Michael John Gerson (born May 15, 1964, New Jersey) is an op-ed columnist for The Washington Post and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He served as President George W. Bush’s chief speechwriter from 2001 until June 2006, as a senior policy advisor from 2000 through June 2006, and was a member of the White House Iraq Group.
Contents
- 1 Background and family
- 2 Career
- 2.1 Speechwriter
- 2.1.1 Criticism from other Speechwriters
- 2.1.2 Lines attributed to Gerson
- 2.2 Washington Post Columnist
- 3 Publications
- 4 References
- 5 External links
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Background and family
Gerson graduated from Westminster Christian Academy and Wheaton College, Illinois.
He resides with his wife, and their two children in Alexandria, Virginia.
In December 2004, Gerson suffered a heart attack at the age of 40, but was successfully treated and soon returned to work.
Career
Prior to joining the Bush Administration, he was a senior policy advisor with The Heritage Foundation, a conservative public policy research institution. He also worked at various times as an aide to Indiana Senator Dan Coats and a speechwriter for the Presidential campaign of Bob Dole before briefly leaving the political world to cover it as a journalist for U.S. News & World Report. Gerson also worked at one point as a ghostwriter for Charles Colson.
In early 1999, Karl Rove recruited Gerson for the Bush campaign.
Gerson was named by Time as one of “The 25 Most Influential Evangelicals In America” in the magazine’s February 7, 2005 issue of the magazine, listing Gerson as the ninth most influential.
Speechwriter
Gerson joined the Bush campaign before 2000 as a speechwriter and went on to head the White House speechwriting team.
“No one doubts that he did his job exceptionally well”, wrote Ramesh Ponnuru in a 2007 article otherwise very critical of Gerson in National Review. Bush’s speechwriters had more prominence in the administration than their predecessors did under previous presidents because Bush’s speeches did most of the work of defending the president’s policies, since administration spokesmen and press conferences didn’t do that, Ponnuru wrote. On the other hand, he wrote, the speeches would announce new policies that were never implemented, making the speechwriting in some ways less influential than ever.
There is a gap between every administration’s rhetoric and its actions, David Frum, a former speechwriter for Bush, wrote in late 2006, “but seldom has it gaped as wide as in this one. As someone involved in the making of those words, this gap has greatly troubled me.”
On June 14, 2006, it was announced that Gerson was leaving the White House to pursue other writing and policy work. He was replaced as Bush’s chief speechwriter by WSJ chief editor William McGurn.
Criticism from other Speechwriters
At least two speechwriters who worked under Gerson in the White House have criticized him for exaggerating his role as the sole speechwriter of some important speeches. David Frum mildly criticized Gerson for taking disproportionate credit for Bush speeches when interviewed by Bob Woodward for a book. Former speechwriter Matthew Scully blasted Gerson in an article in The Atlantic Monthly for exaggerating his role to the point of denying that other speechwriters had collaborated on many of the important speeches of the Bush presidency.
Frum has said Bob Woodward’s book, State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III, which is said to have relied on Gerson’s accounts about certain speeches, “does a serious injustice” to Scully and another speechwriter, John McConnell. On page 342, Woodward wrote that “Gerson had written all of Bush’s memorable post-9/11 speeches”, a statement that is flat-out wrong, according to Frum, since it ignores Scully’s and McConnell’s work. McConnell wrote at least as much as Gerson on some important speeches, Frum wrote. “Gerson ranks among the most brilliant and most influential presidential speechwriters in decades,” he wrote. “It would not detract at all from his great merits and accomplishments to acknowledge the contributions of his colleagues and collaborators.”
Scully said Gerson constantly made exaggerations that appeared in media profiles of him while working in the White House and wrote his own exaggerations after he left government service.
“Every time, line by line, the three of us talked the speeches through, taking turns at the keyboard and generally agreeing when one of us had come up with the right thought, sentence, or edit,” Scully wrote. Gerson would often initiate the speechwriting with a bare outline and the three would collaborate (sometimes with other speechwriters as well) in putting together the speeches, which Gerson would then take to administration officials.
Once, after a collaborative effort to come up with jokes for a 2000 convention speech, Scully and McConnell found a cover note Gerson had written and sent to senior campaign staffers which said, “it’s not easy to write jokes sitting alone in a room.”
“s a matter of undeniable fact — entered in the permanent records of the United States, which will include more than 10,000 different speech drafts saved on the computer we shared — every major Bush speech of the first term was written from start to finish in the office of John McConnell, by the good old team,” Scully wrote.
