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
the fight against hitler and sounded the alarm over communism. politics trumping science. that might explain why krauthammer traded a big-time medical career for a one-way ticket to washington and why, once here, his eyes locked on to a help wanted ad in the political opinion magazine the new republic. i showed it to my wife, and she said, why don t you apply? said, well, how can i apply? i ve never written anything, don t know anybody. she said, you write it, i ll hand-deliver it. i was intrigued, so i called him. michael kinsley was looking for a managing editor for the left-leaning magazine. was there something in his application, something during that phone call that made you want to bring him down? it was mainly the fact that he was a psychiatrist, because he had no writing samples. well, what did you see in him, though? you know, i just enjoy talking to him so much. i had this feeling he must be able to write this down. krauthammer gave it a shot.
a new book. things that matter is not a confessional memoir or scandalous kiss-and-tell. it s a collection of newspaper and magazine 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 entirely about me. [ laughs ] but it s all written in hieroglyphics. well, it s not quite as impenetrable as hieroglyphics. let s start with part one of your book, and it is titled personal. and in there, the first column is really an incredibly moving piece about your brother. marcel krauthammer died of cancer. he was 59. charles writes this about his older brother. he taught me most everything i ever learned about every sport i ever played. he taught me how to throw a football, hit a backhand, grip a nine iron, field a grounder, dock a sailboat in the tailing wind. and how we played. it was paradise.
years off? no. i knew that would be fatal. it was not a question. cause you just couldn t survive. yeah, i mean, life would be over. it s a little early for life to be over. so while nobody had heard of someone with krauthammer s injury standing up to the rigors of a med school curriculum, krauthammer convinced harvard to let him try. amazingly, mere weeks after his accident, he resumed classes while still in his hospital bed. i was lying on my back, couldn t move. the professors would come in, repeat their lectures and project slides on the ceiling, cause i had asked the medical school to let me stay with my class. and you read by laying on your back. one of the cardiac residents hooked up a plexiglas plate above my head that he hung from the posters of the bed, and the nurses would put a book on it face down. now, you don t want to call them every minute and a half to turn
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