Charles Krauthammer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning political columnist and Fox News mainstay, revealed in a touching letter Friday he has only a few weeks to live.
For nearly a year, the conservative-leaning pundit, who was seen regularly for years on Fox News Channel’s Special Report with Bret Baier, has been absent.
What started out as surgery for an abdominal tumor turned into a series of complications that kept the eloquent wordsmith hospitalized for months. Just as he was recovering and preparing to resume a normal life, he learned the cancer had aggressively returned, and he felt the need to say goodbye.
“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,” he writes.
“[R]ecent tests have revealed that the cancer has returned,” Krauthammer explains after describing his near-recovery. “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.”
Krauthammer’s career was originally destined to be in psychiatry. In 1975, even after a diving accident at age 22 left him paralyzed from the neck down and confined to a wheelchair, Krauthammer graduated from Harvard Medical School.
After just a few years in the field of psychiatry, he moved to Washington, DC, in 1978 to work in the Carter administration. Eventually, he started writing speeches for Vice President Walter Mondale. After Carter’s re-election defeat in 1980, Krauthammer joined the New Republic as an editor and contributor. In 1985, he began writing a weekly column for the Washington Post, a job he still holds.
In 1987, he won the Pulitzer for his political commentary.
Krauthammer closed his goodbye letter with, “I leave this life with no regrets. It was a wonderful life — full and complete with the great loves and great endeavors that make it worth living. I am sad to leave, but I leave with the knowledge that I lived the life that I intended.”
Charles Krauthammer is 68-years-old. Read his letter here.
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