Charles Krauthammer
Charles Krauthammer (1950-), born in New York, is a columnist for the Washington Post who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1987.
Krauthammer obtained a first-class honors degree in political science and economics from McGill University. He was later a Commonwealth Scholar in politics at Oxford University's Balliol College. He earned an M.D. from Harvard University's medical school in 1975 and worked as a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital for several years. In practice, Krauthammer developed several psychiatric methods still widely used to this day, and his papers are frequently cited. For example, in 1978, Krauthammer was, with one other, the first to describe secondary mania as a syndrome with multiple causes.
In 1978, Krauthammer quit medical practice to direct planning in psychiatric research for the Carter administration, and began contributing to the liberal magazine, The New Republic. During the presidential campaign of 1980, he served as a speech writer to Vice President Walter Mondale. He also writes essays for Time and the Weekly Standard.
The "Unipolar World"
Krauthammer believes that "the notion that legitimacy derives from international consensus" is a political absurdity in what he calls the "unipolar world" dominated by US foreign policy. As a member of the Project for the New American Century whose goal is to promote American global leadership, Krauthammer defends unilateralism and maintains that as a superpower, the U.S. should assert its positions and invite others to join.
Defending Israel
Krauthammer's articles are usually supportive of Israel, and he frequently accuses those who are uncompromisingly critical of Israel's policy of anti-Semitism or anti-Zionism.
In 2002, he received the Guardian of Zion Award from Bar-Ilan University's Ingeborg Rennert Center for Jerusalem Studies for "his support of the Jewish State in print over the years." This honour has been given to Elie Wiesel (1997), Herman Wouk (1998), A.M. Rosenthal (1999), Martin Gilbert (2000), Cynthia Ozick (2001) and Ruth Roskies Wisse (2003).
President's Council on Bioethics
Appointed to the President George W. Bush's Council on Bioethics in 2002, Krauthammer has held many controversial positions in opposition to such practices as human experimentation, stem cell research, human cloning, and euthanasia. For example, part of Krauthammer's objection to human cloning rests on the grounds that cloning might be used to "creat[e] a class of superhumans." However, this view is controversial. A fellow member of the Council, conservative.
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- by Charles Krauthammer
- by Charles Krauthammer
- by Bret Stephens - June 13, 2002.
- by Charles Krauthammer
- by Charles Krauthammer
- by Sheryl Gay Stolberg
