Pulitzer Prize-winning writer ‘crystallized conservative thought’
Charles Krauthammer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and intellectual provocateur who championed the muscular foreign policy of neoconservatism that helped lay the ideological groundwork for the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, died Thursday at 68.
The cause was cancer of the small intestine, said his son, Daniel Krauthammer.
“I believe that the pursuit of truth and right ideas through honest debate and rigorous argument is a noble undertaking,” he wrote in a June 8 farewell note. “I am grateful to have played a small role in the conversations that have helped guide this extraordinary nation’s destiny. I leave this life with no regrets.”
A Washington Post columnist who often appeared in the opinion pages of National Post, Krauthammer was one of the highestprofile commentators of his generation. In addition to his syndicated weekly column, which garnered him a Pulitzer in 1987, he was a marquee essayist for magazines across the political spectrum, including Time, the New Republic, the Weekly Standard and the National Interest foreign policy journal. He also was a near-ubiquitous presence on cable news, particularly Fox.
By any measure, Krauthammer cut a singular profile in Washington’s journalistic and policy-making circles. He graduated in 1975 from Harvard Medical School — on time, despite a diving accident that left him a paraplegic — and practised psychiatry before a restless curiosity led him to switch paths. Instead of diagnosing patients, he would analyze the body politic.
Jacob Heilbrunn, author of They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons, and editor of the National Interest, said Krauthammer “crystallized conservative thought and exerted influence by setting the terms of public debate at key moments in the nation’s political life.”
Known for acerbic, unsparing prose and hawkishness on U.S. and Israeli security matters, Krauthammer long directed his moral indignation at the “liberal monopoly” on the news cycle. He was festooned with honours by right-leaning groups and sought after by Republican policy-makers. Vice president Dick Cheney once praised him for his “superior intellect.”
To the left, Krauthammer was a bogeyman, most notably on the matter of president George W. Bush’s “war on terror” and the ultimately catastrophic efforts to democratize the Middle East.
On Israeli-Palestinian relations, he acknowledged suffering on both sides but firmly defended the Jewish state in what he saw as its existential battle for survival.
Krauthammer said his politics were shaped by growing up in the post-Holocaust years in Montreal with Jewish parents who had escaped Nazi Europe. He grew up attuned to the “tragic element in history,” he once told a C-Span interviewer. “It tempers your optimism and your idealism. And it gives you a vision of the world which I think is more restrained, conservative, if you like. You don’t expect that much out of human nature. And you are prepared for the worst.”
He initially defined himself as a liberal Cold Warrior, a Democrat who embraced anti-communist as well as New Deal and Great Society programs that aided the most vulnerable. His support for the robust use of American military power gradually left him alienated from the Democratic Party, however, and he found ideological succor in neoconservatism, identifying with writer Irving Kristol’s definition of its adherents as onetime liberals who have been “mugged by reality.”
Yet Krauthammer, who was named by Bush to the President’s Council on Bioethics, was never completely a partisan warrior. He favoured legalized abortion and stem-cell research and abhorred the idea of “intelligent design,” calling it “today’s tarted-up version of creationism.”
Irving Charles Krauthammer was born in Manhattan on March 13, 1950, and at the age of five settled in Montreal with his father and mother, Jewish refugees from Europe.
In Canada, the elder Krauthammer prospered as a real estate executive. Charles, the younger of two sons, graduated first in his class at Montreal’s McGill University in 1970 with a degree in political science and economics. He then spent a year studying political theory at the University of Oxford.
Amid the ferment of student revolution on college campuses, he grew disillusioned with politics and abruptly switched course to pursue medicine.
The summer after his first year at medical school, he was diving into an outdoor swimming pool in Boston when he struck his head on the concrete bottom and his spinal cord snapped.
He spent 14 months in intensive physical therapy while also being tutored so he could complete medical school with his class. “If I can just muddle through life, they’ll say it was a great achievement,” he said. “That would be the greatest defeat in my life — if I allowed that. I decided if I could make people judge me by the old standard, that would be a triumph and that’s what I try to do. It seemed to me the only way to live.”
He is survived by his wife Robyn Trethewey, an artist, their son, and his mother.