real life, a wife and a child, and you say to yourself, what am i doing here . Live from americas news headquarters, im ashley strohmier. Merry christmas to you and your family at home. Investigators are still going through the ruins of what was once a busy downtown nashville area. Authorities still dont know who is responsible for this mornings rv explosion or why. The blast was felt for miles, three people were hurt and treated at local hospitals. All are reportedly stable tonight. Police are looking into tissue that was found at the scene, but right now, there are no known fatalities. President trump spending christmas at his florida resort, the future of a massive covid relief bill is still up in the air and government funding bill arrived in florida last night, and the president doesnt sign the bill, denying checks for millions of americans in need, as well as a government shutdown. Im ashley strohmier. Now back to Charles Krauthammer making his point. For all of your headlines, log onto foxnews. Com. Bret Charles Krauthammer was best known for writing about politics, the power, the policies, the people who dominate the news. The point of it all, not any of that. To charles,ne the point of it al was the stuff that folks not politically obsessed lived for. Family, friends, a day at the ballpark, a good movie, a game of chess. Well, maybe not chess. Its a poison. [laughter] i mean, you reach a point where you are on the internet and playing chess in the middle the night and you realize you are in a motel room. [laughter] you know you hit bottom and you need an intervention. Daniel for chess . You cancel your subscription and dont do it again. Bret thisu is one of my favorites. Im talking to him on the back porch, by the bay, about chess, and hes really getting into it. I mean, really getting into it, to the point where ill asked hi, do you go over the top . Yeah, i have binges. This has happened to me since i was about 20. I go into it for a few years, then i have to quit, then i come back. I think orwell once wrote, you have a promising young man with a bright future, andou you wanto destroy him, teach him chess. Bret did you ever play chess with him . Daniel i played a lot when i was a kid. Bret was a good . Daniel i was all right. I was not as good as him. He taught me come and we played a lot. Maybe i got turned off of it by seeing where it led. It reaches a point where you have a wife and a child, ive got a job, what am i doing here . I gave it up about three years ago. In part, it is because of you, because now that i do special report every night, we used to meet on mondayno nights, andy it would be too exhausting. Bret he blamed his lack of chess play on me. Daniel l yeah, thank you, by the way. But no, i remember when he mentioned there, his monday night chess club. A room in the house, monday nights, there have three or four or five games going at a time, and no talking. Genius, insanity, august 20th, 1993. Chess enjoys and not on holy not with madness, oddness, isolation. I remember a psychiatrist meeting at a chess club come he sat down, looked around, and said, jeez, i could run a group here. Daniel he loved to think, and he loved puzzles. There was an abstract beauty to hit that, to him, almost like parts. Bret which is how we look at baseball, too. Daniel yeah. Suffering a relapse and loving it. Its one thing to root for your sons Little League team. I geton it, after all, he is yor kid and you pay for the glove, the uniform, the helmet, the bat, and when he turns 9, you have a stake in him and his te team. What possible stake to grown men have in me features of 25 perfect strangers, vagabond mercer mercenaries, played obscene sums to play a game for half a year. Ive been a baseball fan most of my life. Whyy should i care about these tobacco spitting, adjusting players who would not care about me why . I have i no idea. Daniel reading what he wrote about it, he had such an appreciation for the raw beauty, a perfect double play, or throwing just the right pitch to just the right batter, at just the t rigt moment, so there was a little kid in him, for sure, that love going to the ballpark and eating hot dogs, but i think there was a deeper and more soulful meaning, that there is something innately beautiful, and what he compared to music or number theory or art, that really expresses something in the human soul. Bret heso called opening day a religious holiday. Daniel yeah. Bret did he impart that love of baseball to you . Daniel he did. I cant claim to be as fanatic a fan as he was, but i grew up playing baseball, Little League. He was probably at just about every single game and practice i ever played. Bret is that right . Daniel yeah. And we went to ball games all the time. The orioles when i was little, and then the nats once they moved to washington. It was kind of our time together. Bret he loved the movies. Daniel yes. His favorites were always casablanca and north by northwest. He could recite them line for line. And with me, we had this tradition of every christmas day, we are jewish, so we did not have a whole lot