And the Welcome to Conversations, I'm Bill Crystal, and I'm very pleased to have it with me today.

My friend Charles Krauthammer. Charles, thanks for taking the time to do this.

Happy to do this.

Happy to be here.

So we first met, I think when I came to Washington in 1985, you'd been here a few years,

and you had just written a terrific piece that became a very important piece on the Reagan doctrine I think both explaining it and defending it

But I remember someone saying to me that at Charles Krauthammer guy he wrote that terrific piece but he came here as a speech writer for Walter Mondale

That's right and people asked me how do you go from he came here as a speech writer for Walter Mondale.

That's right, and people asked me how to go from Walter Mondo to Fox News, and the answer

I gave them, and the answer I'll give you is, I was young once, but I'm recovered from my youth. Now it's true the Reagan

doctor is an interesting thing. I remember we were sitting around I was working at

the New Republic in those days which was sort of famously liberal but I had a pretty aggressive

anti-Soviet hard-lined foreign policy side which is what attracted me to it and I

did a lot of writing and foreign policy.

And I remember saying in one of the editor,

there's something very peculiar going on.

For most of our lives, there were guerrilla movements around the world

and they were invariably national

liberation and they were communists or Soviet supporter or Chinese

supported Vietnam Cuba I mean that was the norm and I said you know there's an interesting counter

development that we have anti-communist guerrillas in Nicaragua and goa

Afghanistan of course this was the Mujahadeen and we're backing it.

...