David Frum reviews Heroic Conservatism, by Michael Gerson.

Resident Fellow  David Frum

Shortly before the scheduled publication of this book, The Atlantic magazine published a scorching article by Michael Gerson's former White House speechwriting colleague, Matthew Scully. In painstaking detail, Scully depicted Gerson as a man who distorted the record to magnify his own role in events.

The article convulsed Washington. And it presents any reviewer of Heroic Conservatism with a dilemma: Should I review the book or review the man?

I worked closely with Gerson and Scully, and I know both men well, as I do the third member of that once-intimate band, John McConnell. I witnessed the events Scully chronicled, and I can attest to the accuracy of Scully's account.

That said, I also know that Michael Gerson is an important figure in American life, whose ideas and values shaped the Bush administration. I anticipated that his prescriptions for the Republican future would deserve a hearing on their own merits, without regard to the personal foibles of their author.

And yet, on repeated readings of advance and final editions of Heroic Conservatism, I find that the teller and the tale cannot be so easily separated. A couple of stories illustrate why.

Heroic Conservatism opens with a dramatic account of a meeting in the Oval Office on November 18, 2002. A handful of people have been toiling in secret (Gerson calls it a "humanitarian conspiracy") to develop a plan for an ambitious program to help Africans infected with HIV/AIDS. Not even Condoleezza Rice knows about it: only deputy chief of staff Josh Bolten, his staff, some researchers at the National Institutes of Health, and Gerson himself. Now, on the big day, the plan is to be unveiled to potentially hostile critics. And it is left to Gerson to deliver the plea that carries the decision in favor of the plan.

It's an exciting and even heroic story. Only . . . it's not quite true.

Among the many, many people who knew the "secret" were the two principal authors of the AIDS plan. Jay Lefkowitz, deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy, and Robin Cleveland, later to serve under Paul Wolfowitz at the World Bank, had toiled for weeks on the laborious and technical task of designing and funding the program. Nor was there any real suspense about the decision the president would make at the November 18 meeting.

Gerson, a skilled writer, surely knows that one can shape history as much through the facts one omits as through the facts one includes. By omitting the true protagonists from the story, he aggrandizes the roles of those he includes, starting with himself. That pattern is sustained throughout the book.

Thus, on page 59 of Heroic Conservatism, Gerson tells a story of Election Day 2000: "Election night came in Austin along with a cold and steady rain. I paced in the campaign headquarters, then walked up Congress Street to the large, outdoor platform that had been constructed for the victory celebration. I expected a narrow win. But I had, folded in my pocket, the only copy of a concession speech, which had not been shown to Karen, Karl, or the candidate, out of superstition and awkwardness. It began: 'My fellow Americans. . .'"

Reading that passage casually, you would be led to the conclusion that the speech that Gerson was carrying was Gerson's work. It was not. Scully and McConnell had written it by themselves.

Some corrections of these omissions seem to have been inserted at the last minute. Comparing the early-release version of the first chapter to the final printed version, I notice that many appearances of the phrase "I wrote" have been amended to "I helped to write."

But other omissions remain. And awkwardly, one of them involves me.

I was not altogether surprised to find no mention of my own White House work in the pages of Heroic Conservatism. Scully and McConnell, who contributed vastly more than I ever did, get only the most glancing references. But I was surprised to find an observation from my own White House memoir reprinted almost verbatim and without credit on pp. 36-37 of Heroic Conservatism as the author's own invention.

FRUM (2003): "Rove had ideas that nobody else had--and that was his value to the president. Hughes had the same ideas that everybody else had--and that was hers."

GERSON (2007): "Karl was valuable because he thought in ways that nobody else did. Karen was valuable because she thought in ways that everyone else did, which is often the key to being an effective communicator."

I have been assured that the passage will be attributed in future printings of the book. It was this episode, however, that persuaded me I had better set the record straight myself.

Heroic Conservatism is both a memoir and a work of advocacy. What it advocates is "morally driven" politics--a politics, alas, to which few conservatives or Republicans measure up. Most conservatives, including many who served in the Bush administration, do not share Gerson's "vision of compassion and freedom." As he sadly observes: "Traditional conservatism has a piece missing--a piece shaped like conscience." For these conservatives, "any idea of the common good is viewed as a dangerous myth." They are engaged, rather, in "a tired and cynical defense of the status quo."

Against this dismal background, Gerson champions an alternative politics of uncompromising humanitarianism. "Where does someone belong who is pro-life and pro-poor? Someone who supports the traditional family and increased spending to fight AIDS? Someone who is passionate about the rights of handicapped children in America and the lives of displaced children in Darfur? I know that I have often felt homeless in the traditional camps of American politics."

Of one thing, however, he is sure: Everything depends on unflinching personal integrity: "Traditional conservatism may celebrate a weary virtue, but history, in case after case, is only moved by an eager purity."

Personally, I do not agree with that last statement. Eager purity leads to bad results at least as often as to good ones. What history does suggest, however, in case after case, is that those who most eagerly profess moral purity do not always practice it.

Gerson promises conservatives that in politics, at least, virtue will be its own reward. His brand of politics is not only "noble"--a favorite adjective--but also profitable. He repeatedly promises that his preferred heroic conservatism will gain votes for the GOP: "If Republicans run in future elections with a simplistic anti-government message, ignoring the poor, the addicted, and children at risk, they will lose, and they will deserve to lose." By contrast, "heroic conservatism can appeal to the conscience, inspire the nation, and change the world."

