foreign policy issues. he was now crediting him with a breakthrough insight that changed the calculus of the cold war. i realized that what reagan had done without a grand master plan was to challenge what, at the time, was called the brezhnev doctrine, and that was whenever we take over a country, it becomes a communist, it s ours. and all of a sudden, what reagan had done is to challenge that and to say, no, you don t get to keep what you got. we re gonna challenge your possessions wherever they are. and i thought, this is a really good idea. and i m gonna give it a name. he invented the reagan doctrine, not reagan, and now everyone has got to have a doctrine. [ chuckles ] 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 still not sure what to make of reagan the man, who he met at the white house in 1986.
about what he knew. his first article, the expanding shrink, protested how psychoanalysis was creeping into political discourse. for example, president carter s famous malaise speech that blamed the horrible economy on americans crisis of confidence. they liked it and they published it, and i got lucky again. it was republished on the op-ed page of the washington post. it was the first time any article in the new republic had been picked up by the post. krauthammer wrote a few more pieces for the magazine and might have joined the staff, except he got an even more intriguing offer as a speech writer for vice president walter mondale. that lasted six months. and when we got totally crushed in the general election, i got a call from the new republic, and they said, we think you re unemployed now. would you like to come work for us? i said yes right away and started on the day reagan was sworn in. that s the first day i started at the new republic as a writer. so help me go
excoriating the nuclear freeze that caused the largest number of canceled subscriptions in the history of the magazine, which i was very proud of. [ chuckles ] what was his writing like? it s always been extremely step by step logical. if you can read a column by charles about something and you can still disagree with him after you re through with it, then you know you must have a pretty good argument. [ chuckles ] those arguments had conservative columnists like william f. buckley wondering why krauthammer and the new republic were not supporting reagan s reelection in 1984. what buckley was writing was, why don t you give up on the democrats, and i was still one of those who wanted to sort of save the soul of the democratic party and maintain this conservative element of which the magazine really was. krauthammer fired off a letter to buckley, writing, reagan still had a lot to answer for on foreign policy, and his domestic policy was far
and his domestic policy was far worse. the catalogue of sins we believe the president has committed is too long to recapitulate here. but krauthammer tells me he privately wanted reagan to beat his old boss, walter mondale. but i had worked for mondale in 1980. i liked him and had respect for him. and as a personal matter, there s a kind of a matter of honor. i didn t want to vote against a man for whom i had respect and affection. so you have a vote reagan or mondale. that s the only presidential election where i left that line blank. left it blank? but if i had been, you know, the swing vote, i would have obviously have voted for reagan. it was a turning point in krauthammer s transition from the political left to the political right. and just a few months after the election, i wrote something called the reagan doctrine. it was a time magazine column, and it was provocative. for awhile krauthammer had praised reagan on a number of
foreign policy issues. he was now crediting him with a breakthrough insight that changed the calculus of the cold war. i realized that what reagan had done without a grand master plan was to challenge what, at the time, was called the brezhnev doctrine, and that was whenever we take over a country, it becomes a communist, it s ours. and all of a sudden, what reagan had done is to challenge that and to say, no, you don t get to keep what you got. we re gonna challenge your possessions wherever they are. and i thought, this is a really good idea. and i m gonna give it a name. he invented the reagan doctrine, not reagan, and now everyone has got to have a doctrine. [ chuckles ] 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 still not sure what to make of reagan the man, who he met at the white house in 1986.