Amazon.com Review
Author One-on-One: Charles Krauthammer and Dana Perino
In this Amazon One-to-One, Charles Krauthammer and Dana Perino discuss Dr. Krauthammer’s new book Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes, and Politics. Charles Krauthammer is a Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist, political commentator and physician. Dana Perino is a Former White House Press Secretary who worked with President George W. Bush, contributor and co-host of The Five on FOX News. She is a long-time friend and fan of Charles Krauthammer.
Dana Perino: Your new book covers three decades of your writings, divided into 16 chapters, and grouped into categories of the things that have mattered to you in your life. As you reviewed your body of work, were you surprised by anything that you had written? Did you ever think, “I can’t believe I ever thought that”?
Charles Krauthammer: No real surprises—I find that I agree with myself a lot—except for my enthusiastic review of Independence Day. Though I might've been unduly swayed by seeing the premiere with my son, then ten, who announced after the showing that he would see the movie every week for the rest of his life.
DP: The thing that has mattered most to you is your family. Your book opens with a column that could be called “a two-hankie job.” How hard is it to write about the people that you love, to give people a glimpse into your personal life?
CK: I didn’t become a writer to write about myself. In fact, I don't even like using the word "I" in writing an opinion column, let alone a personal one. The only times I really have written about my own life is when it had a purpose outside myself, such as honoring a person, perhaps a friend or mentor, of extraordinary character.
DP: As a long-time fan of yours, there are some of your columns that I remember reading, and where I was when I read it, and how I said to my husband, “That’s exactly what I was thinking!” Do you know when a column is going to be a hit?
CK: Quite the opposite. I'm always amazed how wrong I am. A column that I think will sink like a stone might catch on like wildfire. Others that I'm proud and smug about as I submit for publication, leave no trace. Which is why I'm a writer, not a publisher. I wasn't made for marketing.
DP: The original essay you penned for Things That Matter is like an award-winning exhibit of your heart and mind. What will readers learn about you that they may not have known?
CK: How improbable my life story is. I still wake up simply amazed how I've ended up where I am, mostly by serendipity and sheer blind luck. I started out as a doctor. I ended as a writer. And that's the least of the stunning twists and turns that have defined my life—which I write about, for the first time, in the introductory essay to Things That Matter.
DP: You have become a must-read and a must-see on television news programs. Parents shush their children when you’re about to speak. On the rare Friday when you don’t have a column or when you’re not on Special Report with Bret Baier, your mom gets calls of “Where is Charles?” Disappointment hangs heavy over your fans. But who are your weekly must-reads?
CK: George Will. David Brooks. Mickey Kaus. And for that happy half of every year—April through October—the (daily) box score of the Washington Nationals.
DP: Do you think that your training as a psychiatrist has given you an advantage when observing people in politics?
CK: Actually, no. Psychiatry has everything to say about mental illness, very little to say about ordinary life. It offers no magical formulas for understanding human behavior beyond what any lay person can see. Although I do like to joke that there's not much difference in what I do today as a political analyst in Washington from what I used to do as a psychiatrist in Boston—in both lines of work, I deal every day with people who suffer from paranoia and delusions of grandeur. The only difference is that the paranoids in Washington have access to nuclear weapons.
DP: You wrote a column on September 12, 2001 that is included in Things That Matter. How difficult was that to write under the time pressure of the day, and to keep your commentary to standard column length?
CK: Like the whole country, I was on fire with fury. I felt I simply had to write. The difficulty was less time pressure than emotional pressure—trying to suppress my feelings so I could be as analytical as possible. Sometimes that kind of writing can be disastrous. I think this one came out right.
DP: Given the mention in your essay, and because I have a gut feeling that we’re on the same page, what is your preferred style on serial commas?
CK: With commas the rule should always be: the fewer the better. They are a scourge, a pestilence upon the land. They must be given no quarter. When you list three things, it should be written: a, b and c. If you see a comma after the "b"—call 911 immediately.
DP: Many readers may not realize that you once were a Democrat? Was it a gradual or a spectacular breakup?
CK: Like most breakups, gradual. Like few breakups, however, without regret.
DP: You have covered politics and government since the Carter administration. Do you believe that America’s politics are too strained, too partisan, and too deranged to make meaningful progress?
CK: Not at all. What we need is not a new politics but a new president.
DP: What do you think will be the things that matter 20–30 years from now?
CK: The things that really matter, as I try to explain in the introductory essay—the cosmic questions of origins and meaning, the great achievements of science and art, the great mysteries of creation and consciousness—shall always be with us. Thirty years from now, 300 years from now. I hope that one contribution of this book will be to provide some illumination on these wondrous mysteries and achievements.
