A couple of hours ago I was commiserating with a friend who was also working on a short tribute to Charles Krauthammer. We were both having a tough time getting going. The problem, we realized, was this: We couldn’t help but think of what Charles would have written. And we were painfully aware that our efforts were falling so far short of that standard that each of us kept
A couple of hours ago I was commiserating with a friend who was also working on a short tribute to Charles Krauthammer. We were both having a tough time getting going. The problem, we realized, was this: We couldn’t help but think of what Charles would have written. And we were painfully aware that our efforts were falling so far short of that standard that each of us kept starting over.
And kept on falling short.
Which is fine. There’s no dishonor in falling short of the standard of the greatest columnist of our generation—a man of extraordinary moral and physical courage, of intellectual rigor and probity, with a dry wit and a heightened sense of irony. But then it occurred to me: At least for now, why not let Charles speak about Charles? After all, he’s better at it than I am. And in the filmed Conversation I had with him three years ago, Charles opened up more than he often did about aspects of his personal background and education.
So here are a few excerpts of that conversation, which I trust you’ll find interesting. I do recommend watching, or listening to, or reading the transcript of the whole thing:
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KRAUTHAMMER: I was at McGill in Montreal. And McGill was this symbol of Anglo dominance, it was an English-speaking university, it was considered the best school in the Commonwealth, outside of the home island Britain, and it was considered an affront to French Canada.
And there was a movement at the time I was at McGill to turn it into a French university to serve the working class. So it was a combination of French nationalism and essentially communism of some sort. The reason it affected me was this, there were large demonstrations, it was called McGill français, it was sort of the rubric, there were other demonstrations over other issues, but the ones that actually happened on campus were over this.
And I remember at the tender age of – I went to college at 16, so I was probably 18, and a junior – and there was a giant demonstration to liberate McGill, and at the head of it arm in arm was the most radical Communist professor at McGill, a guy called Stanley Gray, arm in arm with a guy whose name I forget, the leader of the French radical nationalist, essentially a fascist party.
Extremely anti-immigrant, they didn’t want anybody to come in because they wanted only French immigrants. They were marching arm in arm. Now, normally it takes till middle age to realize that Left and Right are essentially at the extremes, the equivalent, totalitarian, they have different words for them. You know that nationalism, extreme nationalist, extreme socialism they don’t just meet in Berlin in 1933, they can meet at McGill in 1968, or whatever that was.
So I became very acutely aware of the dangers, the hypocrisies, and sort of the extremism of the political extremes. And it cleansed me very early in my political evolution of any romanticism. I detested the extreme Left and extreme Right, and found myself somewhere in the middle. Now, McGill in the 60s was pretty radical, I got involved with student politics, and a bunch of us who were in the middle overthrew the editorship of the newspaper The McGill Daily, which had fallen into the hands of Maoists.
You have to understand Stalinism was considered reactionary, but it sounds like a joke but the paper was unreadable. So we got rid of them. I became the editor because by default nobody else really wanted to do it, and the first article I ever wrote on the day I took over the paper was called “End of the Monolith,” where I wrote the philosophy of this newspaper as of today is to pluralism. We are open to any idea. We are not bound by any one paradigm, that was the sophisticated word of the 60s.
Remember Kuhn’s book, something shifting paradigms, I can’t remember.
KRISTOL: Right.
KRAUTHAMMER: But, and I meant his ideology, and so that was – because I was a pluralist I was considered, of course, an irredeemable rightwing radical. But anyway, because of this peculiar political culture that I came out of, I was cleansed of romanticism very early on. And that’s a gift because my – you know, then I went to Oxford, studied political philosophy, and I found myself not attracted to Rousseau, repelled by that kind of philosophy. Marxism, Hegelianism, interesting, but they were repulsive as a matter of human nature and how to live humanely.
And found myself attracted to John Stuart Mill, not exactly en vogue in the 1960s.
KRISTOL: No.
KRAUTHAMMER: So I’d always been this kind of Social Democratic, bleeding heart, liberally oriented, but a believer in liberty, and that is sort of what carried me through, and eventually I went from being sort of a Great Society liberal to more a small-government conservative. That was me changing over the years.
But that is what launched me in the right path. I never, I think I wrote in my autobiographical introduction to the collection that I wrote the other year that I never had a Marxist phase. If I did it lasted a weekend, and it must have been a hell of a weekend because I don’t remember it.
KRISTOL: But that’s interesting, because it is something, so I think the American equivalent of that is really a generation older, because I’ve met people of my parents generation who sort of, they saw up close in the 30s and 40s messianic political views on the Right and the Left, and they really decided there was much more merit than conventional wisdom ascribed to Mill, Tocqueville, Raymond Aron, you know, the kind of anti-romantic practical pluralist kind of liberalism.
Now, by the time I went to college, it was sort of, that was sort of boring, and even if you were—even if you didn’t like the Left or the Right somehow that seemed less, you know, that was just taken for granted in a way, we read Mill, but—
KRAUTHAMMER: Right.
KRISTOL: But I think you’re right seeing the European alternatives up close gives you much more of an appreciation for that kind of Anglo American—
KRAUTHAMMER: Exactly, so we had sort of a delayed historical experience in Quebec. But the interesting thing is you end up with this non-romantic, non-messianic view of human nature, exactly where the Founders started.
KRISTOL: Yeah, that’s a good point.
KRAUTHAMMER: And that’s what attracted me because growing up in Quebec in the Anglo school system, the Protestant school, I learned all of colonial history. I can name all of the Prime Ministers, I can tell you about Australia, South Africa, I can tell you about Britain, of course, the Wars of the Roses, I knew every damn monarch.
