Krauthammer dead at 68
Right loses intellectual voice
Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and TV pundit Charles Krauthammer — whose razor-sharp intellect made him one of his generation’s leading conservative voices — died Thursday after a yearlong battle with cancer. He was 68.
Krauthammer went public last year with his battle with a cancerous tumor in his abdomen and then shocked his followers this month, saying he had only weeks to live.
“Recent tests have revealed that the cancer has returned,” he wrote on June 8. “My doctors tell me their best estimate is that I have only a few weeks left to live. This is the final verdict. My fight is over.”
Krauthammer, who wrote for The Washington Post and appeared on the Fox News Channel, had used a wheelchair since 1972 after an accident changed his life.
During his freshman year at Harvard Medical School, he and a pal went for a dip in a campus pool. As he dived in, his head struck a diving board, severing his spine. Krauthammer recovered from the near-death experience and was able to graduate from med school.
While serving as a psychiatric resident at Massachusetts General Hospital, a professor he knew was appointed to a mental-health agency created by thenPresident Jimmy Carter.
That connection led Krauthammer into public policy and politics, working in the Carter administration and then as a speechwriter for Vice President Walter Mondale.
But by the time Ronald Reagan defeated Carter in a 1980 landslide, the young liberal Krauthammer had taken a turn to the right.
“As I became convinced of the practical and theoretical defects of the socialdemocratic tendencies of my youth, it was but a short distance to a philosophy of restrained, free-market governance,” Krauthammer wrote in his 2013 book, “Things That Matter.”
For the next four decades, Krauthammer was hailed as one of the right’s leading intellectual voices.
He joined the The Washington Post in 1984 and won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. While clearly a conservative voice, Krauthammer wasn’t afraid to take positions that went against orthodoxy, such as opposing capital punishment and supporting stem-cell research.
And in recent years, Krauthammer loudly bemoaned the election of President Trump. He called Trump a “moral disgrace” for the president’s reaction to white nationalists who rallied in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017.
Krauthammer is survived by his wife, Robyn and their son, Daniel.
“I leave this life with no regrets,” Krauthammer wrote in his June 8 Washington Post farewell. “It was a wonderful life — full and complete with the great loves and great endeavors that make it worth living. I am sad to leave, but I leave with the knowledge that I lived the life that I intended.”