In the September issue of The Atlantic magazine, on newsstands August 21, former Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully offers a brutal tell all account of his former colleague, Michael Gerson, and shines a light on some internal White House decisions that were crucial to the administration’s public outreach. Gerson served as President George W. Bush’s chief speechwriter from 2001-2006 and is currently a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a Washington Post op-ed contributor.
Despite the numerous profiles of Gerson that have portrayed him as calm, humble and spiritual wordsmith, Scully suggests that Gerson carefully crafted “the Gerson image.”
“He has been held up for us in six years’ worth of coddling profiles as the great, inspiring, and idealistic exception of the Bush White House,” writes Scully. “In reality, Mike’s conduct is just the most familiar and depressing of Washington stories—a history of self- seeking and media manipulation that is only more distasteful for being cast in such lofty terms.”
And Scully says that the glowing profiles certainly went to Gerson’s head. “In a rapture of self-congratulation following coverage of one or another campaign speech in 2000, he actually told us that Bush and the senior staff viewed his contributions, well, differently from ours: ‘I think they look at my writing as the fine china, to be taken out on special occasions.’ What to say when a friend and colleague lays that one on you?”
Scully notes that Gerson was quick to take full credit for the work of his colleagues. “Without fear of contradiction—because it’s all in the presidential records—I can report here that Michael Gerson never wrote a single speech by himself for President Bush,” writes Scully. “From beginning to end, every notable speech, and a huge proportion of the rest, was written by a team of speechwriters, working in the same office and on the same computer. Few lines of note were written by Mike, and none at all that come to mind from the post-9/11 addresses—not even “axis of evil.”
Other interesting tidbits from the 8,500 word cover story:
-Long time Bush advisor Karen Hughes and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had reservations about Bush’s 2003 “Mission Accomplished” speech aboard the U.S.S Abraham Lincoln.
In writing the Abraham Lincoln speech, this habit of historical reenactment spelled trouble. As John and I sat down to get started, in marched Mike with a muffin in one hand and Douglas MacArthur’s “the guns are silent” speech—delivered on the deck of the USS Missouri at the end of World War II—in the other. And this time Mike had worked up his own memorable variation: “The sirens of Baghdad are quiet. The desert has returned to silence. The Battle of Iraq is over, and the United States and our allies have prevailed.” Much as I’d like to record that I had the good sense to object, I think I even added my own touches to the glory of the moment. The honored role here in averting rhetorical disaster was assumed by Donald Rumsfeld, who expressed alarm at this overreach, and by Karen Hughes, who often checked our more blustery outbursts. “These are beautiful sentences,” she wrote on draft three, “but may overstate the case—there is still shooting going on.”
-Scully offers some insight into the origin of the phrase “axil of evil,” used by Bush in his 2002 State of the Union address.
What actually happened is that [former Bush speechwriter David Frum] came up with the phrase “axis of hatred” and e-mailed it, along with some other lines, to John, Mike, and me. We copied the material into the jumble of onscreen notes we kept beneath our working texts. Mike thought we should use the phrase, and we added it to the text. I said, “I hate hatred”—which brought to mind the ineffectual “forces of hatred” favored by Clinton speechwriters—and proposed going with evil instead, since we were already confronting evildoers, wickedness, and the like. It was agreed—“States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world”—and we moved on.
