“Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done,” he said in one of the signature lines. When Malinowski heard it, he felt “kind of funny, kind of queasy.” He had not known that Gibson had included any of his suggestions in the speech. (“This is the great irony of my speechwriting career,” Malinowski said. “I worked for Clinton for seven years. I’m a Democrat. I think I had a lot of success, a lot of speeches that were influential that were quoted all over the world, plenty of ego gratification and all that. But as it turned out, the line that I wrote that I think will probably be remembered and quoted more than any other was uttered by not Clinton but Bush.”)
“Al Qaeda is to terror what the Mafia is to crime,” Bush said. “But its goal is not making money. Its goal is remaking the world and imposing its radical beliefs on people everywhere.” Secretary of State Colin Powell had objected to this line on the grounds that it might unnecessarily offend “the anti-Soprano crowd,” presumably a reference to the protests against the popular HBO television series The Sopranos as being anti-Italian. Bush had kept it in after tweaking its original form.
“Americans are asking, what is expected of us? I ask you to live your lives and hug your children,” Bush said, using another Hughes line, and following with one of Rove’s. “I know many citizens have fears tonight, and I ask you to be calm and resolute, even in the face of a continuing threat.” The line about the children had met resistance in the White House. Scully, for example, thought it was “a little bit of a Hallmark touch.” “We have suffered great loss,” Bush said. “And in our grief and anger, we have found our mission and our moment.” The “mission” line had its roots in Scully’s observation about Bush in the days after the attacks.
Gerson watched the speech at home. Bush called him from the limousine. “I have never felt more comfortable in my life,” the president told his speechwriter softly. “Mr. President, this is why God wants you here,” Gerson said. Bush replied, “No, this is why God wants us here.”*
Although Bush was known and derided for verbal fumbles and errors, he understood the importance of presidential communications. He put a great deal of time and energy into speech preparation and faith in his speechwriters. Bush and top aides such as Karen Hughes and Karl Rove “understood the importance of speechwriting,” Scully said later. “Whereas his father—and they clearly drew this lesson—his father really didn’t…. There’s no doubt in my mind that…Governor Bush and a few others who observed that, saw that this was not the way to run a presidential speechwriting department and that this was obviously a great resource that wasn’t being used.”
“The President wants in his speaking action and directness,” Gerson said. “That said, the President also demands an element of elevation in his speeches that shows some continuity with the great traditions of American political rhetoric.”
“He would often say that each speech is a chance to educate,” said Noam Neusner, who became a Bush economic speechwriter for two years starting in late 2002. And he would stress the virtues of repetition. Bush “would always say, ‘You may get tired of writing it, but this has to be explained. And I like to explain things and you have to make an argument, and lay it out, and you have to do it again and again and again,’” Scully recalled. It might be standard to the speechwriters, but it was often new to the audiences.
When a writer’s speech had been submitted to Bush, he was expected to be at his desk by 7 am, because that was when the president would call with questions. “He’ll say, ‘Yeah, the speech? A couple of little things—page five, this paragraph, what is this? Why are we saying this?’” McConnell recalled. “Or, ‘We need to move a few things around, we need to make some edits.’ It could be anything—a question, a comment, a change. It’s never just chitchat…. It is a specific, action-oriented call.”
Bush stressed organization in his speeches, logical order. He disliked sloppy transitions. “It’s just words, isn’t it?” he might say. “Take it out.” He had the ability, McConnell said, to read a speech through once and grasp its structure and be able to point out which paragraphs were out of place. “He’ll spot it and he’ll say, ‘The paragraph at the bottom of five belongs in the middle of three,’” McConnell said. “In one reading he’ll do this…. The logical marching thing is something that he really grabs onto quickly and he’ll catch the little flaws.”
Bush’s tips could get minute: Do not start sentences with the word “it.” Or they could be broad. “He was very clear,” Noam Neusner recalled. “He said, ‘I like my speeches to be very clearly structured. I think what we need to do always at the beginning of a speech is articulate what the problem is we’re trying to solve and make sure that we’re clearly defining that problem. Then we should talk about the principles that we bring to bear when we address the problem. What do we believe?…Then the next part is the policy: What are we proposing? What addresses the challenge that reflects the principles in the policy? And do it in that order every time.”*
Bush could also catch what he called “cram-ins,” his expression for clunky phrases and extraneous points that bureaucrats or senior aides would stuff into the draft. Often the speechwriters would dismiss the new language; but if they could not, if it came from too senior an aide or if they were feeling mean, they would leave it in for the president to take out. “Who put this in?” he would ask, and guess at which nonspeech-writer was the offender.
When delivering a speech, he once told Scully, he would focus on two or three people in the audience and keep going back to them. He liked to get their reaction as a gauge for the audience and tried to feel as if he was talking to just those people.
