Krauthammer dies at 68
Pulitzer Prize-winning conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer died Thursday after a hard-fought battle with cancer. He was 68.
Fox News, where he spent 15 years as a TV talking head, confirmed his death.
Krauthammer, who lived most of his life in a wheelchair after a diving board accident as a firstyear medical student, could not be pigeonholed, as his thinking evolved politically over the years from a speechwriter for Walter Mondale who believed in a woman’s right to choose and an advocate of environmental conservation, to a supporter of Ronald Reagan’s hard-line antiCommunist foreign policy. He was a strong critic of President Trump.
The Washington Postsyndicated columnist, who won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, inspired his readers to overcome adversity the way he had.
After being sidelined by the spinal injury, he graduated Harvard with an M.D. in psychiatry.
“The catastrophe that awaits everyone from a single false move, wrong turn, fatal encounter,” he wrote in a piece about Major League Baseball player Rick Ankiel, who came back from a nervous breakdown to have a successful baseball career. “What distinguishes us is whether — and how— we ever come back.”
In June, Krauthammer announced in his Post column that he had been recovering from an August 2016 cancer surgery in which the doctors removed a tumor from his abdomen.
“My doctors tell me their best estimate is that I have only a few weeks left to live,” Krauthammer said. “This is the final verdict. My fight is over.”
He told readers that this was the reason he had not been seen on Fox News since 2016.
He thanked Fox viewers, saying “he felt 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,” he concluded. “I am sad to leave, but I leave with the knowledge that I lived the life that I intended.”