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.
Gerson was raised in a devout Christian family within the Presbyterian tradition. He graduated from Westminster Christian Academy and Wheaton College, Illinois.
He resides with his wife and their two children in Alexandria, Virginia.
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.
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.
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 [about aluminum tubes], 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.
Matthew 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.
