Charles Krauthammer is one of the nation’s most prominent political thinkers. A psychiatrist turned columnist, he is a proponent of what he calls “democratic realism”—intervention to defend American strategic interests and fundamental threats to democracy around the world.
Born in 1950, he grew up in an Orthodox family in Montreal, went to yeshiva and studied the Talmud with a rabbi at home. “I had enough Talmud for three lifetimes,” he laughs. “You develop a certain rigor with the Talmud, how to read text and think. It is very legalistic.”
After graduating from Harvard Medical School, he served as chief psychiatry resident at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. He came to Washington during Jimmy Carter’s administration as deputy director of the National Institute of Mental Health.
When he “got bored with medicine,” Krauthammer, then a “Cold War liberal,” did a stint as a speechwriter during Democratic Vice President Walter Mondale’s 1980 re-election campaign. He later joined The New Republic as an editor and writer and drifted toward the Republican Party. In a 1985 Time magazine essay, he coined the phrase “The Reagan Doctrine,” which “proclaims overt and unashamed American support for anti-Communist revolution.” He also came up with the term “Bush Doctrine,” which he has most recently defined as “the idea that the fundamental mission of American foreign policy is to spread democracy throughout the world.”
Krauthammer’s syndicated column for The Washington Post earned him the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary, and in 2006, London’s Financial Times called him the “most influential commentator in America.” He is also familiar to television audiences from his appearances on Inside Washington, the public affairs program, and Fox News.
He believes in a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but opposed the Oslo accords, arguing that until Palestinians accept the Jewish state, “there will be nothing but war, and every ‘peace process,’ however cynical or well-meaning, will come to nothing.” He supported, however, Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005.
In his spacious Washington, DC, office sits a chess set, its pieces posed for a challenge on a corner table. Krauthammer plays here only with Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident and Israeli politician, when he comes to town. In warm weather, Krauthammer likes to play chess at the outdoor tables at nearby Dupont Circle, often with homeless men “who usually beat me.”
During the 2008 election, Krauthammer, a staunch supporter of the Iraq war, backed John McCain but criticized the choice of Sarah Palin as his vice presidential candidate. He wrote that Barack Obama “is a man of limited experience, questionable convictions, deeply troubling associations and an alarming lack of self-definition.” Since the election, he has sounded a more positive note.
“I didn’t vote for him, but I think he is doing a good job and building an excellent team so far,” Krauthammer says. He called Obama’s pick of Illinois Congressman Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff a “brilliant choice.”
Not as well known as the Reagan Doctrine or the Bush Doctrine is Krauthammer’s Law: “Everyone is Jewish until proven otherwise.”—Eileen Lavine
