Things That Matter

Things That Matter is, in its essence, a sustained argument by a doctor-turned-essayist that the great public questions of our time — the moral status of nascent human life, the proper exercise of American power in a world without a rival, the management of weapons whose proliferation could undo the international order itself — are best approached neither with the easy comforts of ideological reflex nor with the false neutrality of mere expertise, but with a willingness to hold opposing arguments in honest tension, to acknowledge what the other side gets right, and to defend the resulting conclusions with the kind of patience and intellectual courage that public discourse increasingly fails to model; Krauthammer's collected essays argue, by their example as much as by their content, that conservative thought at its best is a discipline of careful seeing, that liberal democracy is a precious and fragile achievement that requires both moral conviction and strategic clarity to defend, and that the temptations of utopian internationalism on one side and reflexive isolationism on the other are best resisted by a realism that takes seriously both the limits of power and the responsibilities that power, once acquired, cannot honorably set down.

Charles Krauthammer (1950–2018) was an American political columnist, physician, and public intellectual whose nationally syndicated column in the Washington Post made him one of the most widely read commentators of his generation. Born in New York City and raised in Montreal, he was educated at McGill University, where he received a degree in political science and economics, and at Balliol College, Oxford, as a Commonwealth Scholar. He returned to the United States to attend Harvard Medical School, where, during his first year, a diving accident in a swimming pool left him paralyzed from the neck down. He nonetheless completed his medical degree on schedule and went on to train as a psychiatrist, eventually serving as chief resident at Massachusetts General Hospital. While still practicing medicine he began writing for the New Republic, and in 1981 he left clinical work for full-time journalism, joining the magazine as a senior editor. Within a few years he was contributing essays to Time, Foreign Affairs, and the Public Interest, and in 1985 he launched the Washington Post column that would run for thirty-three years and earn him the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. He served briefly as a speechwriter for Vice President Walter Mondale before his political views shifted rightward, and he became one of the principal voices of mainstream conservative commentary in the post–Cold War era, serving on President George W. Bush's Council on Bioethics and writing his influential 1990 Foreign Affairs essay "The Unipolar Moment," from which much of the foreign-policy material in this book descends. He was also a longtime panelist on Fox News and on Inside Washington. In addition to Things That Matter, published in 2013, he wrote Cutting Edges (1985) and the posthumously published The Point of It All (2018). He died of cancer at the age of sixty-eight, leaving behind his wife Robyn, his son Daniel, and one of the most distinctive bodies of political writing produced by any American journalist of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.