Missing Charles Krauthammer

When Charles Krauthammer died in June of last year, a great many people who’d never met him felt that they’d lost . . . well, perhaps not quite a friend, since his public manner (I didn’t have the good fortune to know him) was precise and a bit formal. It might be closer to the mark to say that Krauthammer was more like a trusted counselor, the man to whom you went in the hope of making sense of an increasingly crazy world.

For me as a working journalist, Krauthammer was a newspaper columnist first and foremost, one of the last, if providentially also the best, of a dying breed—newspapers themselves having by now long since embarked on a downhill slide. For 32 years, he wrote a column about public affairs that appeared each week on the op-ed page of the Washington Post, was syndicated to more than 400 newspapers and other publications, and was closely read in Washington and throughout America, not only for the sake of its unfailing acuity but as a trusty barometer of conservative opinion. Not since the salad days of William F. Buckley, Jr., has any other columnist been so generally regarded as the voice of the right—a voice all the more persuasive coming from one who in his (much) younger days at the New Republic had identified himself as a liberal Democrat in the Harry Truman and Scoop Jackson mold.

By 2005, Krauthammer had also started appearing as a panelist on Fox News Channel’s Special Report. It was in this latter capacity that he would come to be even better known, especially to millennials, few of whom look to op-ed pages for perspective on the events of the day. It was a sign of the times when National Review Online started releasing a daily transcript of what “Dr. Krauthammer” (as NRO scrupulously referred to him) had said on TV the night before. By the time his final illness forced him into an untimely retirement, that was how most people found out what he thought—and what he thought obviously mattered to countless readers and viewers, myself among them.