Meeting with the writers in late 2001 to discuss his upcoming State of the Union address, Bush thought aloud about making the spread of democracy and promotion of women’s rights in the Muslim world its focus. The spread of democracy was a theme to which he would repeatedly return, but it caused enough disquiet in the foreign policy bureaucracy—too radical a shift in relations with the Muslim countries—that he let the idea go for the time being. But it prompted him to examine more closely the U.S. role in the region. “Bush decided that the United States was no longer a status-quo power in the Middle East,” Frum wrote. “He wanted to see plans for overthrowing Saddam, and he wanted a speech that explained to the world why Iraq’s dictator must go.”
Iraq was not a new preoccupation for Bush. During the 2000 campaign, he had criticized the Clinton administration as insufficiently tough on Iraq, and had vowed to be more aggressive in dealing with Hussein. “No one envisioned him still standing,” Bush told a BBC interviewer in 1999, referring to the Gulf War, when his father had stopped short of removing Hussein from power. “It’s time to finish the task.” As early as February 2001, the administration had ratcheted up pressure against Iraq by approving new funds for insurgent groups inside the country and by stepping up air strikes, hitting targets outside of the no-fly zones for the first time since late 1999.
When, in mid-February 2001, Bush met with the speechwriters for a get-acquainted session, one of the priorities he discussed was, as Frum put it, “his determination to dig Saddam Hussein out of power in Iraq.” In the initial hours and days after the September 11 attacks, the question of attacking Iraq as part of the response had been debated but put aside. The United States had started bombing targets in Afghanistan on October 7 and within two months the Taliban regime had crumbled. Now the administration was turning its sights once more to Iraq.
“Here’s an assignment,” Gerson told Frum one day in late December 2001. “Can you sum up in a sentence or two our best case for going after Iraq?”
Frum was an odd choice for the assignment. He had, in fact, considered himself an unlikely choice to be a speechwriter at all. He was a Canadian, had neither government experience nor Bush connections, and had publicly doubted whether Bush was up to the job of being president. And the fact of a president and administration that proudly proclaimed the
ir religious faith “was disconcerting to a non-Christian like me.” As a contributing editor to the conservative Weekly Standard, columnist with the Canadian National Post, and former senior editor at Forbes and assistant editor on The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, he did have the right credentials for a speechwriting job. A well-known political commentator, he was, Scully said, “a highly conscientious person, a gentleman, and…the most accomplished author on our staff.”
Gerson had persuaded Frum to sign on as an economic speech-writer, but now he was giving him an important foreign policy assignment. Frum pondered it. The case could not merely be Hussein’s past transgressions. That would raise the question of timing—why take him out now? He reread Roosevelt’s speech to Congress after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Axis powers in World War II—Germany, Japan, and Italy—had been a menace, he thought, because of their “recklessness.” Iraq was like the old Axis powers. And as Pearl Harbor had served as a warning about the dangers of Germany, so too September 11 could highlight the dangers of Iraq, especially since it was presumed to have chemical and biological weapons.
The more Frum thought about it, the more the “terror organizations and the terror states”—al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Iran and Iraq—“resembled the Tokyo–Rome–Berlin Axis.” Sure, Iran and Iraq had fought a bloody war in the 1980s, and al Qaeda had denounced Iraq’s secular Baathist regime and hated the Shiites who dominated Iran; but the various groups had had moments of cooperation, or at least of truce. Iraq had flown half its air force to Iran in advance of the 1991 Gulf War (the planes were never returned), and some al Qaeda leaders had fled to Iran after the fall of Afghanistan (the Iranian government claimed to have arrested them). And anyway, Frum thought, the original Axis had been a tenuous alliance: Had they won the war, they would have fallen on each other.
The terror groups and terror states did have commonalities, Frum reasoned. They hated freedom, democracy, rationality, Jews, and the West. They celebrated death. Though they may not realize it, they were united in their hatreds. “So there was our link—and our explanation of why we must act: Together the terror states and the terror organizations formed an axis of hatred against the United States,” he wrote. “The United States could not wait for these dangerous regimes to get deadly weapons and attack us; the United States must strike first and protect the world from them.”
Frum put his conclusion into a memo to Gerson and sent it in, not expecting to hear any more about it.
In early January, Bush huddled with the speechwriters in the Oval Office to discuss the agenda for 2002. The writers proposed various domestic or quasi-domestic issues—health care, trade, and so forth—and he batted them away. He was going to devote minimal time and energy to domestic issues.
The troika gathered to prepare the State of the Union. For eight, nine, ten days running, the routine would be the same: The three sequestered themselves in McConnell’s office and word-by-word, line-by-line, wrote the speech. After several days McConnell’s office resembled, as he put it, the “back room of a cheap restaurant”—coffee-stained papers piled up, bits of food, half-full coffee cups and water bottles lying around. McConnell, who kept a supply of Wet Ones towelettes on hand, endured the chaos with good humor.
