Mr Gerson was receiving treatment for cancer, said Peter Wehner, a longtime friend and former colleague.
After years of working as a writer for conservative and evangelical leaders, including Prison Fellowship Ministries founder and Watergate criminal Charles Colson, Mr. Gerson joined the Bush campaign in 1999. Mr. Gerson, an evangelical Christian , wrote with an eye on religion and morality. images, and this approach meshed well with Bush’s personality as a leader open to his own Christian faith.
Mr. Gerson’s work and ties to Bush have drawn comparisons to other powerful White House partnerships, such as John F. Kennedy with his speechwriter and adviser Ted Sorensen and Ronald Reagan with his aide Peggy Noonan. Conservative commentator William Kristol told the Post in 2006 that Mr. Gerson “could have had more influence than any other White House staffer who was not chief of staff or national security adviser” at the ‘modern era.
“Mike was very influential, not just a wordsmith, not just a craftsman of language for other people’s policies, but he influenced politics itself,” Kristol said.
As an impromptu speaker, Bush had a reputation for gaffes and awkward phrases, but Mr Gerson provided him with memorable oratorical flights, such as promising to end ‘the sweet bigotry of low expectations’ in education low-income people and minorities. students and the description of democracy – in Bush’s first inaugural address – as a “seed on the wind, taking root in many nations”. As Bush’s confidante and head of the speechwriting team, he also encouraged such memorable turns of phrase as the “axis of evil,” which Bush used to explain the administration’s hawkish posture at the time. that it triggered long and costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In the chaotic months following the September 11, 2001 attacks, Mr. Gerson became the key architect of what became known as the “Bush Doctrine” – which advocated preemptive strikes against potential terrorists and other perceived threats. With his team of writers, he began shaping Bush’s tone and tenor, including speeches at Washington’s National Cathedral on September 14 and a joint session of Congress on September 20.
“Our grief has turned into anger and anger into resolution,” Bush told Congress. “Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done. »
Mr. Gerson and Bush have found common ground in the use of religious themes of higher power and light versus darkness, seeing such rhetoric as part of other historical struggles, including the abolitionist movement. “It is a real mistake to try to secularize American political discourse,” Mr. Gerson told NPR in 2006. “It removes one of the main sources of visions of justice in American history.”
Prior to the State of the Union address in January 2002, Bush’s speechwriters were instructed to link Iraq to the broader battles against terrorism – a sign that Bush and his entourage, including Secretary at Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, were preparing for war.
Speechwriter David Frum said he came up with the “hate axis” to describe Iraq, North Korea and Iran (even though Iraqi Saddam Hussein was an enemy of the rulers in Tehran ). Mr. Gerson changed it to the “axis of evil” to make it more “theological” – a battle between good and evil – Frum wrote in his 2003 book on Bush, “The Right Man”.
“I thought that was great,” Frum wrote of Mr. Gerson’s change. “That was the kind of language used by President Bush.” (Writing in the Atlantic, another speechwriter, Michael Scully, said Mr. Gerson was caught up in his own mythology and that Frum and Scully were more actively involved in formulating the “axis of evil.”)
Mr. Gerson also helped promote the Bush White House’s false claims about Iraq – including debunked claims of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction – that would seek to justify the 2003 invasion. More than eight years of The war claimed the lives of around 4,500 US service members and more than 100,000 Iraqi insurgents and civilians, according to monitoring groups.
Mr. Gerson has never publicly expressed regret for helping sell the war in Iraq. His 2007 memoir, “Heroic Conservatism,” said American leadership is essential to fighting terrorism and global poverty and disease. But he mostly avoided the many ethical and legal issues raised by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and their consequences such as the waterboarding of prisoners, renditions at Guantánamo Bay and the thousands of civilian casualties.
After a heart attack in December 2004, Mr. Gerson retired from the stress of speechwriting and took on full-time political advisory roles. He has often lamented that the Bush administration’s humanitarian initiatives, such as AIDS prevention in Africa, have become footnotes in a world changed by 9/11.
