Admiration

From A note to readers by Charles Krauthammer.

I have been uncharacteristically silent these past ten months. I had thought that silence would soon be coming to an end, but I’m afraid I must tell you now that fate has decided on a different course for me.

In August of last year, I underwent surgery to remove a cancerous tumor in my abdomen. That operation was thought to have been a success, but it caused a cascade of secondary complications — which I have been fighting in hospital ever since. It was a long and hard fight with many setbacks, but I was steadily, if slowly, overcoming each obstacle along the way and gradually making my way back to health.

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.

I have been reading some of Krauthammer's works for probably some fifteen or twenty years. I have his Things That Matter from a few years ago. Another Washington talking head would be an easy assumption.

I wouldn't discount him so crudely. I am not enthusiastic about all his writings but he has more than a fair share of insights that are clever and well put.

I have greater admiration for him as a human being than as a writer. It was years before I became aware of a significant fact of his life. While I mostly read his works, I occasionally have seen him on TV. From Wikipedia:

He attended McGill University in Montreal, graduating in 1970 with First Class Honours in both economics and political science. At the time, McGill University was a hotbed of radical sentiment, something that Krauthammer says influenced his dislike of political extremism. "I became very acutely aware of the dangers, the hypocrisies, and sort of the extremism of the political extremes. And it cleansed me very early in my political evolution of any romanticism," He later said: "I detested the extreme Left and extreme Right, and found myself somewhere in the middle." The following year, after graduating from McGill, he studied as a Commonwealth Scholar in politics at Balliol College, Oxford, before returning to the United States to attend medical school at Harvard.

Krauthammer was injured in a diving board accident during his first year of medical school. He sustained injuries that left him paralyzed below the neck and required him to be hospitalized for 14 months. He has used a wheelchair since the accident. He remained with his Harvard Medical School class during his hospitalization, graduating in 1975.

In a contemporary world so inundated by people indulging in competitive victimhood status, this is an individual who refuses to allow bitter fate to define his being. For someone to have suffered that severe a life-altering injury and for it to never manifest in his writings or appearances - Hugely impressive.

There is a second attribute which I admire in certain individuals - people who have demonstrated superior achievement in one domain and who then move on to demonstrate superior achievement in an entirely different field.

From 1975 through 1978 Krauthammer was a resident in psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, serving as chief resident his final year. During his time as chief resident he noted a variant of manic depression (bipolar disorder) that he identified and named "Secondary Mania." He published his findings in the Archives of General Psychiatry. He also coauthored a path-finding study on the epidemiology of mania.

In 1978, Krauthammer moved to Washington, D.C., to direct planning in psychiatric research under the Carter administration. He began contributing articles about politics to The New Republic and, in 1980, served as a speech writer to Vice President Walter Mondale. He contributed to the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. In January 1981, Krauthammer joined The New Republic as both a writer and editor. In 1983, he began writing essays for Time magazine, including one on the Reagan Doctrine, which first brought him national acclaim as a writer.

In 1984 he was board certified in psychiatry by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. His New Republic essays won the "National Magazine Award for Essays and Criticism". The weekly column he began writing for The Washington Post in 1985 won him the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1987. In 1990 he became a panelist for the weekly PBS political roundtable Inside Washington, remaining with the show until it ceased production in December 2013. For the last decade, he has been a political analyst and commentator for Fox News.

I am sorry for the fate that has befallen him. He is a great example.