(RNN) – Charles Krauthammer, a writer, commentator and conservative intellectual icon, died on Thursday after a battle with cancer.
Krauthammer announced on June 8 that he had “only a few weeks left to live” in a letter to Fox News, the network that had been his primary platform since 2002.
He was a prolific author, columnist and essayist.
For decades he had bylines in some of media’s most prestigious outlets, among them The New Republic, The Washington Post and Time. He was a founding figure at the conservative Weekly Standard, and his syndicated column at one point circulated in hundreds of papers around the country.
Conservatives saw him as a philosophical force, the thoughtful and rational backbone of Fox News.
When he announced that his cancer was terminal, Megyn Kelly, a former colleague at Fox, saidthere was “no greater thought leader in this country than Charles Krauthammer.”
Charlie Sykes, at The Weekly Standard, recorded a podcast that day in which he said Krauthammer would be a loss for “the state of rational, intellectual, civil, political discourse.”
“He was such an extraordinary man, so utterly irreplaceable,” Sykes said. “A throwback in an era of internet trolls, clickbait celebrities, the talking heads that increasingly dominate much of the media.”
Politicians on the right, from Vice President Mike Pence to Sen. John McCain to Sen. Lindsey Graham, tweeted their tributes when Krauthammer announced his condition.
BREAKING NEWS: Charles Krauthammer, Pulitzer Prize winner and longtime Fox News contributor, dead at 68. https://t.co/xCL2PcxoFn pic.twitter.com/lsPiIwvUoj
— Fox News (@FoxNews) June 21, 2018
Krauthammer had an intellectual flexibility, an unsparing critic of former President Barack Obama who often bucked the conservative line on President Donald Trump at critical moments during the 2016 election, among other things saying the president had “authoritarian impulses” on Fox.
And he could surprise with his philosophical breadth, a committed vegetarian who once wrotehe was “convinced that our great-grandchildren will find it difficult to believe that we actually raised, herded, and slaughtered (animals) on an industrial scale – for the eating.”
Like most any public commentator, though, that did not mean he was immune to blind spots and partisanship.
He was a crucial booster of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, lending intellectual credibility to arguments that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat to America in possession of weapons of mass destruction. He was not.
In many of America’s cultural divides, he also swung reliably to the right, from warning of a “crack baby” epidemic in the 80s, to a firm and consistent opposition to affirmative action, to skepticism of Black Lives Matter and transgender activism.
Yet he also was capable arguing for reparations and pushing back against bathroom laws targeting transgender people.
"The one thing I try to do when I want to persuade someone is never start with my assumptions, because if I do, we're not going to get anywhere," he once said.
Krauthammer was born in New York City on March 13, 1950, the son of European Orthodox Jews.
He was largely raised in Montreal, and attended McGill University there. After studying for a time at the University of Oxford, he enrolled in Harvard Medical School.
In 1972 he was paralyzed in a diving accident. It did not deter him from graduating in 1975 and becoming chief resident in psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital.
He quit medicine in 1978, however, taking a position in the Carter administration directing psychiatric research, later worked as a speechwriter for Vice President Walter Mondale and by 1981 was fully on course for a public life in media in politics, joining The New Republic full-time.
He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1987, and was once named the most influential commentator in America by The Financial Times.
"I decided to become a writer so I could write about politics, because I thought that’s the most important thing one can involve oneself in," he said. "In the end, all the beautiful, elegant things in life, the things that I care about, the things that matter, depend on getting the politics right."
He leaves behind a wife, Robyn, whom he married in 1974 and a son, Daniel.
In his June 8 farewell letter, he said he had “no regrets.”
“It was a wonderful life – full and complete with the great loves and great endeavors that make it worth living,” he wrote. “I am sad to leave, but I leave with the knowledge that I lived the life that I intended.”
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