Also In This Issue Related stories are available to subscribers only: The Gerson Touch: Excerpts from articles and speeches Related Resources On NationalJournal.com Social Studies: "Goodbye, Jesse Helms. Conservatism Won't Be Missing You" (11/01/02) · On The Trail:"Bush's Cluttered Agenda"(1/22/03) · National Journal Cover Story:"Bush And God" (1/02/04) · National Journal Cover Story & Special Report: Social Conservatives (12/03/04) (12/03/04) · Well-Read Wonk: America The Faithful (11/11/04) Additional Resources On The Web President Bush's State of the Union Address (1/29/05) · Center for Media & Democracy's Sourcewatch: Michael J. Gerson · Time Cover Story: The 25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America · JFK's Inaugural Address [an error occurred while processing this directive]

By Carl M. Cannon, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, May 13, 2005

If you are an admirer of the current U.S. president, and if you believe that God takes an active role in human history, you might see the hand of Providence in the first meeting between George W. Bush and Michael J. Gerson.

Granted, it was an unlikely setting for a miracle -- a suite in the JW Marriott Hotel in Washington. Both men played to type: Gerson was anxious, while Bush was self-assured. But Bush hired Gerson that day in early 1999 as his chief speechwriter in a process that happened so quickly, it seems to have had a quality of inevitability. Certainly, it was a meeting of great consequence: In his position, Gerson has been responsible for proposing, drafting, writing, rewriting, reviewing, or editing most of the words Bush has uttered publicly as America's 43rd president.

With those words, Bush has helped change the political face of America, rallied a nation stunned by terrorists, and alienated longtime allies by launching military forces against two sovereign nations, one of which never attacked the United States. He has committed American resources to fighting AIDS in Africa. He has helped to turn domestic party politics upside down by positioning himself and his party as Wilsonian Democrats whose mission in office is to make the world not only safe for democracy, but receptive to it.

Gerson's role in these undertakings can hardly be overstated. A widespread perception exists, even among those who follow political communication closely, that in the aftermath of 9/11, George W. Bush discovered his voice, if not his calling. But if Gerson is the voice, and the spread of freedom around the world is the calling, then Bush had found them both before the nation was attacked. He articulated this vision in a foreign-policy speech in November of 1999, before he was president.

In that address, penned by Gerson and delivered at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Bush outlined the doctrine that generated so much commotion when he expressed it during his second inaugural; namely, that putting stability ahead of democracy was a "false" choice that would bring Americans neither safety nor peace of mind.

The now-famous declaration, "Freedom is not America's gift to the world; it is the Almighty God's gift to every man and woman in the world," is not, as some Bush critics complain, a dubious and messianic theological statement as much as it is a way of updating the doctrine of natural law that Jefferson codified in the Declaration of Independence. And Gerson had been affirming this vision through the speeches of Republican politicians long before he met Bush.

Around the White House, Gerson is known as the man who makes sure the "compassionate" stays in "compassionate conservatism." It was this subject that Bush and Gerson discussed at length the day Gerson was hired, and, in Gerson's telling, the concept extends beyond "faith-based" government programs and, indeed, beyond America's own shores.

"Mike is really the conscience of this place," says Peter Wehner, director of the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives. He characterizes Gerson as one of the "intellectual architects" of compassionate conservatism, and says that except for Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, no aide is as indispensable to Bush as is Gerson. Wehner describes Gerson as a kind of moral compass for the Bush presidency.

Rove concurs. "Not to say that he is the only one here with a conscience, but you can count on Mike to ask how a given policy will affect the least among us," Rove said in an interview. "The shorthand, political way to say it is that Mike is the one always wondering how we can achieve liberal goals with conservative means."

It is understood by those who know Gerson that his actions, attitudes, and articulations are informed by a deep Christian faith that is at the core of everything he writes. Gerson himself, sitting for an hour-long interview in his new first-floor office in the West Wing, describes his faith as a "socially conscious evangelism" that requires much of those who adhere to it.

