Michael Gerson Biography

Michael Gerson is an American op-ed columnist for The Washington Post, a Policy Fellow with the ONE Campaign, a visiting fellow with the Center for Public Justice, and a former senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He served as President George W. Bush’s chief speechwriter from 2001 until June 2006, he also served as a senior policy advisor from 2000 through June 2006 and was a member of the White House Iraq Group.

Michael Gerson Age

Michael Gerson was born on 15 May 1964 in New Jersey, United States. He is 54 years old as of 2019.

Michael Gerson Net worth

Michael Gerson earns his income from his work as an op-ed columnist for The Washington Post. He also earns his income from his businesses and other related organizations. He owns a luxurious house in New Jersey, United States and he also owns a luxurious car. He has an estimated net worth of $ 2 million dollars.

Michael Gerson Family

Michael Gerson was born in New Jersey, the United States to Evangelical Christian family. He was born and raised in New Jersey, United States.

Michael Gerson Education

Michael Gerson attended Westminster Christian Academy for high school education. He then attended Georgetown University for a year and then transferred to Wheaton College in Illinois, graduating in 1986.

Michael Gerson Wife

Michael Gerson wife Dawn was born in South Korea. She was adopted by an American family when she was six years old and raised in the Midwestern United States. The couple, who met in high school, have two sons and reside in Northern Virginia.

Michael Gerson Image

Michael Gerson Op-ed columnist

Michael Gerson before joining the Bush Administration, he was a senior policy advisor with The Heritage Foundation and as 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.

He also worked at one point as a ghostwriter for Charles Colson. In early 1999, Karl Rove recruited Gerson for the Bush campaign. He 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.

Michael Gerson Speechwriter

Michael 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.

According to Ponnuru, 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 did not.

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 The Wall Street Journal chief editor William McGurn.

Michael Gerson Lines attributed to Gerson

Michael 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 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 is 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.

Michael Gerson Criticisms of Gerson as a speechwriter

In an article by Matthew Scully (one of Gerson’s co-speechwriters) published in The Atlantic (September 2007) Gerson is criticized for seeking the limelight, taking the credit for other people’s work and for creating a false image of himself.

It was always like this, working with Mike. 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 the 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 done because “hatred” seemed the more melodramatic word at the time.

Scully also had this to say about Gerson: My most vivid memory of Mike at Starbucks is one I have labored in vain to shake. We were working on a State of the Union address in John’s (McConnell’s) office when suddenly Mike was called away for an unspecified appointment, leaving us to ‘keep going.’

We learned only later, from a chance conversation with his secretary, where he had gone, and it was a piece of Washington self-promotion for the ages: At the precise moment when the State of the Union address was being drafted at the White House by John and me, Mike was off pretending to craft the State of the Union in longhand for the benefit of a reporter.

Michael Gerson Books

• Moneyball for Government: Foreign Assistance and the Revolution of Rigor 2016
• Unleashing Opportunity: Why Escaping Poverty Requires a Shared Vision of Justice 2015
• American Grand Strategy and Seapower 2012
• City of Man: Religion and Politics in a New Era 2010
• Heroic Conservatism CD 2007

Michael Gerson Columnist

Michael Gerson is a nationally syndicated columnist who appears twice weekly in The Post. He is the author of “Heroic Conservatism” (HarperOne, 2007) and co-author of “City of Man: Religion and Politics in a New Era” (Moody, 2010). He appears regularly on the “PBS NewsHour,” “Face the Nation” and other programs. Gerson serves as a senior adviser at One, a bipartisan organization dedicated to the fight against extreme poverty and preventable diseases. Until 2006, Gerson was a top aide to President George W. Bush as an assistant to the president for policy and strategic planning. Prior to that appointment, he served in the White House as deputy assistant to the president and director of presidential speechwriting and assistant to the president for speechwriting and policy adviser.

Michael Gerson Washington Post

With the passing of Jean Vanier on May 7, the sum of the world’s welcoming kindness diminished appreciably more than 50 years ago, Vanier sparked an unlikely movement of conscience. Shocked by the despair and loneliness he found at a psychiatric hospital outside Paris, Vanier did not merely adopt the cause of the intellectually disabled; he decided to buy a dilapidated house and live with Raphael Simi and Philippe Seux, two people with severe intellectual disabilities. “Essentially, they wanted a friend,” Vanier said. “They were not very interested in my knowledge or my ability to do things, but rather they needed my heart and my being.” This highly personalized model of compassion now inspires 10,000 people who live together in more than 150 L’Arche group homes around the world. Those without intellectual disabilities known as “assistants” spend a year or more committed to an L’Arche home and its disabled members. And the relationship can be transforming for both. When you visit one of these L’Arche communities, you are immediately impressed by the rigor and order of the average day. Chores and work schedules are taken seriously. But so are affirming celebrations such as birthdays and rituals such as communal meals and prayer. These homes offer safety, routine and acceptance. And people with disabilities often respond by showing unsuspected aptitudes for friendship and love. The L’Arche movement is not sectarian, but it is clearly informed by Vanier’s Catholic faith. His life’s work reflects Christian anthropology a belief in the inherent rights and dignity of every human life. Vanier identified this as “the belief in the inner beauty of each and every human being.” In one sense, Vanier’s approach to compassion is wildly inefficient. Who would design a social program that strives for a one-to-one ratio of helpers to help? How could that type of effort possibly be scaled? But that is precisely the point. L’Arche is not a traditional social program. Its commitment to the dignity of people with intellectual disabilities is lavish, extravagant. It rejects a utilitarian cost-benefit analysis. And it certainly rejects a social Darwinism that views the vulnerable as worthless. By serving a group of human beings that others ignore or discount, Vanier made the case that no human being should be ignored or discounted. Vanier’s radical Christianity goes even a step further. Not only are the disabled inherently valuable, but they also have much to teach us. “It has been this life together that has helped me become more human,” Vanier reflected. “Those I have lived with have helped me to recognize and accept my own weaknesses and vulnerability. I no longer have to pretend I am strong or clever or better than others. I am like everybody else, with my fragilities and my gifts.”

