Backstory: Compassionate conservatism's voice

Gerson reminisces about sitting in the Oval Office in 2002 when the president decided to approve the emergency AIDS relief – and then later visiting an Ethiopian orphanage of 400 HIV-positive children, all of whom lost both parents to AIDS, and all of whom would have been expected to die in the past. "Because of what the American people have done," he says, "now almost none of the children are dying ... and that is happening all over Africa."

So, Gerson concludes, "sometimes the words really do matter."

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The White House has had a resident speechwriter since Judson Welliver was hired as "literary clerk" to assist the scandal-besieged Warren Harding in 1921. And, Hamilton Jordan, President Carter's chief of staff, observed in a New York Times interview, "The battles over a president's words are really struggles over the heart and soul of his presidency."

But to a degree rare in the White House, Bush let Gerson talk about working on notable Bush lines like "axis of evil" and "the soft bigotry of low expectations." Not that Gerson's client is self- effacing. Bush, notes Gerson, "very much wants to hear his voice in the speeches he gives." And he describes Bush as "a good, aggressive editor," admitting, for example, that the president rejected "some of the vicious things that I tried to give [him to say]" about his GOP primary opponent Sen. John McCain.

But the result of their collaboration has won bipartisan praise for its power and eloquence, if not always for its policy content. One of Jimmy Carter's speechwriters, Hendrik Hertzberg, reviewed Bush's first inaugural address in the New Yorker, calling the writing "shockingly good ... better than all but a tiny handful of all the inaugurals of all the presidents since the Republic was founded."

Still, the Bush team's rhetoric isn't on par with the Kennedy-Sorensen collaboration, argues presidential historian Robert Dallek.

"It is not strictly the quality of the prose, it is the person who delivers it. If you listen to Kennedy speeches ... it is the delivery that brings it across, it is finesse, the quality of voice, a sense of the man's substance," says Mr. Dallek, coauthor of the new book "Let Every Nation Know," an analysis of JFK's most memorable speeches.

And the presidential scholar notes, as several critics have, the sometimes wide gap between the quality of the president's speech when armed with a Gerson text and the quality of his impromptu remarks.

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Gerson is reveling in the sudden post-White House decompression. At a Monitor breakfast last week, he claimed not to have shaved or read a newspaper in a week.

"The first thing you notice is that when you see the news, you don't have to respond to it in any way," he said. "And I think the second stage is you probably get frustrated that you can't respond when you see the news."

A staunch defender of President Bush, Gerson says he left his West Wing perch because, "you come to a point not where you are tired, but you are ready for what's next."

What's next for former White House speechwriters is often a book about their experience close to power. Gerson didn't keep a diary because staffers were requested not to, lest the document get subpoenaed. But he did write letters to his young children that could be raw material for a book.

As for the future, Gerson quips, "I'll eventually try to find someplace to write so that I can see the news and then tell other people how to respond."

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