CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, was a syndicated columnist, political commentator, physician and bestselling author. His Washington Post column was syndicated in over 400 newspapers worldwide. He was a Fox News contributor, and for over a decade he appeared nightly on its flagship evening-news broadcast Special Report. He was also a weekly panelist on PBS’ Inside Washington for 23 years. As for doctoring, as a retired but still board-certified psychiatrist, he liked to consider himself a “psychiatrist in remission.”
Krauthammer was born in New York City but moved at age five with his family to Montreal, where he lived until graduating college. His summers, however, were always spent at the family cottage in Long Beach, New York, where he enjoyed what he described as “a paradisiacal childhood.” He graduated McGill University with First Class Honors in political science and economics, was a Commonwealth Scholar in politics at Balliol College, Oxford, and received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1975.
He served as a resident and then chief resident in psychiatry at the Massachusetts General Hospital from 1975–78. During his residency, he discovered an unusual form of manic-depressive disease (“Secondary Mania,” Archives of General Psychiatry, November 1978) that continues to be cited in the medical literature. In 1978, he quit the practice of psychiatry and moved to Washington, DC, to work in the Carter administration on planning psychiatric research. During that time, he began contributing articles to The New Republic. In 1980, he served as a speechwriter for Vice President Walter Mondale.
In 1981, he joined The New Republic as a writer and an editor. Three years later, he won the National Magazine Award for essays and criticism. In 1983, he started writing a monthly back-page essay for Time. In 1985, he began his syndicated column for the Washington Post, which won the Pulitzer Prize two years later. Throughout his career he published articles in many other periodicals, among them The Weekly Standard, Commentary, The National Interest, The Public Interest and Foreign Affairs. He received many awards and honors over the years, including the American Enterprise Institute’s Irving Kristol Award, the Bradley Prize and the William F. Buckley Jr. Prize for Leadership in Political Thought. In 2006, the Financial Times named him the most influential commentator in America.
Krauthammer was a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2001 to 2006. He was an avid chess player and a member of Chess Journalists of America. He was also chairman and cofounder, with his wife Robyn, of Pro Musica Hebraica, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the recovery and performance of classical Jewish music. He and Robyn lived in Chevy Chase, Maryland. An Australian lawyer, she happily pursued a career as an artist and sculptor after moving to the United States.
Charles Krauthammer died on June 21, 2018.