CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER (1950 – 2018)Irving Charles Krauthammer was born in Manhattan on March 13, 1950, to parents who were Jewish refugees from Europe. Five years later, the family moved to Montreal. Charles studied political science and economics at McGill University, and graduated first in his class in 1970.
Switching careers, he went to Harvard to study medicine. That discipline, he later wrote, “promised not only moral certainty, but intellectual certainty, a hardness to truth, something not to be found in the universe of politics.”
A diving accident there snapped his spinal cord and left him a quadriplegic, but didn’t stop his studies. Focusing on psychiatry, he completed his studies on time, and eventually became the chief resident of the psychiatric consultation service at Massachusetts General Hospital. a professor with whom he had done important research on bipolar disorder was appointed to a mental health agency created by President Jimmy Carter. Krauthammer went, too.
That Washington connection evidently reignited his interest in politics. He worked as a speechwriter for Walter Mondale, and found his true calling as a writer. He joined the staff of the
New Republic in 1981, received a National Magazine Award in 1984 and joined the
Washington Post the next year.
In 1984, he coined the term “the Reagan Doctrine” to describe “overt and unashamed American support for anti-Communist revolution” in the form of proxy wars from Nicaragua to Angola. After the fall of the Soviet Union, he was credited with popularizing the phrase “unipolar moment” in commentaries that advocated solidifying American hegemony in an era when no other power came close to matching the United States in might.
His arguments found favor with the growing tide of neoconservatives in the GOP and saw their most intense expression during the first term of the Bush administration.
Yet Dr. Krauthammer, whom Bush named to the President’s Council on Bioethics, was never completely a partisan warrior. He differed from many cultural conservatives by favoring legalized abortion and stem-cell research and abhorred the idea of “intelligent design,” calling it “a fraud,” “today’s tarted-up version of creationism.”
He scolded the tea party, a loud minority within the GOP that tried to force its way legislatively with government shutdowns, as the “suicide caucus.” It was one thing to be a “blocking element” in the minority, he said, but their tactics were no way to govern.
Dr. Krauthammer was apoplectic about the rise and election of President Trump, calling him a “moral disgrace” for his initial refusal to fully condemn a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville and a walking “systemic stress test.”
"I used to think Trump was an 11-year-old, an undeveloped schoolyard bully," he wrote in August 2016, around the time Trump officially became the Republican nominee. "I was off by about 10 years. His needs are more primitive, an infantile hunger for approval and praise, a craving that can never be satisfied. He lives in a cocoon of solipsism where the world outside himself has value — indeed exists — only insofar as it sustains and inflates him."
Outside of his political thinking, he was chairman of Pro Musica Hebraica, a group that revives largely forgotten Jewish classical music on the concert stage. He was also noted for his love of baseball – to the point where the Washington Nationals honored him with a moment of silence before the start of their game Thursday after the news of his death broke. Chess was another passion of his.
“…but at our club, when you lose with a blunder that instantly illuminates the virtues of assisted suicide, we have a cure. Rack 'em up again. Like pool. A new game, right away. We play fast, very fast, so that memories can be erased and defeats immediately avenged. I try to explain to friends that we do not sit in overstuffed chairs smoking pipes in five-hour games. We play like the vagrants in the park--at high speed with clocks ticking so that thinking more than 10 or 20 seconds can be a fatal extravagance. In speed (“blitz”') chess, you've got 5 or 10 minutes to play your entire game. Some Mondays we get in a dozen games each. No time to recriminate, let alone ruminate.”
http://townhall.com/columnists/charleskrauthammer/2002/12/27/the-pariah-chess-club-n1010830Charles was one of those vanishingly rare Washingtonians who could be both likable and logical. This is not easy in a town where the local industry, politics — unlike, say, engineering; get things wrong and the bridges buckle — thrives on unrefuted errors. – George Will
“He had great lucidity of thought and was an extremely pungent polemicist,” Jacob Heilbrunn said of Dr. Krauthammer. “Those traits manifested themselves once more in his searing denunciations of Donald Trump as a phony. They showed that Krauthammer wasn’t simply a reflexive, unthinking conservative who was peddling the party line. He had real discernment and independence. At bottom, he was an intellectual, not just a journalist, with real literary flair and style and insight.”
“History is shaped by its battle of ideas, and I wanted to be in the arena,” Dr. Krauthammer once said, “not because I want to fight, but because some things need to be said. And some things need to be defended.”