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

My friend Charles Crowdhammer. Charles, thanks for taking the time 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, but that 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 to you go from more. came here as a speech writer for Walter Mondale.

That's right.

People ask me how to go from Walter Mondo to Fox News and the answer I give them and the answer

I'll give you is I was young once, but I'm recovered from my youth.

No, 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 had a pretty aggressive

anti-Soviet hard-line 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 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 then I said you know there's an interesting counter

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

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