As a teacher and writer, Vanier spoke to a broader cultural unease. In modern societies, it is not only the disabled who feel isolated, abandoned and alone. Vanier diagnosed loneliness as the great challenge of our time. “Loneliness is a feeling of being guilty,” he said. “Of what? Of existing? Of being judged? By whom? We do not know. Loneliness is a taste of death.”

The answer to loneliness is the same thing that L’Arche offers. Human beings can only thrive and be happy in small, family-sized communities. And communities of this type are only created through mutual vulnerability. And that sense of vulnerability requires a knowledge of our frailties. And so the happiness and belonging we need most in life begin with a recognition of our own weakness.

“If we deny our weakness and the reality of death,” Vanier wrote, “if we want to be powerful and strong always, we deny a part of our being, we live an illusion. To be human is to accept who we are, this mixture of strength and weakness. To be human is to accept and love others just as they are. To be human is to be bonded together, each with our weaknesses and strengths because we need each other.

Weakness, recognized, accepted and offered, is at the heart of belonging.” Vanier’s message was so different from our typical cultural emphasis on strength and independence. It will be terribly missed. But it is carried forward by the assistants and people with disabilities at L’Arche, who have much to teach us about the universal human need for acceptance and belonging.

Michael Gerson Mueller

A thought experiment. Suppose that on March 24 the day Attorney General William Barr publicly summarized the Mueller report all of the results of the special counsel’s probe that have dribbled out over the last two years had been revealed at once. Americans would have discovered that a hostile foreign power had engaged in major intelligence operations designed to elect Donald Trump something consistently denied by the president himself.

In this hypothetical, Robert Mueller would have simultaneously announced the indictment of 34 Russians and Americans a network of espionage and corruption including hackers, Russian military officers and high-level operatives of the 2016 Trump campaign. Suppose the report had revealed that 14 Trump campaign officials had been in contact with Russian nationals, including the president’s son, who had met with Russian operatives in an attempt to gain information harmful to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Suppose it had been revealed that several Trump advisers and operatives had lied to the FBI and Congress in an attempt to conceal the extent of these contacts, and also that some of Trump’s closest advisers including his campaign chairman were guilty of conspiracy and fraud. Suppose it had been revealed that Trump himself, while a Republican candidate, had continued to pursue a multimillion-dollar business deal to place a Trump Tower in Moscow.

And that there was serious though not conclusive evidence that Trump obstructed justice during the Mueller investigation. Yes, it would still be news that Mueller did not believe that Trump and his campaign had directly coordinated with Russia and that Trump himself would not be indicted for a crime. But that would only be part of the story a story of corruption, criminality, and cover-up. The story of a presidential election that should have an asterisk explaining that the outcome may have been substantially influenced by a foreign power.

But all these disturbing facts did not come out at once. And Trump and his team provided a master class in controlling expectations. Trump consistently set out the standard of judgment he wished “No collusion! in the knowledge that he was not personally guilty of collusion. And when this was (seemingly) confirmed by Mueller, Trump and his team declared unconditional victory.

This has led to an unusual circumstance. Trump supporters are doing a victory dance over the fact that he isn’t a Russian agent, just a Russian stooge. And Trump’s supporters are spiking the ball following an investigation that did not clear the president of obstruction charges. So it is still a legal judgment call whether or not the president is a crook.

Trump may not know much, but he knows lawsuits and legal proceedings. In this instance, he did not claim, “My staff has the highest ethical standards!” That would have been laughable. He did not say, “My first choice for national security adviser wasn’t a national security threat!” Because he was. Trump claimed, in essence, that he did not directly conspire with Russia to win an election. Then he cleared an ankle-high bar.

Though Trump and his team are savaging the media for its coverage of the scandal, the president is benefiting from its shallowness. Much news coverage is based on an electoral paradigm: Who won and who lost? These events are more complex. Barr’s summary of the Mueller report is the most favorable interpretation Trump is likely to get.

The report itself may be a catalog of horrible judgment, unethical behavior, and noncriminal corruption. It may put Trump Inc. in a very bad light. If and when it comes out in full. In the meantime, the Trump administration is the defendant, judge, and jury. The full report, however, may require revised judgments from some of Trump’s critics as well. Perhaps the president is not a foreign agent or a criminal mastermind.

Perhaps he is a weak leader who surrounds himself with clowns and criminals. Perhaps his lack of character attracts and enables other corrupt men. Perhaps he is more pathetic than dictatorial, more fool than knave. Perhaps behind the compulsive, simplistic, narcissistic exterior, there is a compulsive, simplistic, narcissistic interior. Perhaps he has moved beyond good and evil, enforcing only one code: loyalty to his person. Integrity and competence be damned.

Michael Gerson The Washington Post columnist

Michael Gerson 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 neo-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.

On October 2017, Gerson questioned U.S. president “Trump’s fundamental unfitness for high office.” Senator Bob “Corker has given the public permission to raise the most serious questions: Is Trump psychologically and morally equipped to be president?

And could his unfitness cause permanent damage to the country?” and “It is no longer possible to safely ignore 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.”

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