"Our deepest moral and religious beliefs have public consequences," Gerson said. "But the primary social consequence is to seek the common good and some vision of social justice."

If you've never met him, picture a man with a young face, but an old heart. Gerson is 40 years old but looks considerably younger; yet he's already had a heart attack that led to angioplasty and the insertion of two coronary stents. He's slightly built, not tall, with Clark Kent glasses, and a physical modesty that almost, but not quite, hides an ever-present nervous mental energy. He conveys an aura of gravity -- even when he is laughing off compliments or making self-deprecating comments.

Gerson is simultaneously shy and self-confident; his skin is pale, the result of spending most of his waking hours for the past five years writing down words on yellow legal pads inside a windowless room. And if his mind is well ordered, his desk is not. He's been in the new office for the better part of six months, and he still doesn't have pictures on the wall. Apparently, there are photographs around somewhere of his wife, Dawn, whom he's known since childhood, and their two sons, but they are buried under piles of paper.

On a table is a tome Gerson came across in a bookstore called Standing in the Need of Prayer, a book-length photo essay of African-Americans praying, with a foreword by Coretta Scott King. "It moved me to no end," Gerson says quietly.

Gerson really speaks this way, which perhaps is not a surprise. The prose he writes for the president is lofty in both style and content, launching its speaker toward a stratosphere occupied in modern times mainly by Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. The JFK comparison is never too far from the minds of Gerson's stable of speechwriters.

"Kennedy said we would 'pay any price' to assure the survival of liberty. That we would 'bear any burden,' " John McConnell, the presidential speechwriter who has worked mostly closely with Gerson, mused last week while standing in the White House driveway. "Not some price, not a little bit of burden. Any price. Any burden. 'Meet any hardship. Support any friend. Oppose any foe.' And then Kennedy said: 'This much we promise -- and more.' "

Although McConnell and Gerson were not yet born in 1961, McConnell's recollection of JFK's Inaugural Address is faultless. That speech, with its unmistakable echoes of the writing voice of Kennedy aide Theodore Sorensen, is considered one of the best inaugural speeches of all time -- and not only by Democrats. In the ensuing four and a half decades, the two that rival it most closely were drafted by Gerson and delivered by the 43rd president -- and that's not a judgment rendered only by Republicans.

"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," wrote Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker, a liberal who helped draft Jimmy Carter's 1977 Inaugural Address. "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."

In 2001, Sorensen put it this way: "Bush with a Gerson text sounds a lot better than Bush on his own."

Sorensen intended that remark as both a compliment to Gerson and a slight to Bush. There is little doubt that it's true -- that's why presidents hire speechwriters -- and in any event, Bush isn't the first Republican politician Gerson has worked for who may have wondered if audiences would notice the obvious "eloquence gap" between his own impromptu self and the formal speaker armed with a Gerson-written script.

The trick isn't getting a guy who writes in your voice -- any reasonably talented professional speechwriter can pull that off -- it's getting someone with whom you can achieve Vulcan mind-meld. Kennedy had this with Sorensen, who was, author Theodore White said, "almost a lobe of Kennedy's mind." Saul Pett, the great Associated Press writer, described the challenge this way: "Writing isn't hard. Thinking is hard." And what Bush has in Gerson is -- for all their differences -- someone who thinks like him.

The Calling of the Apostle
George W. Bush met his Ted Sorensen in early 1999, in an unlikely setting for the Lord to work his mysterious will -- if that is what happened.

Gerson came into the Marriott hotel room, shook hands with the Texas governor, and sat down. Also present were longtime Bush confidant Karen Hughes and David Beckwith, who was the newly hired spokesman for Bush's as-yet-unannounced presidential campaign. Rove was flitting about, too, but with a phone in his ear, typically doing three things at once. The governor's attention was not scattered, however. It was riveted squarely on Gerson.

"This isn't an interview," Bush said. "I want you to write my announcement speech, my acceptance at the Republican convention, and my Inaugural Address. And I want you to move to Austin immediately."