DP: If you had a magic wand and could get the U.S. federal government to do three things, what would be your top priorities?
CK: Abolish the income tax code with its staggeringly intrusive and impenetrable provisions and replace it with a clean consumption tax.
Get out of the race business and return the country to the colorblind vision of Martin Luther King.
Kill the penny.
Review
“Required reading…Krauthammer is among the very best—and this is the best of the best, selected by him, with an engaging and fascinating introduction…Amazingly fresh, and full of thought-provoking formulations and arguments.” –The Weekly Standard
“A fantastic read, a cerebral read, a fun read.” –Guy Benson, Townhall
“It’s going to be a big hit.” –Bill O’Reilly, The O’Reilly Factor (October 21, 2013)
“Krauthammer’s assets include steel-trap logic, an epée wit, a profound sense of history, and a withering contempt for journalists who would rather cringe in the dark than bring the truth to light.” –City Journal
America, you’ve got to read this for your own great pleasure and relief.” –Hugh Hewitt (October 31, 2013)
"The best American columnists make their British counterparts look like bumbling amateurs,but none of them writes with more sense,sensibility and sanity than the Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer. Things That Matter, selected from a lifetime of writing, bears comparison with the greatest of American prose." -Daniel Johnson, Standpoint
"Usually thought of as a conserva-tive, this syndicated columnist has won both the left-wing People for the American Way’s First Amendment Award and the right-wing Bradley Foundation’s first $250,000 Bradley Prize. Readers of all political persuasions will find plenty here that’s thought-provoking and worthwhile." -Pittsburg Tribune-Review
“Krauthammer’s first collection in more than 20 years is a priceless introduction to the columnist’s writing. And for those who have thrilled at the sight of a Krauthammer byline for decades, Things That Matter is a window into the master polemicist’s habits of mind, heart, and technique.” -Matthew Continetti, Commentary
“For three decades, Charles Krauthammer has enriched American political discourse with his sharply-honed analysis, humane values, and questing mind. From personal meditations to learned examinations of history and policy, Things That Matterstands as a record of a transformative period in the American experience, and a remarkable intellect at work.” -Henry A. Kissinger
"Charles Krauthammer is not only the most influential conservative commentator in America, his writing transcends the crush of daily events and can be read, with profit, always." –David Brooks, New York Times columnist and bestselling author of The Social Animal
“Amid today's clutter of print and cacophony of broadcast commentary, Charles Krauthammer's lapidary judgments stand out, and stand the test of time. Literature has been called news that lasts. Krauthammer's columns take journalism to the level of literature.” –George F. Will, Washington Post columnist
“Blending high-mindedness with strong conservative values, he has commanded respect on both the extreme and moderate sides of the spectrum, becoming the closest thing the factionalized GOP could have to a spokesperson, a de facto opposition leader for the thinking right.” -POLITICO
About the Author
Charles Krauthammer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, was a syndicated columnist, political commentator and physician. His column was syndicated to 400 newspapers worldwide. He was a nightly panelist on Fox News’s Special Report with Bret Baier. He’s a former member of the President’s Council on Bioethics and of Chess Journalists of America.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
introduction
I. THE BOOK
What matters? Lives of the good and the great, the innocence of dogs, the cunning of cats, the elegance of nature, the wonders of space, the perfectly thrown outfield assist, the difference between historical guilt and historical responsibility, homage and sacrilege in monumental architecture, fashions and follies and the finer uses of the F-word.
What matters? Manners and habits, curiosities and conundrums social and ethical: Is a doctor ever permitted to kill a patient wishing to die? Why in the age of feminism do we still use the phrase “women and children”? How many lies is one allowed to tell to advance stem cell research?
What matters? Occam’s razor, Fermat’s last theorem, the Fermi paradox in which the great man asks: With so many habitable planets out there, why in God’s name have we never heard a word from a single one of them?
These are the things that most engage me. They fill my days, some trouble my nights. They give me pause, pleasure, wonder. They make me grateful for the gift of consciousness. And for three decades they have occupied my mind and commanded my pen.
I don’t claim these things matter to everyone. Nor should they. I have my eccentricities. I’ve driven from Washington to New York to watch a chess match. Twice. I’ve read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. Also twice, though here as a public service—to reassure my readers that this most unread bestseller is indeed as inscrutable as they thought. And perhaps most eccentric of all, I left a life in medicine for a life in journalism devoted mostly to politics, while firmly believing that what really matters, what moves the spirit, what elevates the mind, what fires the imagination, what makes us fully human are all of these endeavors, disciplines, confusions and amusements that lie outside politics.
