a costly charade at the u.n. charles krauthammer, page-6

charles krauthammer Charles Krauthammer
Offers clear and new perspectives on politics, foreign policy and culture, often from the right. Pulitzer winner. Once a week.



Charles Krauthammer, winner of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary, writes a nationally syndicated editorial page column for The Washington Post Writers Group. Krauthammer, also winner of the 1984 National Magazine Award for essays, began writing the weekly column for The Washington Post in January 1985. It now appears in more than 100 newspapers.

The late Meg Greenfield, editorial page editor of The Washington Post, called Krauthammer's column ``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." He is widely known as a conservative, but he is unorthodox to the core. His motto, he once wrote, is ``If the United States Senate votes 98-0 on anything, it must be wrong.''

A column, says Krauthammer, is not just politics. ``My beat is ideas, everything from the ethics of cloning to strategy in Afghanistan. I also do public service, like reading Stephen Hawking's books and assuring my readers that `It is not you, they are entirely incomprehensible.'''

Perhaps Krauthammer's most important mission as a columnist is to challenge conventional wisdom. Hence eight years of columns warning that the Oslo peace accords were a fraud and a deception, doomed to fail. Alas, he was proved correct.

Krauthammer was born in New York City and raised in Montreal. He was educated at McGill University, majoring in political science and economics, Oxford University (Commonwealth Scholar in Politics) and Harvard (M.D. in 1975). He practiced medicine for three years as a resident and then chief resident in psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital.

In 1978, he quit medical practice, came to Washington to direct planning in psychiatric research for the Carter administration, and began contributing articles to The New Republic. During the presidential campaign of 1980, he served as a speechwriter to Vice President Walter Mondale. He joined The New Republic as a writer and editor in 1981. He writes regular essays for Time magazine, and contributes to several others including The Weekly Standard, The New Republic and The National Interest.

Krauthammer lives in suburban Washington with his wife Robyn, an artist, and their son.

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