charles krauthammer is not just a day at the park. it s essentially grad school for baseball. okay. this is unfortunate matchup. the only reason salano is in there, he s backup catcher that doesn t hit very well. come on. no, no, no, no. he s a catcher. can t run. from time to time, charles writes about baseball. typically in a way that transcends the sport. take his column of rick ankiel, 21-year-old pitching phenom who back in 2000 fell apart when he was picked to start a playoff game. with a huge national tv audience watching, he suddenly couldn t throw a strike. he never pitched the same again. but instead of writing, he went back down to the minors. learned a new position and returned to the majors as a hitter. the column is reprinted in krauthammer s book things that
important person of the 20th century. time magazine had chosen einstein, the great scientist. charles disagreed. he picked churchill, the indispensable statesman who led the fight against hitler and sounded the alarm over communism. politics trumping science. that might explain why he 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? i said, how can i apply? i ve never written anything, don t know anybody. she said, you write it. i ll hand deliver it. that morning at my office i get a call. i m mike kingsly. i just got your letter. why do you want to do this? you re a doctor. i was intrigued so i called him.
traditional liberal democrat. great society liberal. i was pretty hard line on the soviets. hard 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 the liberal readers. i supported just about every element of the reagan foreign policy and, boy, did we get reaction from the liberal readership. i wrote one article that caused the largest number of canceled subscriptions in the history of the magazine which i was very proud of. what was the writing like? it s always been extremely step by step logical. you can read a column by charles about something and you can still disagree with him after you re through with it and then you know you must have a pretty good argument. those arguments had
and generosity of spirit has co-authored my life. in a moment, charles co-author helps him answer a higher calling. and later, he finds himself moving left to right after the break. [ male announcer] surprise you re having triplets.
hooked up a plexiglass plate and the nurses would put a book on it face down. you don t want to call them every minute and a half to turn the page so i put two books up at once, so they d only have to come half the lime but you have to remember where you were. a bit of a challenge. it keeps you busy. there wasn t a lot else to do. with such force of will, krauthammer graduated on time in 1975 and near the top of his class. along the way, he got the girl, too. and married robin. but as he began his three-year residency at massachusetts general hospital, there were indications from the beginning that charles and psychiatry might not be the perfect fit. part of the residency is that you re supposed to go to a weekly group therapy session and you didn t want to go. there were 12 of us residents in mass general, and there was a group therapy once a week.