Mr. Gerson left the White House in 2006, with Bush’s backing, to pursue outside political work and writing. The following year he joined The Post and wrote bi-weekly columns that broadened his reach as a conservative afflicted by populism and the politics of anger, and driven by the belief that religion and social activism are powerful partners. .
“It’s a different kind of conservatism,” he told PBS’s “Religion and Ethics Newsweekly” in 2007, “a common-good conservatism that argues that we need to steer our policies toward people who might not even vote for us”.
Mr Gerson’s columns for The Post have taken a lot of beatings against President Barack Obama during his two terms, calling his foreign policy unruly and the Affordable Care Act – and his attempt to move the nation forward. universal health care – chaotic. With the rise of Trump, however, Mr. Gerson found himself on the outside. He lamented how many members of the Republican Party — including other evangelical Christians — have switched allegiance to Trump despite his record of lying, infidelity and racist remarks. But he acknowledged that, at the moment, he was on the weaker side as a critic of Trump.
“It’s been said that when you choose your community, you choose your character,” Mr. Gerson wrote in an essay for The Post on Sept. 1. “Strangely, evangelicals have largely chosen the company of Trump supporters who deny any role for character in politics and define all useful wickedness as a virtue.
Michael John Gerson was born in Belmar, NJ, on May 15, 1964, and raised in and around St. Louis by evangelical Christian parents. Her mother was an artist; his father was a dairy engineer whose job included developing ice cream flavors.
He studied theology at Wheaton College, an evangelical school school in suburban Chicago, graduating in 1986. He began his career as a ghostwriter with Prison Fellowship Ministries, led by Colson, a self-proclaimed “henchman” for President Richard M. Nixon during the Watergate crisis . Colson spent seven months in prison for obstruction of justice.
In prison, Colson said, he experienced a religious conversion that redirected his life. For young Mr. Gerson, it proved a deep inspiration – and a first contact with someone who once had the ear of a president. “I had read many Watergate books, in which Chuck appears as a character with few virtues apart from loyalty,” Mr Gerson wrote in The Post in 2012. “I knew a different man.”
In the late 1980s, Mr. Gerson entered politics as policy director for Sen. Daniel Coats (R-Ind.), and he later wrote speeches for Sen. Robert J. Dole (R-Kan. ) During his 1996 presidential run. Mr. Gerson spent two years as an editor at US News & World Report before being recruited by Bush campaign strategist Karl Rove as a speechwriter for the Bush-Cheney ticket in the run-up to the 2000 election.
At first it was just the thrill of “high-tension political excitement,” Mr. Gerson said. Then he found a kindred spirit in Bush during a campaign stop in Gaffney, SC, when someone in the crowd asked how to stop undocumented migrants at the southern border.
Bush “took the opportunity to remind his rural, conservative audience that ‘family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande,'” Mr. Gerson wrote, “and that as long as ‘moms and dads’ in Mexico will not be able to feed their children at home, they would seek opportunities in America.
Mr. Gerson’s 2010 book, written with fellow former speechwriter Wehner, “City of Man: Religion and Politics in a New Era,” is a call to action for evangelicals to use their influence for broader social and economic programs.
In 1990, Mr. Gerson married the former Dawn Soon Miller. In addition to his wife, survivors include two sons, Michael and Nicholas, and two brothers.
In his Post columns, Mr. Gerson wrote candidly about his battles with cancer and depression. “I have no doubt that I will end up repeating the cycle of depression,” he wrote in February 2019. “But now I have a certain knowledge of myself that cannot be taken away. I know that – when I’m in my right mind – I choose hope.
David Shipley, the Post’s editorial page editor, called Mr Gerson “a rare writer whose mind, heart and soul have been shown in equal measure in his work”.
In a column from the holiday season in 2021, Mr Gerson quoted lines from a poem by Sylvia Plath and examined his battle with cancer to come up with a single uplifting thought: “Hope wins”.
