WASHINGTON – A few years ago, I was talking with Charles Krauthammer in the Fox News green room when the news that someone famous had passed away flashed on the television screen. Charles told me the way he hoped to go when his time came. His dream, he said, was to be assassinated during the seventh-inning stretch at a game at Nationals Park. He wanted to die in what he once called “my own private paradise,” where “the twilight’s gleaming, the popcorn’s popping, the kids’re romping and everyone’s happy.”
Alas, fate has different plans. Charles’s announcement that he has only a few weeks to live is heartbreaking. But in writing it, he gave all who love and admire him a wonderful gift – the opportunity to tell him what he means to us and how he changed our lives.
Charles was the first person I turned to for advice when I was offered the opportunity to write a weekly column for The Post.
I did not know him at the time. Like so many others, I had long admired his work from afar. The first time I saw him speak in person was in 2004, when I was a young Pentagon speechwriter and Charles gave the American Enterprise Institute’s Irving Kristol Award lecture. He was introduced by Vice President Dick Cheney, who noted that Charles had been a speechwriter for one of his predecessors. “I now wish I had paid more attention at the time to the speeches of Walter Mondale,” Cheney said.
Charles delivered an enthralling lecture, which, to this day, is the best expression I have ever heard of America’s role in the world. He dismissed the idea of American empire, declaring, “It is absurd to apply the word to a people whose first instinct upon arriving on anyone’s soil is to demand an exit strategy.” Unlike Rome or Britain or other classical empires, he said, Americans do not hunger for territory. “We like it here. We like our McDonald’s. We like our football. We like our rock-and-roll. We’ve got the Grand Canyon and Graceland. We’ve got everything. And if that’s not enough, we’ve got Vegas – which is a facsimile of everything. If we want Chinese or Indian or Italian, we go to the food court.”