to do, he would rent a whole bunch of videos and we would lock ourselves in our tv room and watch movies from dawn till dusk, and my mom would flip a sandwich under the door every once in a while. But he would always choose a theme, whether westerns or scifi, it would be the great classics of that genre. This is kind of how he taught me the great movie cannon, so to speak. But yeah, he just come he loved movies. Bret up next. Did the kids in the class go, man, your dad is a downer, why did he tell me that . L get you ay from all this pain. Its soulful and stirring. And tom hanks is magnificent. Its hard finding your way home. Unfortunately, we are still limiting inperson appointments due to the pandemic and well need to move your fathers visit to a later date. Were sorry. Hola, papa. American Cancer Society helpline. How can i help you . Learning is hard work. Hard work requires character. Learning begins in faith. It must move upwards toward the highest thing, learning is hard work and freedom is essential to learning. Its principles must be studied and defended. Learning, character, faith, and freedom these are the inseparable purposes of hillsdale college. Bret Daniel Krauthammer was born in 1985. By the time he was in high school, the cold war was over, the nation was safe, and the dotcom economy was booming. Charles knew it couldnt last. But how do you get a bunch of teenagers to listen . Heres how it works. There is a Spring Campaign and a fall campaign. Bret did he know all your friends . Daniel yeah, everyone always came to our house. Speak with your turkey. Daniel he was one of the favorite dads on the block. I gave a lecture at my sons high school in the late 90s. Ik i was like a prophet, the end is near. I was trying to make i was try to impress upon them, what a wondrous age, 17, having trouble getting a date is not a message you are going to accept. Bret do you remember that . Daniel i do, vaguely. He did feel like b 90s were an anomaly to history in the grd ideologies and things we have to fight for and protect. The 90s felt like everything is great. Bret so to the kids in the class go, man, your dad is a downer, why did he tell me that . Daniel yeah, i think what also happened when i was in high school, was september 11th. Just before bat speech was just before, and i remember the other day it took him three hours to drive toma my high school which normally takes 15 minutes. He picked me up, and i remember a lot of teachers ones my friens going to ask him, what does this mean . And he said, this means things are serious, and in retrospect, that was kind of the book and to that bubble, that time when all of us kids just thought that this is the way it was. Bret charles never wrote with more urgency than in the wake of the terror attacks. Your dad was an advocate for muscular response to post9 11. Did he look back and say maybe we shouldnt have been that aggressive . Daniel i think his words speak for themselves pretty well in the book. Iraq was, of course, problematic. Critics completel conveniently s had broader support from congress, the highest ranking Foreign Policy figures in the obama administration, john kerry, hillary clinton, chuck hagel, biden. Sanctions that f would come in short order, have restored Saddam Hussein to full economic and regional power, well positig him, post sanctions, to again threaten his neighbors and restart his programam peered i suspect history will see bush as a man who, by trial and error, but also with precedents and principal, established the structures that will enable us to prevail. Daniel there is a lot of secondguessing that happened in all of the years since. A there were a lot of places alont the way that things could have and should have been done differently. He did always retain the view that we needed a strong Foreign Policy that was also careful, and i think that is something that is sometimes people paper over. He was very careful and thoughtful, in terms of both not wanting america to extend blood and treasure where it was not it also not waiting too long before something would come back to harm our country directly. Bret what is notable about the book, so much of what charles wrote, whether during the obama, bush, or reagan administrations, remains relevanth today. In some instances, more than ever. Thought police on patrol. April 11th, 2014. Two months ago, a petition bearing more than 110,000 signatures was delivered to the washington post. Demanding a ban on any article questioning global warming. The petition arrived the day before publication of myio colu. Which consisted off precisely that heresy. The column ran as usual, but i was gratified by the show of intolerance because it perfectly illustrated my argument, that the leftar is no longer trying o win the debate, but stopping debate altogether. Vanishing from Public Discourse any and all opposition. The proper word for that attitude is totalitarian. Daniel you saw the 20th century totalitarianism, communism, radical isla islam im that matter, going to level humn civilization, they thought to change human nature. In the