The Scrapbook has a weakness for hardcover collections of essays and columns. Not many people like them, judging by how well they sell, but we boast several shelves full of collections by William F. Buckley, Joseph Epstein, George Will, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Christopher Hitchens, and many others.
Krauthammer’s research assistants reminisce.
“You’re betraying your whole life if you don’t say what you think—and you don’t say it honestly and bluntly.”
In 2013, Charles Krauthammer was the featured speaker at The Weekly Standard “summit” at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado. His performance was scintillating. He surprised the crowd with his sense of humor. He took questions.
I miss Charles. I’ve missed him for the past 10 months, ever since his operation. As he wrote in his farewell letter, “That operation was thought to have been a success, but it caused a cascade of secondary complications.” Charles fought those complications in the hospital. This meant that he and…
Hosted by Jim Swift
They aren't making any more of him.
In January of 2006, Charles Krauthammer wrote an appreciation of his older brother, Marcel, who had died shortly after the New Year. It was a far more personal offering than most of his written work and, despite a full catalogue of essays and columns that influenced the thinking of world leaders,…
Anyone who read Charles Krauthammer’s writing, saw him speak on television, or knew anything about his incredible life story could tell you he was exceedingly intelligent. Those who knew Charles well also speak about his dry sense of humor. I often think of the time I witnessed Charles combine…
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…
The Pulitzer Prize winner is remembered by friends, former colleagues and others whose lives he touched.
Hosted by Charlie Sykes.
Not at all.
Charles Krauthammer writes in his syndicated column Friday about the United Nations's cultural agency's recent decision to condemn the state of Israel—and the Obama administration's apparent acquiesence to the global campaign by nations hostile to Israel against the United States's strongest ally…
The Scrapbook has previously touted the Conversations with Bill Kristol video series, but we suspect readers will be particularly drawn by the latest in the series—an extended discussion between our editor and one of our renowned contributing editors, Charles Krauthammer.
The latest episode of Conversations With Bill Kristol, featuring Charles Krauthammer:
The Scrapbook is thrilled to note the publication this week of Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics, a collection of essays by our friend and contributing editor Charles Krauthammer. Needless to say, this is a book that matters, by a thinker and commentator who…
Charles Krauthammer previews his book Things That Matter on Jon Stewart's The Daily Show:
Charles Krauthammer declared Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney the winner of tonight's debate:
After first insisting columnist Charles Krauthammer was wrong to say that President Obama returned a bust of Winston Churchill to the British embassy when he first became president, the White House is now apologizing. Here's the letter White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer sent to…
Charles Krauthammer seeks a full-time research assistant for one or two year tenure. Send resume to job@charleskrauthammer.com.
Charles Krauthammer seeks a full-time research assistant for one or two year tenure. Send resume to job@charleskrauthammer.com.
WEEKLY STANDARD contributing editor Charles Krauthammer seeks a research assistant for a one- or two-year term. Send résumé to job@charleskrauthammer.com.
Dan Foster: "Space Aliens Are Probably Progressive Liberals"
Last night, Charles Krauthammer weighed in on the controversy surrounding Newt Gingrich's criticism of the House Republican's budget. "This is a big deal," Krauthammer said on Fox News. "He's done. He didn't have a big chance from the beginning, but now it's over. Apart from being contradictory and…
Charles Krauthammer writes, in the Washington Post:
In his column today, Charles Krauthammer sizes up the potential GOP presidential candidates and concludes by noting there's a chance Paul Ryan could end up running in 2012:
The master columnist takes aim at the TSA:
The New York Times has published a piece on Charles Krauthammer's love of chess:
The weathervanes of conventional wisdom are engaged in another round of angst about America in decline. New theories, old slogans: Imperial overstretch. The Asian awakening. The post-American world. Inexorable forces beyond our control bringing the inevitable humbling of the world hegemon.
Americans have a deep and understandable aversion to gasoline taxes. In a culture more single-mindedly devoted to individual freedom than any other, tampering with access to the open road is met with visceral opposition. That's why earnest efforts to alter American driving habits take the form of…
IN 1983, REPRESENTATIVE GERRY Studds, Democrat of Massachusetts, admitted to having sex with a 17-year-old male page. He was censured by the House of Representatives. During the vote, which he was compelled by House rules to be present for, Studds turned his back on the House to show his contempt…
During the last few weeks in Washington the pieties about torture have lain so thick in the air that it has been impossible to have a reasoned discussion. The McCain amendment that would ban "cruel, inhuman, or degrading" treatment of any prisoner by any agent of the United States sailed through…
The remembrances of the Columbia astronauts were deeply moving, dignified in their restraint. The president's eulogy at the Johnson Space Center recalled each of them individually, gave the simple reassurance that "America's space program will go on," and modestly offered the "respect and gratitude…
Beware what you wish for. Conservatives have long hoped for the abolition of affirmative action on the grounds that racial preferences of any kind are not only destructive of the American ideal of equality but devalue minority achievement and poison ethnic relations. And the day now seems at hand,…
When President Bush enunciated his radical new doctrine of preemption, the forcible disarmament of rogue possessors of weapons of mass destruction, it was met with a mixture of disdain and consternation by a foreign policy establishment instinctively allergic to new doctrines. Most objected that…
They cannot fathom why voters might keep choosing Republicans, but they have some crazy theories.