If you are not a Bush admirer, or if you are secular in your outlook, you'd say the moral of this story is nothing more than that Mike Gerson's reputation as a wordsmith had preceded him -- and that he makes a good first impression. Empirical evidence supports this view, too. By the time Gerson was hired on first sight by Bush, the same thing had happened to him three times before, first with former Nixonite-turned-prison-minister Charles Colson, next with then-Sen. Daniel Coats of Indiana, and again with journalist James Fallows, when he was editor of U.S. News & World Report.

Colson sought Gerson out because of an article Gerson had written for his college newspaper. Coats took him on because of Colson's recommendation and because the senator and the speechwriter had attended the same college. Perhaps it's that simple. Or, maybe not.

Asked bluntly if he believes that God put Gerson where he is today, Ethics and Public Policy Center Vice President Michael Cromartie replied, "Yes, absolutely I do. But let me explain...."

Cromartie is an evangelical Christian, a friend and admirer of Gerson's, and a fellow alum of Colson's Reston, Va.-based Prison Fellowship. Cromartie is also a sophisticated person who knows how such sentiments can look in print. Though conservative, he is nonpartisan at heart -- and he is giving a theological answer to the question about Gerson and Bush, not a political one.

"I don't presume to know what God is really up to," Cromartie says. "But I do believe that, in some mysterious way, Providence and the sovereignty of God is at work in history. Our job as believers is to be faithful to the task we've been given -- no matter what our calling. In other words, if John Kerry had won, God would have put him there, too. God put all of us where we are."

Those aren't the kinds of quotes one usually reads in articles about White House officials, but most evangelical Christians -- and millions of devout Catholics -- believe that earthly events are directed by a higher power, that human beings have specific callings, and that people who listen carefully -- and prayerfully -- will receive guidance in getting to places where they can employ their gifts for an elevated purpose.

But in the case of Mike Gerson, what is that purpose?

The answer might surprise those on both sides of the great political and religious divides in this country. One thing is sure: It cannot be found in a sound bite or on a bumper sticker. The place to start looking might be Wheaton College in Illinois, the Christian school where Gerson ended up in the early 1980s after a brief stint at Georgetown University.

Wheaton to Washington
Chartered in 1853 by the Wesleyan Methodists as an anti-slavery school, and initially called Illinois Institute, Wheaton was always imbued with social awareness. It admitted blacks, which not all abolitionist colleges did, and it enrolled female students -- women's suffrage being part of the spiritual package. Including women probably saved the school from early extinction, because most of the male students in what would have been the class of 1861 left to fight for the Union.

By the war's end, 247 Wheaton College men saw military service, including its second college president, the Rev. Lucius Matlack, who mustered to be a chaplain in the Union army. Twenty-six of them did not survive the war, including a former student named George C. Hand who died in a Southern prison camp after volunteering to trade himself as a prisoner of war for an army surgeon whom the Confederates had improperly plucked off a battlefield. Hand's heroism inspired one of those in his Wisconsin unit who witnessed it, Walter Osgood Hart, to go to Wheaton after the war and to become a pastor.

Today, Wheaton -- not to be confused with a liberal arts college of the same name in Norton, Mass. -- has 2,400 undergraduates, 51.6 percent of whom are female; graduate schools in a dozen disciplines; and 13 teams in Division III intercollegiate athletics. It is nondenominational, but its motto, "For Christ and His Kingdom," is emblazoned in stone at the school's entrance. Its mission statement, renewed annually, says that Wheaton "exists to help build the church and improve society worldwide by promoting the development of whole and effective Christians through excellence in programs of Christian higher education."

When Gerson attended Wheaton, the philosophy department was chaired by Arthur F. Holmes, who wrote a text called All Truth Is God's Truth, which might be the school's unofficial motto. The book discusses "how Christians can't be afraid of rigorous intellectual inquiry," Gerson says. "Some of the [Wheaton] professors are quite liberal, and all of them embrace a socially conscious evangelism. The students you meet want to change the world. I'd love my own kids to go. I loved my time there."

