WASHINGTON (CelebrityAccess) — Dr. Charles Krauthammer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist who was a leading voice of the neoconservative movement, has died. He was 68
According to the Washington Post, Dr. Krauthammer’s son Daniel said the cause of death was cancer of the small intestine.
Earlier this Month, Dr. Krauthammer penned a brief column in the Washington Post where he revealed that he’d been battling cancer and that his prognosis had become grave.
“However, recent tests have revealed that the cancer has returned. There was no sign of it as recently as a month ago, which means it is aggressive and spreading rapidly. 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,” he wrote in the brief column on June 8th.
Considered to be one of the leading voices of intellectual conservativism, Dr. Krauthammer coined and defined the concept of the Reagan Doctrine, which advocated for supporting anti-communist guerrillas and resistance movements around the world in a bid to overwhelm the influence of the Soviet Union.
This naturally translated into his support for the Bush Doctrine in the early 2000s, and Dr. Krauthammer was a key advocate for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and other attempts to spread democracy to the Middle East through military intervention.
However, he was not a doctrinaire conservative and he differed with many of his colleagues on key issues such as with his support for a two-state solution for the Israel-Palestine conflict and was a supporter for both the legality of abortion and the use of stems cells in medicine.
A native of New York, Dr. Krauthammer attended McGill University, and then Balliol College, Oxford, where studied politics before returning to the U.S. to attend Harvard Medical School.
While at Harvard, he suffered an injury while diving that left him paralyzed from the neck down and he was confined to a wheelchair for the remainder of his life. Despite his handicap, he graduated from Harvard and served as a resident in psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he authored several influential papers on manic depression.
In 1978, he moved to Washington to conduct psychiatric research under the Carter Administration and he became a contributor to the New Republic and Time Magazine before he found his longtime journalistic home at the Washington Post.
In 1987, his “witty and insightful” columns for the post earned him a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. His other accolades include a William F. Buckley Award for Media Excellence, and Bradley Prize among others.
He is survived by his wife Robyn and his son Daniel, as well as his mother.