This raises a vexing question: If heroic conservatism really can rally the nation, why has seven years of it left the nation so very conspicuously unrallied? If present trends continue, George W. Bush will exit the White House as the most continuously unpopular president since Harry Truman. The Bush-led GOP is widely condemned as corrupt, arrogant, and incompetent. In generic polls, voters prefer Democrats over Republicans on almost every issue.

The troubles go beyond polls. Although America has prospered under George W. Bush, many of the social indicators that ought to concern a heroic conservatism have trended in the wrong direction. Poverty has increased, and in many American cities crime is worsening. As best we can tell, there has been no sustained increase in volunteering. The international democracy agenda that opened with such promise has lost its momentum. Gerson himself has to admit that the trends are against him, or (as he puts it) "the darker impulses of conservatism have become more assertive, more public, and more pronounced."

What went wrong? With fascinating unintentionality, Heroic Conservatism itself points to the answer.

Let's revert to that anecdote about the 2002 Oval Office meeting on HIV/AIDS. As Gerson reports, many administration officials strenuously opposed the program the president was considering. The Office of Management and Budget protested that the program would cost too much. The Centers for Disease Control worried that the program seemed "half-baked." Staffers at the National Security Council warned that direct foreign aid to local health-care programs had, in the past, often been stolen or wasted. In the face of all these objections, the president posed a stark question: "Will this work?"

At this moment, the story goes, Gerson spoke up. "If we can do this and we don't, it will be a source of shame." The president chimed in: "That's Gerson being Gerson!" And the program proceeded.

So, okay: Did it work?

Curiously enough, Gerson seems very little interested in the answer to that question. He tells a moving story about visiting AIDS treatment centers in Africa. But that emotional response does not substitute for analysis. In the nearly five years since the program went into effect, it has been intensely studied by experts inside government and out. It is generally agreed that the program has done some good in treating Africans infected with HIV/AIDS: Of the 25 million or so infected Africans, about 1 million are now receiving drug treatments paid for by the U.S. Treasury. At the same time, many knowledgeable people contend that the program's prevention dollars are largely wasted.

What's the final verdict? The experts disagree, and I am not expert enough to judge who is right. I do know, however, that my above paragraph, written on the basis of a single afternoon's reading and telephoning, contains more hard information on the program's results than you will find in all 300-plus pages of Heroic Conservatism.

Americans are deeply compassionate people. But they are also deeply pragmatic people. They want results, not a politics of moral gestures. And all too often, moral gestures are all that the Bush administration has offered.

Here's another example, this one from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Gerson writes: "I hoped that Hurricane Katrina would force the American political class to confront extreme poverty and racial injustice in the shadow of our affluence." He takes enormous pride in the speech George W. Bush delivered in Jackson Square, New Orleans, on September 15, 2005, declaring a "duty to confront this poverty with bold action."

But the president never specified the kind of action he had in mind in the speech, and over the next few days it became embarrassingly apparent that this was because his administration had nothing much to propose. The administration cobbled together a package of initiatives headed by a proposal for a Gulf Coast "opportunity zone"--an idea from the 1980s that quickly collapsed of its own insubstantiality.

Gerson laments that this speech became "a lesson in the limited power of words." Yet this misses the point. Bush's words in Jackson Square were enormously powerful. By promising something that the administration had no plans to do, the Jackson Square speech inflicted terrible and permanent damage on the administration's credibility. It is precisely because a president's words are always powerful that they should not be used promiscuously.

It was not Michael Gerson who failed to generate plans for a grand conservative war on poverty. But in the absence of grand plans, a speechwriter ought to modulate his grand language. Instead, through the second Bush term there occurred a dangerous decoupling of words and actions. As actions shriveled, the words inflated; as the administration's ambitions narrowed, its rhetoric soared.

Never, of course, did the rhetoric soar higher than in the second inaugural address, the speech in which George W. Bush pledged himself to an "ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."

Barely a week after that speech, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak arrested the principal opposition candidate for president, a democrat and liberal named Ayman Nour. Nour was stripped of his parliamentary immunity and tossed in jail. Independent election observers were barred from Egypt. On election day, September 7, 2005, Mubarak reported himself the winner with 88.6 percent of the vote. Through this ordeal, the U.S. government could barely bring itself to utter a word of protest. Nor did it protest when the Saudi government reversed itself and forbade female participation in the Spring 2005 municipal elections, the first Saudi elections since the 1960s. The Egyptians and Saudis were testing the president: Did he really mean what he had said? They rapidly discovered the truth: No, he did not. The speechwriter was too powerful and important to be curbed. But he was not powerful and important enough to get his way. The relationship between Gerson and the rest of the government reminds me of a savage little witticism uttered by Frederick the Great: "My subjects and I have come to an understanding that suits us both: They may say what they please, and I do as I please."

The bitter irony of this story is that, in many ways, the Bush administration has made important progress in the Middle East. It has forced the Saudis and other Gulf states to open their banking systems to outside audit. It has cut the flow of funds to al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas. It has helped to establish a real democracy in Iraqi Kurdistan, and it did push Syrian troops out of Lebanon. It has emboldened publics throughout the Middle East to demand more accountability and less corruption from their leaders. Above all, the Bush administration's big idea--that Islamic extremism is nurtured by the authoritarian politics of the Middle East--has gained broad acceptance in the West and in the Arab world.

Tragically, all of these achievements have been overshadowed by the enormous gap that has opened over time between the Bush administration's increasingly magniloquent words and the necessarily more frustrating realities. Some will say the Bush administration should have promised less. Others will counter that the administration should have delivered more. What is certain is that an administration, like an individual, can win some immediate applause by presenting itself as finer than it is. But the truth will always out.

David Frum is a resident fellow at AEI.