What changed, and what didn't.
To find them, start at the old Iron Curtain and go east.
The U.N. secretary general gets entangled in l'Affaire Sommaruga.
The American empire and the Islamic challenge.
Why everything is at stake.
I. PEACEKEEPING?
Sanity and prudence combined to produce a great victory on July 31 when the House of Representatives overwhelmingly defeated—the margin was over 100 votes—the legalization of early human embryonic cloning. But the fight is not over. The Senate needs to act as well.
ABM, Kyoto, and the new American unilateralism
Murder by stoning, death by shrapnel: The fallacy of moral equivalence.
The return of Ariel Sharon.
The Cuban missile crisis is the closest the human race has come to Armageddon. Oddly though, like the moon landing -- another 1960s event of millennial importance -- it has faded from our historical imagination. For a new generation, its gravity is unappreciated. Thirteen Days, the new Kevin…
ALL THAT WAS MISSING FROM the scene were the helicopters lifting people off the embassy roof. Otherwise, Israel's panicked evacuation from Lebanon last week looked eerily like America's last hours in Vietnam.
The most improbable story of the twentieth century is the return of the Jews to sovereignty in their original homeland. The establishment of a Jewish state after two thousand years of dispersion and powerlessness is an idea that just a hundred years ago, at the founding of the Zionist movement,…
If you were to say to a physicist in 1899 that in 1999, a hundred years later . . . bombs of unimaginable power would threaten the species; . . . that millions of people would take to the air every hour in aircraft capable of taking off and landing without human touch; . . . that humankind would…
Early this century, on New York's Lower East Side, where the Yiddish theater thrived and Shakespeare was an audience favorite, the playbill for a famous Second Avenue production read: "Hamlet, bei William Shakespeare, fartaytch un farbessert" -- Hamlet, by William Shakespeare, translated and…
Zbigniew Brzezinski is not alone in his judgment that the Cold War was won in 1986 at Reykjavik, though the fact that Brzezinski was President Carter's national security adviser shows that this is no partisan judgment. At Reykjavik, Ronald Reagan was offered the most sweeping arms control proposal…
CULTURE WARS, CHAPTER 36.
Ehud Barak did not win last week's Israeli election so much as Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu lost it. He lost it badly, 56 percent to 44 percent. In Israeli terms, that is a landslide.
Like the careless Buchanans of The Great Gatsby, Bill Clinton is known as the man who leaves friends wounded and bleeding in his wake. But of all the casualties littering his trail -- the jailed business partners, the disgraced aides, the character-assassinated former lovers -- the most serious by…
In light of the conclusion of the Senate trial of the president, the editors of THE WEEKLY STANDARD asked 22 writers, thinkers, and political actors the following questions: "President William Jefferson Clinton has been impeached and acquitted. What have we learned? What should we do now?"
One day the fate of Jerusalem, of Palestine, of Israel itself will be decided. Soon.
"When faced with a scandal, one's objective should be to deal with the president in office without damaging the office itself."
It was a remark of dazzling, if unintended, self-revelation. But its perversity being subtle, it went entirely unnoticed. It does not deserve such obscurity.
The nuclear genie is out of the bottle.
I. OPENING GAMBIT
I. A SMALL NATION
Tom Boswell, sportswriter and baseball fan extraordinaire, once wrote a book called Why Time Begins on Opening Day. And so it does. Life begins anew not with the first robin or the vernal equinox, but with the first pitch -- this year thrown out charmingly at Camden Yards by a former pigtail league…
God, I hope he's lying. In the Lewinsky affair, the mantra of President Clinton's defenders is, "I hope he's telling the truth." Regarding Iraq, however, the only hope for the country is that the president is not telling the truth about his avowed goals.
Meet the students who want to avoid the mixed-sex, free-for-all, condoms-on-demand atmosphere of college dorms.
"What we have is the world's best chess player vs. Garry Kasparov."
Oslo is beyond saving, but peace still has a chance.
Benjamin Netanyahu's subtle, tenuous achievement.
The search is on among those who would learn nothing from history for the large, irresistible forces that made this an unwinnable election for the Republicans. There are none. The reason for the Republican defeat is to be found not in the economy, not in the opponent, not in the stars, but in the…
Netanyahu opened a tunnel. Arafat started a war. It is hard to find a publication or a government on the planet that has not denounced the opening of the tunnel. About the starting of the war, silence.
THE KLEIN AFFAIR -- the savaging of Joe Klein for having lied about his authorship of Primary Colors and the charge that he thus betrayed the standards of his journalistic profession -- is indeed kleine nachtmusik. But when the self-importance meets the self-righteousness of the American press,…
The revisionists cannot understand why Netanyahu won because they simply refuse to see Israel as it is.
The Clinton administration hopes against all evidence that treating Assad with honor will induce him to moderation.
"If there is peace, peacekeepers are unnecessary. And if there is war, peacekeepers are unavailing."
"In the United States at this time," wrote Lionel Trilling in 1950, "liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation. . . . " Times change. Forty-five years…