power scenes. and you know you re lunching with one of the d.c. power players if his caricature s on the wall. i got another scenario for you. today charles krauthammer s holding forth on the nuances of power. i can t wait to hear this. i know where this is going. not the political power of the white house ten blocks away. he s talking about the washington nationals. and whether they can power a late season playoff run. the nats finish 14-2. one game ahead of cincinnati. right. i was wondering where he was going. i think charles and i are both people that write about politics to support our baseball habits. newly minted fox news contributor george will has written two books on baseball. do you remember when you first met charles? i think it was 1982 because he was then at the new republic and wrote a cover story on me.
possessions. wherever they are. and i thought this was a really good idea. and i m going to give it a name. he invented the reagan doctrine. not reagan. and now everyone s got to have a doctrine. yeah. charles has made it mandatory to come up with a doctrine. for every president. but even after reagan s 49-state landslide, krauthammer was not sure what to make of reagan the man who he met at the white house in 1986. he invited me to lunch. i tried to engage him like on the contras, what will you do? all of a sudden i m hearing from him is a story about how when he and nancy were in the guest house of the president of the philippines there was a giant spider on the ceiling and the question was, how do get him off without scaring nancy. i m thinking, i don t get it. this is the most successful president in my lifetime. he seems to be out to lunch. what s going on?
colleague, and friend. but he only agreed to cooperate on a fox news reporting profile reluctantly as part of the publicity campaign for, yes, a new book. things that matter is not a confessional memoir it is a collection of pieces from the pulitzer prize winning columnist or maybe it s more than that. are you decoding my book? i am decoding it right now. like it s all about me. it s all written in hieroglyphics. it s not as impenetrable as hieroglyphics. let s start with part one. it is titled personal. and in there, the first column is really an incredibly moving piece about your brother. marcel krauthammer died of cancer several years ago. he was 59. charles writes this about his older brother. quote, he taught me most everything i ever learned about every sport i ever played. he taught me how to throw a
they met in havana, moved to rio and eventually new york city where charles was born in 1950. when he was 5, the family moved to montreal. but they spent summers at the family cottage in long beach, new york. charles recalls spending every day with his brother on the field, on the court or in the water. i don t think i owned a shirt until i was 21. all the pictures, the family movies, my father is shirtless. my brother shirtless. i am. we re outside in the sun. i read on the beach. that s where i got all my knowledge is reading. of course there was reading and studying. the father who spoke nine languages even carried his son s stellar second grade report card around in his coat pocket. his motto is to know everything. i want you to learn everything. you don t have to do everything but you have to know everything. he thought that was part of life. that life did not include a tv. says the cable news pundit. my father wouldn t allow it. once a week, sunday night we go
to the neighbors to watch the ed sullivan show. that was the one concession of the television. inspired by uncles who were doctors, marcel krauthammer went to medical school. it was assumed charles would follow but as a 19-year-old senior, the internationally renowned canadian university, he was bitten by a different bug. political journalism. with campus intrigue, the editorship of the newspaper was controlled by the student council. i had been elected to the student council, and the paper was becoming unreadable. it was just it looked like it came out of the soviet union. you just couldn t read it. so we engineered a coup to fire the editor and realized we have to find an editor. so they looked around and decided it s going to be me. so i said, wait. i ve never worked on a paper. they said oh, it s a detail.