Continuity is very much part of the Wheaton College fabric. The school has had only seven presidents since 1860, when incoming President Jonathan Blanchard moved it to its present location. Blanchard, and then his son Charles Albert Blanchard, headed Wheaton College until 1925.

That year, for other reasons, was burned into the collective memory of Christian conservatives. It was in July 1925 that a celebrated showdown took place between Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan in the sweltering Tennessee hamlet of Dayton. Ostensibly, the Scopes trial was over the teaching of evolution in public schools. But everyone understood that more was at stake. This was a clash between traditionalism and modernism, between biblical literalism and science, between Bryan and Darrow -- in other words, between the Democratic Party's pious past and its humanist future.

"If evolution wins, Christianity goes," Bryan warned. "Scopes isn't on trial," Darrow countered. "Civilization is on trial."

One of Blue America's most confident legends is that Darrow -- and the forces of enlightenment -- decisively won the "Monkey Trial," and that the frivolous nature of fundamentalist conservatism was exposed, once and for all, when Bryan arrogantly took the witness stand himself, and Darrow deflated him with his relentless cross-examination.

Religious conservatives saw an alternate story line, however, and it went like this: Eastern liberalism, as epitomized by the American Civil Liberties Union (which organized Scopes's defense), had become openly antagonistic to any public expression of religion. Those who adhered to a fundamentalist faith opened themselves to being mocked, even by mainstream Protestants. And the national media could not be trusted to be objective toward, or even respectful of, Christian conservatives.

The upshot was that fundamentalists beat a general retreat from America's public political life. Their view was that politics and the world were unclean. This withdrawal lasted only a single generation, however. In the aftermath of World War II, a new crop of "neo-evangelicals" that included Billy Graham, Carl Henry, and Charles E. Fuller argued that Christians simply could not ignore the outside world.

The most influential of all of them was Henry, a small-town journalist who had a sudden conversion to Christianity. Figuring that "faith without reason is not worth much," Henry enrolled at Wheaton College, where he earned bachelor's and master's degrees; he went on to earn a doctorate in divinity from a Baptist seminary, and a second doctorate, a Ph.D. in philosophy, from Boston University. In 1947, Henry published an influential book, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, in which he insisted to his fellow evangelicals that personal salvation is too difficult to attain alone, and that Christian faith is too precious to be locked up in a church. In this view, involvement in the community is an extension of the struggle for salvation, and Henry -- like Graham, his Wheaton classmate who later persuaded Henry to launch the evangelical magazine Christianity Today -- maintained that it is every fundamentalist's duty to resist materialism and to embrace civil rights and concern for those in need.

All of this was happening more than a decade before Mike Gerson was born, but it is where he rejoins our narrative. Because the neo-evangelists' message dovetailed with the Democratic Party's historic orientation toward helping the downtrodden, newly energized evangelicals of the postwar generation were as likely to vote for a Democrat as a Republican. Raised in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church by his Republican father and Kennedy-Democrat mother, Gerson gravitated easily toward a presidential candidate who was born again, and who wasn't afraid to say so.

"Jimmy Carter, because he was forthright about his faith, was well liked in my home," Gerson recalls. At Westminster Christian Academy in St. Louis, Gerson championed Carter in the formal school debate. He rode his bicycle downtown, picked up Carter's campaign literature, and grew even more enamored. As president, Carter steamed into St. Louis aboard the Delta Queen, and Gerson met him. "It was the first time I shook a president's hand."

By 1984, however, Gerson was knocking on doors for Ronald Reagan. "I suppose I was typical of evangelicals who'd supported Carter and were dismayed by the hardening of the parties on social issues," Gerson explained. "In college, I became strongly pro-life."

It was a 1985 editorial on abortion that he penned for his school newspaper, The Wheaton Record, that set Gerson on his path into politics. The piece, which lauded Mother Teresa for raising the subject of abortion at the United Nations, was seen by Chuck Colson, who was running his prison ministry. Colson called Gerson to ask him to meet in Chicago.