american context, he saw liberalism is not nearly that dangerous, but having those same themes of being a little too utopian. He feared that out of whatever good intentions, you could have a state that grew and squashed the individual, and that is what he wanted to avoid. Bret he wrote that the founding of the United States was a miracle. Every fourth of july. Daniel yeah, the fourth of july party at our summerhouse on the chesapeake bay. We would do all of the hot dogs and crab cakes and fireworks and all of that, but the centerpiece of the entire event was a Group Reading of the declaration of independence. It was always an extraordinarily moving event. You would think it could be kind of cheesy or hokey, but you read those words, and you realize, men were betting their lives on this. He saw his role largely as reminding us that it doesnt just stick around, inevitably, that it has to be guarded and has to be passed down to each generation. In the book, he really gets into the nature of what liberal democracy means and why that is letting america flourish. Let us begin on thanksgiving by giving thanks that we are not french. And i say this with no malice. I mean it this way. They both had glorious, liberating revolutions, but ours was not cursed by excessive rationalism. Nor by its twin, hatred of religion. The American Revolution repatriated liberty and established a new politicalre order. But its ambitions stop there. It left the weekend alone. Daniel he is very clear eyed. He sees threats to democracy, to america, to our promises of ats superpower, our way of life, but he also had a confidence in america, and he believed that we would figure it out. Bret kind of the same feeling on the porch reading the declaration of independence. Daniel absolutely. He had a very big picture view of the world, of history, and i think that is what made his political analysis of a different order. He wasnt just talking aboutut e politics of this or that scandal or this election, it was what does this mean in the grand scheme of everything . And that is another layer of why i wanted to finish this book for my dad, to put it out there, because i think his ideas can apply at any time anyplace. Bret its hard not to come away from that thinking that he was a man of true faith. Right . Thats next. It is christmas time, and what would christmas be without the usual platoon of annoying had a fathers rising annually to strip christmas of any christian context. I was struck byri the fact that you almost never find Orthodox Jews complaining about a christmas crush in a public square. That is because their children come steeped i in the richness f their own religious tradition, they are not threatened by christian celebrating their religion and public, they are enlarged by it. Merry christmas to all. Bret Charles Krauthammer told me he was not very c religious. But theres more to the story. Danielwikipedia describes you wish, but not religious. That is a very fair characterization. My father was a religious jew, and he said i cannot make you religious come i cannot force you, but i want to make sure you are not ignorant, then you wont have any choice. I studied hebrew, the religious texts and scripture. I studied and made my own choice. I chose differently than my father. But the education he gave me had the h inevitable effect of attaching me to a culture that i find precious. Bret i found that fascinating. Having attended that beautiful Funeral Service in the synagog synagogue, that he planned himself, its hard not to come away from that thinking that he wasas a man of true faith, righ . Daniel it was a very complex and subtle religiosity and spirituality and identity he had. His own family history, the peoples history, the culture, the language, all the texts, the great traditions of it bret your father and mother were into music . Daniel they created organization that sought to find and save and revive jewish music, Classical Music written by jewish composers in a jewish style that had otherwise been lost to history and to bring it back to perform at the Kennedy Center here in d. C. My father also cofounded the hebrew high school, specifically so i could have what he thought was what i needed, in full or hebrew and jewish education, and he has been involved in a lot of different works of jewish charities, particularly in education and culture, and so that Heritage Court to him and so important to him. We do not use electrical devices on the sabbath. As a result, when we sat down to the last sabbath meal for the end of the e day, we relied for illumination light from the windows. As the day waned, the light began to die. And when it came time for the hebrew recitation, three times of the 23rd psalm, there was so little light that i could no longer read. To this day, whatever i hear the 23rd psalm, i am filled with the most profound memories of father and family, of tranquility and grace, in gentle, gathering darkness. Bret as his son, how would you describe his relationship with god . Daniel his sense of god was kind of the grandest possible sense, remove from a