i wrote one editorial 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,
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.
so help me god. the new president was promising big changes, even starting the world anew. reagan s inaugural truly signaled a great clash of ideas. in this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem. government is the problem. and the new republic was right in the midst of it. well, it was overwhelmingly liberal. the writers were the best of that era. i was still a democrat at the time, a traditional liberal democrat, a great society liberal, but i was pretty hard lined on the soviets. it s hard for people to believe now, but the democratic party had a very powerful wing that was very anti-soviet. but those democrats were a dying breed, and krauthammer found himself agreeing more with president reagan than with his liberal readers. i ended up supporting just about every element of the reagan foreign policy, and boy, did we get reaction from our liberal readership. i wrote one editorial
as the saying goes, he wrote 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
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