"He showed up in a three-piece suit, looking like he stepped out of the Victorian era," Colson recalls. "And with Victorian manners, too."

Colson asked Gerson what he was planning to do after he graduated from Wheaton. The younger man replied that he was interested in government service eventually, but he was heading to California first, to attend divinity school at Fuller Theological Seminary.

This was Colson's opening. "I said, 'I think you should come to Washington to get some political experience -- and work for me,' " Colson recalled. "And he did."

Gerson's duties included writing speeches for Colson, and after six months, the former White House aide sent Gerson a note saying that, in all his years in government and the ministry, he'd never seen such a gift.

After arriving in Washington in 1986, Gerson settled on a new idol: conservative columnist George Will. Friends say he would drive by Will's big suburban house and park in hopes of glimpsing the great man. Some feared, only half in jest, that Gerson might get picked up for stalking. He was rescued from this infatuation when Rep. Dan Coats, an Indiana Republican and Wheaton alum whom Gerson admired, won election to the Senate in 1988. Gerson went to Colson with a request.

"I made a four-year commitment to you, but if you release me from it, I'd like to go to work for Dan Coats," Gerson said.

"He'd made that commitment in his own mind, never to me, and I didn't even know he'd made it," marvels Colson. "It was amazing.... Of course, I had to let him go."

Colson did more than that, according to Coats's recollection: He called the senator-elect, an old friend, and said he had two things to tell him. "First, congratulations on winning the Senate seat," Colson said. "Second, I'd like to send you a gift. The gift is a young man named Michael Gerson. He's from Wheaton, and you will be glad you hired him."

Amazed would be more like it. Coats, like Colson before him, essentially decided to hire Gerson before laying eyes on him. God's will? Or terrific conservative networking? Coats, now retired from the Senate, still speaks reverentially about his former aide.

"He does more than write speeches," Coats told National Journal. "He's a deep thinker, who helped me formulate policy. He'll sit down with you, talk through the ideas underlying the speech. Meanwhile, he's taking these squiggly notes on a yellow pad, with doodles and underlines and arrows pointing back and forth, and you think nothing can come of it, and then he comes back with this speech that not only captures what I said to him, it captures what I meant to say -- what I was thinking -- but wasn't quite able to communicate."

Coats added, "This is a talent that comes across once in a lifetime. Sometimes, his writing was so exquisite, I had to choke back a lump in my throat. I found myself speaking better, thinking better, because of Mike. You don't want him to adapt to you -- you want to adapt to him."

One day, Coats asked Gerson about his long-term goals.

"My dream," replied the young Senate aide, "would be to be a speechwriter to a president."

In furtherance of that goal, Gerson spent the mid-1990s temping, as it were, for the false-start presidential candidacy of Jack Kemp, the second of two quixotic runs of Steve Forbes, and the almost-to-the-mountaintop run of Bob Dole.

Between the 1996 and 2000 presidential elections, Gerson wound up working at U.S. News, a strange pairing orchestrated by National Editor Steven Waldman, who has since founded beliefnet.com, a religious-oriented Web site. Waldman wanted to promote philosophical diversity at the magazine and to find someone to write about charity from the viewpoint of what is now called "compassionate conservatism."

Waldman went to David Kuo, who had just left the staff of Sen. John Ashcroft, R-Mo., to set up a nonprofit group to evaluate the efficacy of social-service organizations, and asked, "Who is the best conservative writer out there?"

"The best writer I know, period, is Mike Gerson," Kuo replied.

And so in November 1997, Waldman, with editor Fallows's blessing, called Gerson up, sight unseen, to talk him into changing careers. Waldman appealed not to Gerson's ego, but to his altruism. "I said, 'You care about this topic -- improving civil society -- making it work better for people in need.' "

Gerson bought the pitch, and quickly branched out at the magazine. But as George W. Bush geared up for his run, Coats and Al Hubbard, Bush's economic adviser (and friend from business school) lobbied Team Bush to take a look at Gerson's speechwriting, setting the stage for that fateful 1999 meeting at the Marriott.

