The speechwriter who shaped Bush’s message

Michael Gerson 1964–2022

Not all Americans knew Michael Gerson’s name, but most knew his words. As chief speechwriter for George W. Bush for seven years, Gerson had a pivotal role in shaping the voice of a president not previously known for eloquence. When Bush spoke of “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” or called democracy a “seed upon the wind, taking root in many nations,” that was Gerson’s pen at work. Most notably, Gerson crafted Bush’s messaging in the days after 9/11, coining the phrase “axis of evil” and writing the speech Bush gave Congress nine days after the attack. “Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war,” he wrote, “and we know that God is not neutral between them.” An evangelical Christian, Gerson believed it was “a real mistake to try to secularize American political discourse,” as he said in 2006. “It removes one of the primary sources of visions of justice in American history.”

Born in New Jersey to a dairy engineer father and an artist mother, Gerson studied theology at Wheaton College. He planned to go on to a seminary, said Christianity Today, but a former Nixon adviser who’d had a prison conversion persuaded him to come to Washington and write for the Prison Fellowship Ministries. Gerson soon realized he could “take the theology he cared about so much and apply it to the public square” by working for Republican lawmakers, including Sen. Bob Dole during his 1996 presidential run. In 1999, he was recruited to write for then-candidate Bush, said The New York Times. Almost immediately, he “brought discipline and polish to the president’s previously shambolic, malapropistic speaking style.”

After a 2004 heart attack, Gerson “stepped back from the stresses of speechwriting” to focus on policy, said The Washington Post. Two years later he left the administration, joining the Post as an opinion columnist and appearing frequently on PBS NewsHour. A harsh critic of Trump and the evangelicals who backed him, Gerson wrote frankly about his battles with depression and the cancer that eventually killed him. But his true calling was composing presidential oratory. “On most days you are writing for the next day’s headlines,” he said. “In a few moments, you are writing for American history…. And then there may come a time, once or twice, when you are writing for the angels.”