I didn’t know a thing about America, that’s all self-taught, that came later when I was in college, and when I was at Oxford. But the Founding to me as a result of that, the Founding documents were enormously attractive, it wasn’t like I learned them rotely as a child, I discovered them later as an adult, and that’s exactly the kind of, you know unromantic, unsentimental view of human nature, of the weaknesses, of the way you construct outside institutions to contain, to channel what is ultimately selfishness into creating a system that would balance itself, and moderate itself.
* * *
KRISTOL: Any professors have a huge influence on you or teachers, or other writers, thinkers, either in school or in college, Oxford?
KRAUTHAMMER: It was never the hands-on professorship. It was reading Mill, and then reading Isaiah Berlin’s Four Essays on Liberty, two of which are about Mill that made me sort of understand why I was attracted to him. So it very starkly, in sentences that were a hundred words long, and Isaiah could go on and on, he was a very comma heavy guy. You were waiting to get to a period so you could breathe.
KRISTOL: That influenced your terse style?
KRAUTHAMMER: No, I think—Yeah, I write very short sentences.
KRISTOL: You do, I think it’s very effective, yeah.
KRAUTHAMMER: But I mean, that sort of fleshed it out in a modern way. And I thought, when kids come to me and say, “What should I read?” I say, “Read Berlin, and then read the original, and John Stuart Mill, and then you read the Founding documents.” And you’re well on your way.
So that was the influence.
KRISTOL: That’s interesting.
KRAUTHAMMER: In terms of professors, there was a wholly different story, but I had a professor of philosophy at McGill, who was a man called David Hartman, well known many years later for running the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, which was an attempt to mold Judaism orthodoxy and modernity at the same time, which was sort of a noble endeavor.
But he taught Maimonides, and I took his course, and became sort of a disciple. I had been raised in an Orthodox Jewish home, I studied all of the text word by word, and I was living in the—
I was living in the trees. I never got a view of the forest. And all of a sudden there’s the greatest of all Jewish philosophers, essentially an Aristotelian, so I already knew Greek philosophy, and I encounter Jewish Aristotelianism, what’s this about? And it sort of renewed my commitment to Judaism.
I had felt it small, peripheral, sectarian as all sixteen-year-old college students do. I had discovered the world, and was going to leave all of this behind, because I was too sophisticated for it. And then in my third year I took Hartman’s course in Maimonides, and I’m thinking this is pretty serious stuff.
KRISTOL: Impressive.
KRAUTHAMMER: It stands up to the Greeks, stands up to the philosophers of the age, and it gave me sort of a renewed commitment to and respect for my own tradition, which I already knew, but was ready to throw away. And I didn’t throw it away as a result of that encounter.
KRISTOL: Yeah, that’s terrific. And then you went to medical school, and I’ve noticed, I didn’t know you then that clearly shaped, I don’t know if it shaped you, or you had a sort of scientific interest, inclination, but certainly you can see that in your writing too, a kind of, sort of guided by the facts, experimental, I don’t what the right way to say it is, but a kind of –
KRAUTHAMMER: My real interest in life is physics. I mean, apart from anything I’ve ever done, if—And the reason I didn’t go to a career in physics is because, very simply I wasn’t a genius, and I knew it pretty early, and there were geniuses, I saw some, and I read some.
And I remember a friend of mine who was very smart—we were the two best science students in my high school. In my high school, everybody ended up at McGill, everybody went. There were 28 of us in the graduating class; 27 went to McGill, the other was already pregnant so that was not an issue.
I wanted to be a physicist, he did too, and one day he said, “You know, we’re not going to make it. We’re the physicists who end up testing steel for General Motors.” So I didn’t see that as my future, so I gave up. But I loved mathematics and physics, that was always my interest.
But I didn’t have it. So, I had this dual interest in science and interest in political philosophy, and I was very unable to decide. I was also young in college; I graduated at 20. So I wasn’t sort of ready to make a life choice, under my father’s influence I had taken all of the pre-med requirements, but I did that all in my freshmen year. So I didn’t take another science.
KRISTOL: Is that right?
KRAUTHAMMER: I didn’t take another science for the rest of my, I became, I switched over to political science and economics, and I never looked back. So, I applied to medical school again to please my father, and I’m from a family of doctors, and my brother became a doctor.
And you know, who knows? If other things don’t work out, I can make a living. So I got accepted, but I said no—
KRISTOL: You got accepted without taking a science course since your freshmen year? That’s impressive.
KRAUTHAMMER: Well, I did—They all accepted me—
KRISTOL: You must have remembered something for the medical boards.
KRAUTHAMMER: It was a time when they were looking for sort of quirky applicants, and I came in under the quirky quota.
They said, I was accepted to Harvard Medical School on the condition that I take—I was short, I never took a biochem course—so they said you got to take a biochem course. So in my senior year I signed up for a course, I never attended any labs, so I’m working out of 80 percent, and I studied the week before, and I got enough to get through, so I fulfilled a requirement, but that was it.
So, I applied to both, I got accepted to Oxford, I went and started political philosophy. I had a little John Stuart Mill crisis of conscience, he had one when he was 20, I had mine at 21, I thought, “What am I doing here? Abstraction. The world is happening out there.” So I decided, all of a sudden I quit, I had a three-year scholarship, I quit after one year, picked up the phone, I called Harvard Medical School, and I spoke to the registrar, this is August, at the end of my first year and said, “I’d like to accept that – the deferred.”
They said, “Well, you know, it’s impossible, except for one thing we had somebody drop out of the class, it starts on Monday, if you’re here Monday you’re in.” So I left immediately.
KRISTOL: Is that right?
KRAUTHAMMER: I took a toothbrush, I didn’t pack, I went straight to Boston, I registered for the year, I woke up the next morning, and I thought, “Oh my God, what have I done?” Because there’s no going back, you cannot, that was it.