There is, however, a little more to the story than the way Gerson tells it.

"There was a Texas Ranger in Bush's security detail," recalls Dave Beckwith, who was reporting to Hughes at the time. "He comes and says, 'There's this guy out there who says he's got an appointment with the governor, but we're worried about him. He doesn't look well. He's sweating and breathing heavily....' "

Gerson was so nervous that he was almost hyper-ventilating. That's why Bush cut the interview short -- to reassure Gerson that he was already wanted for the job. Karen Hughes had researched Gerson's writing, and the speeches he'd written for other Republicans had amazed the whole Bush camp.

The governor really had only one question for Gerson:

"Mike, did you write these speeches?" Bush asked.

"Yes, I did," Gerson replied, a little nonplussed.

"Well, how would like to join our team?" Bush said. "If this is your work, this is what I want."

The rest of the interview centered on faith-based approaches to race and poverty questions. Gerson, in what amounted to a self-directed continuing education, had been immersing himself in Catholic social thought, to try to understand the intellectual underpinnings of these issues. (He currently attends the Falls Church, an evangelical Episcopal church in suburban Virginia that was organized in 1734; George Washington served there as a warden.) Gerson had also been studying how Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Services delivered services to those in need. And Bush -- in part because of Colson's work in Texas's prisons -- had become a convert to the idea that government could work in concert with faith-based programs.

"Catholics have long believed that the state has a role to play in alleviating poverty, but that this is not necessarily a role it plays directly," says Catholic scholar Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. "What has happened in the U.S. is that Protestants have embraced this -- first with school vouchers, and later with prison outreach, poverty, and other issues. It's a growing alliance between Protestants and Catholics to help the less fortunate, and Mike Gerson is at the intersection of these two traditions coming together."

In Texas, though, Gerson took some getting used to.

A Public Solace
"The first time I was in his office in Austin, I looked around at all the empty coffee cups, and chewed pens, and stacks of these notebooks with their indecipherable chicken scratches, and it felt for a minute that I had wandered into the lair of the Unabomber," recalls campaign consultant Mark McKinnon.

In those days, Bush took to calling Gerson "The Scribe," although in recent years he seems mostly just to call him "Gerson," apparently a promotion.

In the parlance of writing coaches, Gerson is a "planner," not a "plunger," meaning that he makes a meticulous outline, which he consults during the writing process, and that he wants all of the notes and background material in front of him before he begins. He is also idiosyncratic. He drafts speeches in longhand, compulsively chewing his pens, and is so oblivious to the outside world that a reporter saw him walking from a Starbucks to the White House in shirtsleeves, pen and paper in hand -- in 20-degree weather.

At the 2000 GOP convention in Philadelphia, Bush aides were stunned when Gerson walked in 30 minutes after the most important oration of Bush's -- or Gerson's -- career, and asked, "How'd the speech go?"

"He was too nervous to watch!" McKinnon recalled. "He'd been walking the streets of Philadelphia, worrying."

For all the testimonials about Gerson's ability, presidential speechwriting is not, as author and former Bush speechwriter David Frum notes, "an exercise in writerly self-expression." It is a cooperative undertaking. During the 2000 campaign, McConnell and Gerson once worked at a computer together for 32 hours with only a one-hour break. Afterward, no one quite knew who had written what. In the White House, Gerson and McConnell collaborated closely for four years, along with Frum, Matthew Scully, and Michael Anton. Others weigh in, including Karen Hughes, whose writing is no match for Gerson's but whose advice carries great authority. For the 2000 convention speech, Hughes axed a reference to a letter to Thomas Jefferson about angels as too flowery. Gerson stuck it back in for the first Inaugural Address, where it remained.

Gerson says he has no problems with Hughes's editing his work. Asked if this were really true, Rove cackled. "Karen Hughes? That's the least of his problems! Have you seen the staffing sheet?" Rove held up a piece of paper, apparently relating to the impending Latvia speech, with a dozen names on it, including Cheney's, Rice's, and his own -- all of whom weigh in. Rove suggested one change, substituting the word "injustices" for Gerson's "crimes" in the reference to America's own imperfect past. Gerson accepted the change.

