Charles Krauthammer with Walter Mondale
The White House | Washington, DC | 1980

Charles Krauthammer worked as a speechwriter for Vice President Walter Mondale from 1980 to 1981. It was one of his first jobs in politics after moving to Washington, DC, and “an experience,” he wrote, that he would always “remember well and with fondness.”

In the years that followed, Krauthammer would reflect, his politics and those of the Democratic Party moved apart. “On foreign policy,” he wrote, “as the cliché goes, I didn’t leave the Democratic Party. It left me.” And on “domestic policy…. As I became convinced of the practical and theoretical defects of the social-democratic tendencies of my youth, it was but a short distance to a philosophy of restrained, free-market governance that gave more space and place to the individual and to the civil society.”

READ: An explanation of Charles Krauthammer’s political evolution, in his own words.

Despite their diverging political paths in the decades that followed, Krauthammer and Mondale retained the greatest respect and affection for one another. They remained in touch until the end of Krauthammer’s life.

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