Charles Krauthammer, The Washington Post columnist, announced recently that he is stricken with terminal cancer and has only weeks to live. Since then, the tributes have poured forth, and rightly so. Charles taught generations of readers and fellow writers how to reason, persuade, live – and now how to die.
We have 38 years’ worth of columns, essays, speeches and spoken commentaries. If you lean conservative, as I do, the experience of a Krauthammer column was almost invariably the same: You’d read the piece and think, “that’s exactly it.” Not just “interesting” or “well written” or “mostly right.” Week after week, his was the clearest and smartest expression of the central truth of nearly every subject: a bad Supreme Court nomination, the joys and humiliations of chess, the future of geopolitics.
And if you don’t lean conservative? Then Charles’ writing served an even more useful purpose. Since I’m not aware of any precise antonym to the term “straw man,” I hereby nominate the noun “krauthammer” to serve the function, defined in two ways: (1) as the strongest possible counterargument to your opinion; (2) a person of deep substance and complete integrity.
There might be a verb in this, too. As in: “Frank Bruni’s column this week totally krauthammered Robert DeNiro, Samantha Bee and the rest of the rage-against-Trump machine.”
Still, this falls short of explaining Charles’ achievement. Whether you agreed with him or not, Charles’ column taught. There is a style of Beltway columnizing that specializes in reporting, sometimes usefully but rarely profoundly. That’s not teaching. There’s also the data-heavy column, also occasionally useful, but those too generally mistake information for insight.