It's Friday, Feb. 10, 2023, the day of the week when I reprise a quotation meant to be uplifting or educational. Today's lines come from a writer named Michael John Gerson who died last November at age 58 and whose life, faith, and searing prose were honored Thursday in a moving memorial service at Washington National Cathedral.
Mike Gerson is best remembered as chief speechwriter for George W. Bush. While that is no small accomplishment, his career entailed so much more than that.
Once upon a time, presidential speechwriting was not a ticket-punching perch to a glamorous or lucrative career. For most of America's history it didn't exist as a job at all. Earlier presidents drafted their own speeches. And even after a White House aide named Judson Welliver began penning speeches for Calvin Coolidge, speechwriters tended to be anonymous. The evolution of political advisers, particularly presidential aides, into celebrities eventually elevated the White House speechwriters' station in life.
Presidential ghostwriters ranging from Ted Sorensen (John F. Kennedy) and Peggy Noonan (Ronald Reagan) became famous even outside politics, while wordsmiths such as William Safire (Richard Nixon) and Hendrik Hertzberg (Jimmy Carter) parlayed their résumés and their writing talents into big-time media jobs. Presidents would occasionally hint at displeasure with aides who got too big for their britches, but since writers generally want credit for their craftsmanship, the speechwriters tended to enjoy it. "If we don't honor ourselves," Hertzberg once quipped, "who's going to?"
In any event, by the time George W. Bush arrived on the scene, that cat was long out of the bag, and when the normally plainspoken Dubya delivered an uncommonly eloquent first inaugural address, it was only natural that people would wonder about its authorship.
"Together, we will reclaim America's schools, before ignorance and apathy claim more young lives," Bush vowed. In a passage inspired by Reagan's 1988 farewell address as president, Bush went on in this vein: "We have a place, all of us, in a long story … the American story – a story of flawed and fallible people, united across the generations by grand and enduring ideals. The grandest of these ideals is an unfolding American promise that everyone belongs, that everyone deserves a chance, that no insignificant person was ever born."
Among those mightily impressed was Rick Hertzberg himself. "George W. Bush's first week as president of the United States began with a speech that, taken as a whole and judged purely as a piece of writing, was shockingly good," he wrote in The New Yorker. "It was by far the best inaugural address in 40 years; indeed, it was better than all but a tiny handful of all the inaugurals of all the presidents since the Republic was founded."
Michael Gerson's reputation was cemented. Here's the thing about presidential speechwriting, though. Two things, actually: First, once he spoke them, those words belonged to George W. Bush, not anyone in his employ. Second, presidential speechwriting is invariably a group effort. This was certainly true in Bush's administration. Mike Gerson was the head of the speechwriting shop during the 2000 campaign, and in the White House, and as was true in Reagan's White House, there wasn't just one talented prose stylist. There were several. Gerson guided a troika of three primary writers who worked seamlessly together (the other two being Matthew Scully and John McConnell), while additional writers included David Frum on economics, Michael Anton on foreign policy, and generalist Pete Wehner, who was one of Mike Gerson's eulogists on Thursday. Those group efforts also were usually vetted by Karl Rove or Karen Hughes, who made edits of their own; and if they dealt with war, the speeches had to pass muster with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Final say, of course, rested with the president himself.
So those are the caveats, and they aren't trivial. But the thing about Mike Gerson is that he was a prolific writer before and after working for George W. Bush. His words were not only beautiful, but powerful. He was best known in Washington in the last years of his life for his blistering criticism not just of Donald Trump, but of evangelical Christians who rationalized their support for this most unsaintly man.
Gerson's legacy, however, is more profound. For starters, inside the Bush White House he was known for passionately pushing a plan to vastly increase U.S. aid to Africa to combat HIV-AIDS and malaria. The program known as PEPFAR -- and the words Gerson & Co. helped craft in support of it -- saved millions of lives. Millions.
Four years ago, the Rev. Randolph Marshall Hollerith, the dean at National Cathedral, invited Gerson to preach at the storied church. Mike's sermon was about clinical depression, and how a Christian should cope with it. He was speaking from personal experience, and I suspect his words that day saved lives as well. He spoke of chemical imbalances in the brain, but also of the mystical. Depression, he suggested, is a metaphor for the precarious human condition.
"All of us -- whatever our natural serotonin level -- look around us and see plenty of reason for doubt, anger and sadness," he proclaimed from the pulpit. "A child dies, a woman is abused, a schoolyard becomes a killing field, a typhoon sweeps away the innocent. If we knew or felt the whole of human suffering, we would drown in despair."
The rebuttals to such darkness, Mike said, are "the fragments of love and meaning that arrive out of the blue: In beauty that leaves a lump in your throat, in the peace and ordered complexity of nature, in the shadow and shimmer of a cathedral, in the unexplained wonder of existence itself."
He added: "I have one friend, John, who finds God's hidden hand in the habits and coloring of birds. My friend Catherine, when her first child was born, discovered what she calls ‘a love much greater than evolution requires.' I like that: ‘A love much greater than evolution requires.'"
This was Mike Gerson at his best. Not to diminish his impassioned pleas against the angry populism that came to dominate his political party, or the call to action in his book, "Heroic Conservatism," I think Mike was at his best when he wrote about love.
Here is the opening of his Aug. 19, 2013, column on dropping his eldest son off at college. Parents all over the country read it and wept. Perhaps you will, too:
Eventually, the cosmologists assure us, our sun and all suns will consume their fuel, violently explode and then become cold and dark. Matter itself will evaporate into the void and the universe will become desolate for the rest of time.
This was the general drift of my thoughts as my wife and I dropped off my eldest son as a freshman at college. I put on my best face. But it is the worst thing that time has done to me so far. That moment at the dorm is implied at the kindergarten door, at the gates of summer camp, at every ritual of parting and independence. But it comes as surprising as a thief, taking what you value most.
And that's our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