personal god who knows you and me, involves himself in ournd lives. He gott there, both through the abstract thought and beauty of the jewish religion and astrophysics and thinking about the universe, and he often liked to quote einsteins view of god, the same with a lot of his nature come of how miraculous it is that we live in a universe owwhere all the physical love, o allow life to exist, to come about, to think, to have consciousness, that if one does not have some kind of reverence for that, then youre missing something. Bret he obviously passedth that on, that reverence, to you. Daniel ive had o my own religious journey, not completely dissimilar to my dad. I grew up more religious household. He had wanted me to have that structure early on, which im very thankful for, but then began to think on my own about what exactly what i believe. I would say i have a similar sense of deep reverence for the unknown, but for judaism. I feelal extremely grateful to have that jewish identity, and thats from my dad and my mom. Bret and it has helped heal with his loss. Daniel yeah, you know, its a way to connect with him. I dont know if or where god comes into it, but i do know that i feel closer to him because of what our traditions give. Bret when we return. It is the one part of the book my father wouldnt have included if he were still alive. Fr your family. To your teachers. In that spirit of giving, chevys proud to give our employee discount to everyone. The chevy price you pay,. Is what we pay. Not a cent more. Because giving,. And giving back, is what the holidays are all about. Use the chevy employee discount for everyone to get a total value of over eight thousand four hundred dollars on this silverado. Get the chevy employee discount for everyone today. I try never to use the word eye. Columnists use that word all the time andti every time they do, its a failure. Speak of the truth is charles did sometimes write about himself and when daniel dug up some of those pieces he didnt see failure. The final chapter of the book is called a speaking in the first person. Its a one part of the book that i know my father wouldnt have included if he were still alive but i thought about this a great deal and i wanted to stomach the world to see some of that inner man. Tso this last chapter has some very personal writings that havent been seen before where he talks about my mother, he talks about his challenges in life and choosing to take chances. If you decide to be a Nuclear Scientist and you know you wont be able to be a shakespearean scholar, im here to tell youst that thats false. Nt i started my life as a doctor and i spent seven years as a doctor and a psychiatrist and one day at the end of the 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 didnt love the law when she quit as well. We left our home and we came to washington to seek our fortune. She became an artist and sculptor and i became a writer and columnist. C things have turned out rather well. Dont be afraid to choose. Choose what you love, and if you dont love what youve chosen, choose again. And it ends with my eulogy to him which was a very hard decision whether to put that in or not. Its something i wanted to hold dear and precious, those things that were just my gifts to him. But i want the world to know what kind of man he was. 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 both the life that you want, that you intend. Dont be defined by what lifet throws at you and you cannot control. Except the hand you are dealt g with grace and then go on to play that hand as joyously and industriously and vigorously as you can. Like his father daniel attended harvard and oxford and stanford, two. Hes worked stints in Silicon Valley and put his life on hold to care for his dad, finished his book and launch a website, charleskrauthammer. Com to preserve and advance legacy. It was a purity and simplicity of his love for me that was his greatest gift his love was full, unadulterated, unconditionall ud allencompassing. He really liked the way that he ended pieces, why . He has a way of drawing you logically to the end point of his argument but then he steps back for a minute and leaves you with an uncertainty to ponder, whether its anything about bioethics or the nature of the universe and god and space, that e there are mysteries that we dont know now and we may never know and that may be the definina partof what means to b. My father has not made step into the greatest of them all. He did not know what laid ahead for him and he didnt pretend to know and neither do i. I dont 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. Thats our story. Merry christmas to all and happy new year. Charles my friend, we miss you. This is bethlehem, the birthplace of and the sight of the very first christmas. Millions of christians come here every year to worship and today the site remains contested under Palestinian Authority control, walled off from jerusalem. We drive away from the church in bethlehem, moving back towards israel and you see this. A massive wall with guard towers, a wall separates