Background and career
Charles Krauthammer (; March 13, 1950 – June 21, 2018) was an American political columnist and psychiatrist. A conservative pundit, Krauthammer won the Pulitzer Prize for his columns in The Washington Post in 1987. His weekly column was syndicated to more than 400 publications worldwide. While in his first year studying medicine at Harvard Medical School, Krauthammer became permanently paralyzed from the waist down after a diving board accident that severed his spinal cord at cervical spinal nerve 5. After spending 14 months recovering in a hospital, he returned to medical school, graduating to become a psychiatrist involved in the creation of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders III in 1980. He joined the Carter administration in 1978 as a director of psychiatric research, eventually becoming the speechwriter to Vice President Walter Mondale in 1980. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Krauthammer embarked on a career as a columnist and political commentator. In 1985, he began writing a weekly column for The Washington Post, which earned him the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for his "witty and insightful columns on national issues". He was a weekly panelist on the PBS news program Inside Washington from 1990 until it ceased production in December 2013. Krauthammer had been a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, a Fox News contributor, and a nightly panelist on Special Report with Bret Baier on Fox News. Krauthammer received acclaim for his writing on foreign policy, among other matters. He was a leading conservative voice and proponent of United States military and political engagement on the global stage, coining the term Reagan Doctrine and advocating both the Gulf War and the Iraq War. In August 2017, due to his battle with cancer, Krauthammer stopped writing his column and serving as a Fox News contributor. He died on June 21, 2018.
Krauthammer was born on March 13, 1950, in the New York City borough of Manhattan. His father, Shulim Krauthammer (November 23, 1904 – June 1987), was from Bolekhiv, Ukraine (then the Austro-Hungarian Empire), and later became a naturalized citizen of France. His mother, Thea (née Horowitz; July 28, 1921 – February 14, 2019), was from Antwerp, Belgium. The Krauthammer family spoke French in the household. When he was five, the family moved to Montreal. Through the school year they resided in Montreal, and spent the summers in Long Beach, New York. Both of his parents were Orthodox Jews, and he graduated from Herzliah High School. Krauthammer attended McGill University in Montreal, graduating in 1970 with first-class honours in economics and political science. At that time, McGill was a hotbed of radical sentiment, something that Krauthammer said influenced his dislike of political extremism. "I became very acutely aware of the dangers, the hypocrisies, and sort of the extremism of the political extremes. And it cleansed me very early in my political evolution of any romanticism." He later said: "I detested the extreme Left and extreme Right, and found myself somewhere in the middle." The following year, after graduating from McGill, he studied as a Commonwealth Scholar in politics at Balliol College, Oxford, before returning to the United States to attend medical school at Harvard. A diving accident during his first year of medical school left Krauthammer paralyzed from the waist down. He remained with his Harvard Medical School class during his hospitalization, graduating in 1975. He credited Hermann Lisco, associate dean of students, for making it happen. From 1975 through 1978, Krauthammer was a resident in psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, serving as chief resident his final year. During his time as chief resident, he identified a variant of manic depression (bipolar disorder) that he named secondary mania. He published his findings in the Archives of General Psychiatry. He also co-authored a path-finding study on the epidemiology of mania. In 1978, Krauthammer relocated to Washington, D.C., to direct planning in psychiatric research under the Carter administration. He began contributing articles about politics to The New Republic and, in 1980, served as a speechwriter to Vice President Walter Mondale. He contributed to the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. In 1984, he was board certified in psychiatry by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology.
In 1979, Krauthammer joined The New Republic as both a writer and editor. In 1983, he began writing essays for Time magazine, including one on the Reagan Doctrine, which first brought him national acclaim as a writer. Krauthammer began writing regular editorials for The Washington Post in 1985 and became a nationally syndicated columnist. Krauthammer coined and developed the term Reagan Doctrine in 1985, and he defined the U.S. role as sole superpower in his essay "The Unipolar Moment", published shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In 1990, Krauthammer became a panelist for the weekly PBS political roundtable Inside Washington, remaining with the show until it ceased production in December 2013. Krauthammer also appeared on Fox News Channel as a contributor for many years. Krauthammer's 2004 speech "Democratic Realism", which was delivered to the American Enterprise Institute when Krauthammer won the Irving Kristol Award, set out a framework for tackling the post-9/11 world, focusing on the promotion of democracy in the Middle East. In 2013, Krauthammer published Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics. An immediate bestseller, the book remained on The New York Times bestseller list for 38 weeks and spent 10 weeks in a row at number one. His son Daniel is responsible for the final edits on a book that was posthumously released, The Point of It All: A Lifetime of Great Loves and Endeavors, that was published in December 2018.
In 1974, Krauthammer married his wife, Robyn, a lawyer who stopped practicing law in order to focus on her work as an artist. They had one child, Daniel Krauthammer. Charles Krauthammer's brother, Marcel, died in 2006. Krauthammer was Jewish, raised largely in the Orthodox tradition, but in his adult life he variously described himself as "not religious" and "a Jewish Shinto" who engaged in "ancestor worship". At the same time, while he considered himself a skeptic regarding religious fanaticism and those claiming to hold certainty of any particular theological dogma, he was also quite scornful of atheism, once being quoted as saying that of all the belief systems he was aware of, "the only one I know is NOT true is atheism." His beliefs were sometimes described as a version of the "ceremonial Deism" exhibited by some of the U.S. Founding Fathers, particularly Thomas Jefferson. He was also influenced by his study of Maimonides at McGill University with Rabbi David Hartman, the head of Jerusalem's Shalom Hartman Institute and professor of philosophy at McGill during Krauthammer's student days. Krauthammer was a member of both the Chess Journalists of America and the Council on Foreign Relations. He was co-founder of Pro Musica Hebraica, a not-for-profit organization devoted to presenting Jewish classical music, much of it lost or forgotten, in a concert hall setting. Krauthammer was a big baseball fan. He enjoyed chess to a point that he gave it up later in life, fearing he was addicted. In the final presidential election of his life, that of 2016, he refused to support either candidate and declared his intention to cast a write-in vote after giving extensive explanations for why he could support neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump.
In August 2017, Krauthammer had a cancerous tumor removed from his abdomen. The surgery was thought to have been successful; however, on June 8, 2018, Krauthammer announced that his cancer had returned and that doctors had given him only weeks to live. On June 21, he died of small intestine cancer at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia. He was 68. Krauthammer was survived by his wife and son. Mitch McConnell, Chris Wallace, David Nakamura, Megyn Kelly, John Roberts, Bret Baier, Mike Pence, and others paid tribute to him.
Krauthammer was a supporter of abortion legalization (although he believed Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided) and opposed to euthanasia. Krauthammer was appointed to President George W. Bush's Council on Bioethics in 2002. He supported relaxing the Bush administration's limits on federal funding of discarded human embryonic stem cell research. Krauthammer supported embryonic stem cell research using embryos discarded by fertility clinics with restrictions in its applications. However, he opposed human cloning. He warned that scientists were beginning to develop the power of "creating a class of superhumans". A fellow member of the council, Janet D. Rowley, insists that Krauthammer's vision was still an issue far in the future and not a topic to be discussed at the present time. In March 2009, Krauthammer was invited to the signing of an executive order by President Barack Obama at the White House but declined to attend because of his fears about the cloning of human embryos and the creation of normal human embryos solely for purposes of research. He also contrasted the "moral seriousness" of Bush's stem cell address of August 9, 2001, with that of Obama's address on stem cells. Krauthammer was critical of the idea of living wills and the current state of end-of-life counseling and feared that Obamacare would just worsen the situation:
