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.
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
he invited me to lunch. i tried to engage him, like, on the contras. what are you gonna do? and all of a sudden, what i m hearing from him is this story about how when he and nancy were in the guest house of president marcos of the philippines, there was a giant spider on the ceiling, and the question was how to get him off without scaring nancy. and 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? he says it was only later that he realized what eluded him about reagan. he had no need ever to show how smart he was. he knew exactly what i was asking. he didn t want to talk about it. and if you thought he was a dunce, he didn t care, cause he knew that he wasn t. it would also be some time before krauthammer embraced a conservative domestic policy, taxes, welfare, small government, and other reagan-esque sins. it took me about a decade. i was skeptical of tax cuts. i was skeptical of smaller g
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
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.