In a 2002 segment of the ABC News program Nightline, Gerson suggested that he worked on speeches alone:
Lines attributed to Gerson
Gerson proposed the use of a “smoking gun/mushroom cloud” metaphor during a September 5, 2002 meeting of the White House Iraq Group, in an effort to sell the American public on the nuclear dangers posed by Saddam Hussein. According to Newsweek columnist Michael Isikoff, “The original plan had been to place it in an upcoming presidential speech, but WHIG members fancied it so much that when the Times reporters contacted the White House to talk about their upcoming piece , one of them leaked Gerson’s phrase — and the administration would soon make maximum use of it.”
Gerson has said one of his favorite speeches was given at the National Cathedral on September 14, 2001, a few days after the September 11, 2001 attacks, which included the following passage: “Grief and tragedy and hatred are only for a time. Goodness, remembrance, and love have no end. And the Lord of life holds all who die, and all who mourn.”
Gerson also coined “the soft bigotry of low expectations” and “the armies of compassion.”
Gerson’s noteworthy phrases for Bush are said to include “Axis of Evil”, a phrase adapted from “axis of hatred”, itself suggested by fellow speechwriter David Frum but deemed too mild.
Scully wrote that he, not Gerson, came up with the wording change to Frum’s original formulation.
Washington Post Columnist
After leaving the White House, Gerson wrote for Newsweek magazine for a time. On May 16, 2007, Gerson began his tenure as a twice-weekly columnist for the Washington Post. His columns appear on Wednesdays and Fridays.
Gerson, a conservative, has repeatedly criticized other conservatives in his column and conservatives have returned the favor. One of Gerson’s first columns was entitled “Letting Fear Rule”, in which he compared skeptics of President Bush’s immigration reform bill to nativist bigots of the 1880s Conservative opponents of the bill such as Power Line deemed Gerson’s column insulting and an effort to demonize opponents
At a conference at the Atlantic Ideas Fest, Gerson claimed that Saddam Hussein was “the equivalent of Pol Pot,” a claim which brought jeers from the audience.
In February 2009 Gerson published an editorial criticizing Pope Benedict XVI’s decision, in the name of Christian unity, to lift the excommunication of the Holocaust denying conservative bishop Richard Williamson.
Publications
- Michael J. Gerson (2007). Heroic Conservatism: Why Republicans Need to Embrace America’s Ideals (And Why They Deserve to Fail If They Don’t). HarperOne. ISBN 0-06-134950-X.
References
- ^ Naomi Schaefer Riley (2006-10-21). “Mr. Compassionate Conservatism”. The Wall Street Journal. http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009135.
- ^ Isikoff, Michael; David Corn (2006-09-08). Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War. New York: Crown Publishers. ISBN 0-307-34681-1.
- ^ “The 25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America”. TIME. 2005-02-07. http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101050207.
- ^ Gerson, Michael. Interview with Brian Lamb. Q&A. C-SPAN. 2007-01-07. (Interview).
- ^ a b c d e f g h i Scully, Matthew, “Present at the Creation”, The Atlantic Monthly]], September 2007, p 76
- ^ “The 25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America”. TIME. 2005-02-07. http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101050207.
- ^ Ponnuru, Ramesh, “Gerson’s World: The president’s chief speechwriter turns columnist”, article in National Review, July 30, 2007
- ^ a b Frum, David, “Blogging Woodward 21″ a posting at “David Frum’s Diary” blog at National Review Online, posting dated October 13, 2006, accessed August 10, 2007
- ^ “Longtime Bush Speechwriter Leaving White House”. Associated Press. 2006-06-14. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/14/washington/14wire-gerson.html.
- ^ Hubris, page 35
- ^ Jim Rutenberg (2006-06-15). “Adviser Who Shaped Bush’s Speeches Is Leaving”. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/15/washington/15gerson.html.
- ^ “Missionaries in Northern Virginia”. Washington Post. 2007-05-16. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/15/AR2007051501872.html.
- ^ “Gerson noted that the previous regime in Iraq was responsible for terrible human rights violations, including genocide, and he went on to say that Saddam was ‘comparable to Pol Pot.’ This was apparently a controversial assertion, because it provoked boos and grumbling in the audience. I would note for the record that there seemed to be no Kurds in the audience.”Highlights Of The Ideas Fest
- ^ Gerson, M (2009-02-09). “The Real Scandal of Religion”. RealClearPolitics.com. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/02/the_real_scandal_of_religion.html. Retrieved on 2009-02-11.
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