Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer issued a public statement Friday announcing that he is terminally ill and has a few weeks to live.
Krauthammer, a Washington Post columnist who also has long been considered one of the most rational and informed conservative voices on Fox News, has been missing from the cable network since August 2016 after surgery to remove a cancerous tumor from his abdomen.
The cancer has returned and is spreading rapidly, Krauthammer said in the letter, which was published in The Washington Post.
“My doctors tell me their best estimate is that I have only a few weeks left to live,” Krauthammer said. “This is the final verdict. My fight is over.”
Krauthammer thanked his colleagues and his Fox News viewers, adding he is “grateful to have played a small role in the conversations that have helped guide this extraordinary nation’s destiny.”
“I leave this life with no regrets,” Krauthammer added. “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.”
Rupert Murdoch, executive chairman of Fox News parent 21st Century Fox, praised Krauthammer’s contributions to the network in a statement.
“Charles has been a profound source of personal and intellectual inspiration for all of us at Fox News,” Murdoch said. “His always principled stand on the most important issues of our time has been a guiding star in an often turbulent world, a world that has too many superficial thinkers vulnerable to the ebb and flow of fashion, and a world that, unfortunately, has only one Charles Krauthammer.”
Krauthammer, 68, has been a Fox News contributor since 2002, most frequently as a panelist on the network’s Washington-based news program “Special Report With Bret Baier.” He has been a columnist at The Washington Post since 1985. He earned the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1987.
Krauthammer was a board-certified psychiatrist before he became a columnist. He wrote for Time and the New Republic before joining the Post. At age 22, Krauthammer was injured in a diving board accident while attending Harvard Medical School, leaving him paralyzed and with limited use of his arms.
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