Then there's Bush himself, whose reputation among the speechwriters increased on the day in the Oval Office when he coined the phrase about freedom not being America's gift, but God's. "We didn't put that out, because no one would believe it," said one White House aide. "But I swear that's what happened."

Frum says that Gerson, while first among equals, accords other speechwriters respect. He worked most closely with McConnell and with Scully, who has since left the White House. "Gerson, McConnell, and Scully were a wonderful team, with a real sense of mission, who took obvious joy in the work," Frum says. "Speechwriters are not always people of ideas, but Mike and the people he brought in came with well-defined belief systems."

Picking up on this theme, Rove adds: "His faith determines how he relates to other people. You have to prod him to talk about it, because he sees it as a private solace for himself, but Mike's faith informs his thinking, his attitudes, his intellectual framework."

There are chinks in the intellectual armor of even the most faithful Christian conservatives, however, and for some liberals, the most obvious gap in Gerson's (and Bush's) thinking concerns gay rights. To them, Bush's (Gerson-drafted) stated opposition to gay marriage, as expressed in the 2005 State of the Union address, seems tonally at odds with the liberation philosophy stressed in the second inaugural just a few days earlier. Gerson's response -- when asked recently at a Pew seminar -- is to emphasize, as Bush has, that although Bush and Gerson disagree with their critics, they have led the way in conducting the debate in a respectful and inclusive way.

This is true enough, but, for Bush's critics, insufficient. They tend to blame Rove -- or Bush -- however, not Gerson. "You'll have a very hard time finding anyone to say anything bad about Mike Gerson," says Brookings Institution fellow E.J. Dionne, the liberal columnist who asked Gerson about gay marriage. "He is one of the few people who escapes the political polarization of this city. The reason is that he's a thoughtful, sincere, incredibly decent person."

Another reason that Gerson may have built up some goodwill among progressives is that on AIDS policy, Gerson has personally pushed this administration to do more than anyone expected of it. Early in the first term, he and Josh Bolten, then White House deputy chief of staff for policy, were discussing AIDS in Africa. "What would you do," they asked each other, "if money was no object? What's the best policy, the right policy?"

Out of this exercise, Bolten and his staff developed a proposal to spend $15 billion over five years combating AIDS -- with most of that money going to Africa. Anticipating concern from the president about whether that money could be funneled into existing anti-AIDS programs effectively without being siphoned off, Bolten's group constructed its plan carefully. Then came the senior-staff meeting in the Oval Office. Bush listened, posing the pragmatic questions they had anticipated. At the end, Bush turned to Gerson.

"Mike, what do you think?"

"Mr. President, if this is possible -- and we don't do it -- we will never be forgiven."

There was a brief pause, as the others seemed taken aback. Bush broke the silence himself, bellowing, "That's Gerson being Gerson!" And then he approved the plan.

Six weeks after Bush's re-election, Gerson went home from a White House Christmas party complaining of shortness of breath and chest pains. He ended up in the hospital, getting the treatment that family and friends and colleagues hope will give him another 40 years of life. His father died young, though, and the heart attack has left Gerson feeling mortal and has pushed him into regular physical exercise for the first time.

Even before his heart attack, he had been elevated to senior adviser and given an office closer to the Oval Office, and he had supervised the hiring of his successor as senior speechwriter. But his new gig is not exactly cushy. Gerson wrote last week's Latvia speech that the president considered so important, and his portfolio now includes not only AIDS, faith-based programs, and bioethics, but also Middle East peace and the spreading of democracy around the globe.

"The biggest difference in my life is that I've gone from being deadline-oriented to project-oriented," Gerson said, fully appreciating the paradox that, without the threat of deadlines, even the best-laid plans can come to naught. But he has faith.

"I've never felt more directly," he said, "the good that government can do."

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