Charles Krauthammer

A column, says Charles 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."

Krauthammer's mission as a columnist is to challenge conventional wisdom. 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."

Born in New York City, Krauthammer grew up in Montreal and was educated at McGill University, Oxford University, and earned his medical degree at Harvard University. He practiced psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and his scientific papers, including his co-discovery of a form of manic-depressive illness, are still frequently cited in the psychiatric literature.

Krauthammer quit psychiatry and went to Washington D.C. to serve as a science adviser in the Carter administration and, later, speechwriter to Vice President Walter Mondale. He joined the staff of The New Republic where he was an essayist and editor. In the mid-eighties he began writing a weekly syndicated column for The Washington Post, which now appears in more than 100 newspapers, and a monthly essay for Time magazine.

In his first full year as a syndicated columnist, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Commentary in 1987. His New Republic essays won the highest award in magazine writing, the National Magazine Award for Essays and Criticism and the Washingtonian magazine has named him among the top 50 most influential journalists in the national press corps.

Awarded for writing on everything from the economics of oil to religion in civil society, Krauthammer has also received the Guardian of Zion Award from Bar-Ilan University. His essays have appeared in dozens of anthologies on subjects ranging from nuclear deterrence to gay marriage. He has been writing about medical ethics for The New Republic since 1979 and is a member of the President's Council on Bioethics. He also penned a collection of his essays and columns, Cutting Edges.

A regular weekly panelist on Inside Washington, Washington’s highest rated political TV talk show, and a contributing editor to The New Republic and The Weekly Standard, Krauthammer also serves on the Editorial Board of several journals, including the National Interest and the Public Interest.

In his speeches, Charles Krauthammer breathes new life into tired debates, offering clear and compelling arguments that everyone else overlooks and challenging conventional wisdom. An incisive thinker, he is a strong voice offering new perspectives on international affairs, U.S. politics, foreign policy and culture. He is widely known as a conservative, but he is also unorthodox to the core.