Charles Krauthammer (Steve Barrett)
Pulitzer winner Charles Krauthammer has died of cancer. He was 68. In honor of his life, we are publishing Krauthammer's 1987 Commentary entry for the first time on pulitzer.org. Read it here.
Widely regarded as one of America's preeminent right-of-center political commentators during six presidential administrations, Krauthammer first came to Washington in 1978 as a psychiatric research planner in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare — under the liberal Jimmy Carter.
Not yet 30, he had flirted with socialism as an undergraduate at McGill University (his family divided their time between Montreal and the New York metropolitan area); studied politics at Oxford as a Commonwealth Scholar; and received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1975 after surmounting a swimming accident that left him paralyzed from the neck down for the rest of his life. As chief resident in psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, he conducted seminal research into secondary mania and the epidemiology of mania.
Yet this promising scientific career soon segued into a speechwriting position with Vice President Walter Mondale and later political journalism, most notably as a syndicated columnist with The Washington Post. In essays such as "The Reagan Doctrine" (published in Time in 1985) and "The Unipolar Moment" (published in Foreign Affairs in 1991), the onetime "70 per cent Mondale liberal, 30 per cent Scoop Jackson Democrat" crafted New Right-era corollaries to George F. Kennan's "Long Telegram" and "The Sources of Soviet Conduct." "If one country breaks the rules at will, then later claims its protection," Krauthammer argued in the former essay, "what — apart from habit and cowardice — can possibly oblige other countries to honor that claim?"
Much as policies derived from Kennan's work veered away from his formative insights into Southeast Asia's calamities of containment, the Reagan Doctrine normalized a brand of interventionism that arguably prefigured the Iraq War. Although he identified with the neoconservative movement and supported the invasion of Iraq, Krauthammer cautioned against imperial excess at the height of the conflict.
"I believe [democratic globalism] must be tempered in its universalistic aspirations and rhetoric [...] to a democratic realism," he said in 2004. "It must be targeted, focused and limited."
It was for this reason that longtime Washington Post editorial page editor and 1978 Editorial Writing winner Meg Greenfield characterized Krauthammer's column as "independent and hard to peg politically. It's a very tough column. There's no 'trendy' in it. You never know what is going to happen next."
In "Teen-Age Sex: The Battle Is Lost," the final piece in his Pulitzer-winning portfolio, Krauthammer laments the mass media's inculcation of moral values while conceding that "the front-line issue is [teenage] pregnancy. " and accurately predicting the "expensive failure" of "in-school drug education."
"Some situations are too far gone to be reversed," he concludes. "They can only be contained." For Krauthammer, conservation was always subordinated by and undertaken in the context of a quintessential American impulse: the philosophy of pragmatism.
Related
Read an enhanced edition of "Tutu and King" (the first column in Krauthammer's entry) from our This Day in Pulitzer History series here.