Accordingly, this book was originally going to be a collection of my writings about everything but politics. Things beautiful, mysterious, profound or just odd. Working title: There’s More to Life than Politics.
But in the end I couldn’t. For a simple reason, the same reason I left psychiatry for journalism. While science, medicine, art, poetry, architecture, chess, space, sports, number theory and all things hard and beautiful promise purity, elegance and sometimes even transcendence, they are fundamentally subordinate. In the end, they must bow to the sovereignty of politics.
Politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything because, in the end, everything—high and low and, most especially, high—lives or dies by politics. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933.
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” every schoolchild is fed. But even Keats— poet, romantic, early 19th-century man oblivious to the horrors of the century to come—kept quotational distance from such blissful innocence. Turns out we need to know one more thing on earth: politics— because of its capacity, when benign, to allow all around it to flourish, and its capacity, when malign, to make all around it wither.
This is no abstraction. We see it in North Korea, whose deranged Stalinist politics has created a land of stunning desolation and ugliness, both spiritual and material. We saw it in China’s Cultural Revolution, a sustained act of national self-immolation, designed to dethrone, debase and destroy the highest achievements of five millennia of Chinese culture. We saw it in Taliban Afghanistan, which, just months before 9/11, marched its cadres into the Bamiyan Valley and with tanks, artillery and dynamite destroyed its magnificent cliff-carved 1,700-year-old Buddhas lest they—like kite flying and music and other things lovely—disturb the scorched-earth purity of their nihilism.
Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at bay, and everything burns. The entire 20th century with its mass political enthusiasms is a lesson in the supreme power of politics to produce ever-expanding circles of ruin. World War I not only killed more people than any previous war. The psychological shock of Europe’s senseless self-inflicted devastation forever changed Western sensibilities, practically overthrowing the classical arts, virtues and modes of thought. The Russian Revolution and its imitators (Chinese, Cuban, Vietnamese, Cambodian) tried to atomize society so thoroughly—to war against the mediating structures that stand between the individual and the state—that the most basic bonds of family, faith, fellowship and conscience came to near dissolution. Of course, the greatest demonstration of the finality of politics is the Holocaust, which in less than a decade destroyed a millennium-old civilization, sweeping away not only 6 million souls but the institutions, the culture, the very tongue of the now-vanished world of European Jewry.
The only power comparably destructive belongs to God. Or nature. Or, if like Jefferson you cannot quite decide, Nature’s God. Santorini was a thriving island civilization in the Mediterranean until, one morning 3,500 years ago, it simply fell into the sea. An earthquake. A volcanic eruption. The end.
And yet even God cannot match the cruelty of his creation. For every Santorini, there are a hundred massacres of innocents. And that is the work of man—more particularly, the work of politics, of groups of men organized to gain and exercise power.
Which in its day-to-day conduct tends not to be the most elevated of human enterprises. Machiavelli gave it an air of grandeur and glory, but Disraeli’s mordant exultation “I have climbed to the top of the greasy pole,” best captured its quotidian essence—grubby, grasping, manipulative, demagogic, cynical.
The most considered and balanced statement of politics’ place in the hierarchy of human disciplines came, naturally, from an American. “I must study politics and war,” wrote John Adams, “that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.”
Adams saw clearly that politics is the indispensable foundation for things elegant and beautiful. First and above all else, you must secure life, liberty and the right to pursue your own happiness. That’s politics done right, hard-earned, often by war. And yet the glories yielded by such a successful politics lie outside itself. Its deepest purpose is to create the conditions for the cultivation of the finer things, beginning with philosophy and science, and ascending to the ever more delicate and refined arts. Note Adams’ double reference to architecture: The second generation must study naval architecture—a hybrid discipline of war, commerce and science—before the third can freely and securely study architecture for its own sake.
The most optimistic implication of Adams’ dictum is that once the first generation gets the political essentials right, they remain intact to nurture the future. Yet he himself once said that “there never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” Jefferson was even less sanguine about the durability of liberty. He wrote that a constitutional revolution might be needed every 20 years. Indeed, the lesson of our history is that the task of merely maintaining strong and sturdy the structures of a constitutional order is unending, the continuing and ceaseless work of every generation.
To which I have devoted much of my life. And which I do not disdain by any means. Indeed, I intend to write a book on foreign policy and, if nature (or God or Nature’s God) gives me leave, to write yet one more on domestic policy. But this book is intended at least as much for other things. Things that for me, as for Adams, shine most brightly.
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