An infamous phrase’s origins come into question in article
One of President Bush’s most famous phrases is “axis of evil,” which he used to describe Iraq, Iran and North Korea during his 2002 State of the Union address.
The phrase has long been credited to Michael Gerson, who was Bush’s chief speechwriter from 2001 to ’06. But in the September issue of The Atlantic magazine, on newsstands Aug. 21, former Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully says not so fast. Scully’s 8,500-word-plus cover story for the magazine is a brutal tell-all account of former colleague Gerson (to wit: “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.” Ouch.), and he pulls back the curtain on how the “axis of evil” phrase came to be.
“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 [deputy assistant and speechwriter to Bush John McConnell], Mike [Gerson], and me,” Scully writes. “We copied the material into the jumble of on-screen 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.” Now if we could only find out whose idea it was to use “Mission Accomplished.”
