Born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada Frum is the son of the late Barbara Frum, a well-known journalist and broadcaster, and Murray Frum, a dentist, who later became a real estate developer, philanthropist and art collector. David Frum's sister, Linda Frum, is a member of the Canadian Senate. David Frum is married to writer Danielle Crittenden, the stepdaughter of former
Toronto Sun editor Peter Worthington. Frum has three children. He is a distant cousin of economist Paul Krugman.
At age 14 he was a campaign volunteer for a New Democratic Party candidate, taking an hour-long bus/subway/bus ride each way to and from the campaign office in western Toronto. He would read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's
Gulag Archipelago, a paperback edition his mother had given him. "My campaign colleagues jeered at the book — and by the end of the campaign, any lingering interest I might have had in the political left had vanished like yesterday’s smoke."
He graduated from the University of Toronto Schools in 1978 where he was the School Captain. He then attended Yale University where he simultaneously earned Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees in History, graduating in 1982. While at Yale he was in the Directed Studies program, a type of "Great Books" course. He went on to Harvard Law School, and received his Juris Doctor (J.D.) in 1987. Frum has described one of his study methods:
When I was in law school, I devised my own idiosyncratic solution to the problem of studying a topic I knew nothing about. I'd wander into the library stacks, head to the relevant section, and pluck a book at random. I'd flip to the footnotes, and write down the books that seemed to occur most often. Then I'd pull them off the shelves, read their footnotes, and look at those books. It usually took only 2 or 3 rounds of this exercise before I had a pretty fair idea of who were the leading authorities in the field. After reading 3 or 4 of those books, I usually had at least enough orientation in the subject to understand what the main questions at issue were — and to seek my own answers, always provisional, always subject to new understanding, always requiring new reading and new thinking.—David Frum (January 1, 2008)National Review
He served as an editorial page editor of the
Wall Street Journal from 1989 until 1992, and then as a columnist for Forbes magazine in 1992-94. From 1994 through 2000 he was a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. During the 1990s he attended "three or four" Bilderberg Group meetings as a guest of Conrad Black.
Following the election of George W. Bush in 2000, Frum was appointed to a position within the White House. Still a Canadian citizen, he was one of the few foreign nationals working within the Bush White House. (According to Frum, he was once briefly arrested by a White House security guard who did not believe that a Canadian national could have a job working at the White House.) He served as Special Assistant to the U.S. President for Economic Speechwriting from January 2001 to February 2002. He filed for naturalization and took the oath for citizenship on September 11, 2007.
Frum strongly supported John Roberts, George W. Bush's nominee for Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court. However, like many conservatives, he opposed the nomination of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court, on the grounds that she was insufficiently qualified for the post, as well as insufficiently conservative.
On October 11, 2007, Frum announced on his blog that he was joining Rudolph Giuliani's presidential campaign as a senior foreign policy adviser. David Frum is on the board of directors of the Republican Jewish Coalition.
Frum was a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, from 2003 until March 25, 2010, when his paid position was terminated and he declined to accept the offer of a non-paying position. Media reports noted that the termination came three days after Frum's strongly-worded criticism of the Republican strategy on health care reform, but Frum said that the AEI had not cited his criticism as the reason for his termination. It was suggested that he was fired for criticizing Fox news, saying "Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we are discovering we work for Fox.”
