,
Brett Kavanaugh,
Condoleezza Rice, and Gerson review President
George W. Bush's
State of the Union speech in 2004. Before 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." The February 7, 2005, issue listed Gerson as the ninth-most influential evangelical that year. 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
The Wall Street Journal chief editor
William McGurn.
Lines attributed to Gerson Gerson proposed the use of a "smoking gun/mushroom cloud" mixed-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 [about aluminum tubes], one of them leaked Gerson's phrase – and the administration would soon make maximum use of it. Gerson said one of his favorite speeches was given at the
National Cathedral on September 14, 2001, a few days after the
September 11 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 was credited with coining such phrases as "the soft bigotry of low expectations" and "the armies of compassion". His 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.
Criticism of Gerson's speechwriting In an article by
Matthew Scully, one of Bush's speechwriters, published in
The Atlantic in September 2007, Gerson was criticized for seeking the limelight, taking credit for other people's work and creating a false image of himself. "No good deed went unreported, and many things that never happened were reported as fact. For all of our chief speechwriter's finer qualities, the firm adherence to factual narrative is not a strong point." Of particular note is the invention of the phrase "axis of evil." Scully claims that the phrase "axis of hatred" was coined by David Frum and forwarded to colleagues by email. The word "hatred" was changed to "evil" by someone other than Gerson and was changed because "hatred" seemed the more melodramatic word at the time. Gerson, a neo-conservative, repeatedly criticized other conservatives in his column and conservatives 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. In October 2017, Gerson referred to
President Donald Trump's "fundamental unfitness for high office" and asked whether he is "psychologically and morally equipped to be president? And could his unfitness cause permanent damage to the country?" He cited "the leaked cries for help coming from within the administration. They reveal a president raging against enemies, obsessed by slights, deeply uninformed and incurious, unable to focus, and subject to destructive whims." In August 2019, Gerson wrote that it is a "scandal" that "white evangelical Protestants" are not in a state of "panic" about their own demographic decline in the United States. One of the last articles he wrote was an essay on the continuing alliance between evangelical Christians and Donald Trump in 2022 and his belief that such an alliance was foolish and unchristian. ==Personal life==