They called these efforts “death marches,” but the fact was that the three men enjoyed themselves. For one thing, having two other people there relieved the pressure of the job. “There was this unspoken sense of relief that there wasn’t one man alone in the room who was going to…have to generate something really good,” McConnell said. “We knew that we could do this together.” Throughout their collaboration, amidst trying to write speeches in tones of “high seriousness,” the three would crack each other up with humorous digressions, coming up with absurd, inappropriate, or rude things Bush might say in whatever speech they were working on. For all of his seriousness, Scully said, Gerson was “hilarious company,” while McConnell could do impressions of everyone from Harry S. Truman to crude Saturday Night Live characters. Other staffers would poke their head into McConnell’s office to find out what all the howls were about. “Education speeches in particular—with their endlessly complicated programs and slightly puffed-up theories, none of which we could ever explain quite to the satisfaction of our policy people—were always good for a laugh,” Scully later wrote. “As John observed in late 2003, around draft twenty in the typically chaotic revising of an education speech, ‘We’ve taken the country to war with less hassle than this.’”
Gerson summed up the feeling of happy companionship toward the end of the 2002 death march when he said that it was a rare thing in life when one is cooped up with two other people for nine days running and still look forward to going in to work on the tenth morning. There was nevertheless trouble brewing: media accounts of the speechwriting process and profiles of Gerson mostly portrayed him as working alone, a solitary artist crafting the president’s speeches. And it was not clear to Scully whether even their White House colleagues knew precisely how the speeches were produced.
To Frum’s surprise, his Iraq argument was incorporated into the State of the Union. The topic of weapons of mass destruction and terrorists had first been raised in preparations for the September 20 speech, but Bush had put it off—it might be too frightening an idea so soon after 9/11. Now might be the time. And while Frum’s “axis of hatred” focused on Iraq and terrorist groups, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice worried that singling the country out might tip the administration’s hand concerning the war planning that was already secretly under way. She and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, suggested adding Iran and North Korea.
“Axis of hatred” was slightly revised. “I hate hatred,” Scully said when Gerson brought up the phrase. It reminded him of “forces of hatred,” a formulation that Clinton used. Scully suggested that “evil” be substituted—it fit with the “evil-doers” that Bush had mentioned in the months since 9/11. The three discussed it and agreed on “evil.”* “For a time, I congratulated myself on at least preventing the even more melodramatic ‘axis of hatred’ from marching into history—though, looking back, I suppose ‘axis of evil’ was a case of how the very intensity of these speeches could sometimes give events a false momentum and fill the air with needless drama,” Scully wrote.
“North Korea is a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction, while starving its citizens,” Bush charged in his State of the Union address on the evening of January 29, 2002. “Iran aggressively pursues these weapons and exports terror, while an unelected few repress the Iranian people’s hope for freedom. Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror…. States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.”
“Axis of evil” ignited a firestorm. Not surprising, the three countries denounced Bush, but friendly nations also found it disquieting. Bush did little to settle matters two days later when he followed up on the nations “on our watch list.” “People say, ‘What does that mean?’ It means they better get their house in order, is what it means,” Bush said in Atlanta on January 31. “It means they better respect the rule of law. It means they better not try to terrorize America and our friends and allies, or the justice of this nation will be served on them, as well.” “The testosterone talk from the White House may be grist to the mill of President Bush’s domestic popularity, but it’s getting U.S. allies abroad a little nervous,” Time reported.
Conservatives hailed the speech. “He is using his war popularity to seek support for more war—far wider, larger and more risky,” columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote. “Bush’s three bad guys—North Korea, Iran and Iraq—are ideologically well chosen.” He said that the speech only just stopped short of declaring war against Iraq. Afghanistan would merely be “prologue,” the first step in a gambit whose final stage would be Saddam Hussein’s overthrow.
Frum resigned on February 25. He had decided that an economic speechwriter did n
ot have much to do in a wartime White House. He was replaced by Joseph Shattan, who, like McConnell and Scully, had worked for former Vice President Dan Quayle. As Frum was packing up his office, a colleague told him to turn on CNN because Robert Novak had just reported that Bush had fired him. The crux of the controversy, such as it was, was that Frum’s wife had e-mailed some family and friends bragging that Frum had conceived of “axis of evil.” Her e-mail had been forwarded to a reporter with the Internet opinion magazine Slate, who published it.
That Frum would be fired for even directly leaking authorship of a phrase in a speech seems unlikely. A New York Times reporter had been encamped with the speechwriters when the September 11 attacks took place, producing an insider blow-by-blow of the writing of the speech to the joint session of Congress. Hughes and Gerson had given similar inside accounts to other reporters. Gerson was the subject of flattering profiles. The Bush White House was not shy about publicity for its speechwriters.
Speculation about war with Iraq increased from spring through summer of 2002, stoked by Bush’s speech on June 1 at West Point unveiling the “Bush doctrine.” The United States would strike preventively against perceived dangers before they blossomed into actual threats. Bush was scheduled to speak at the United Nations on September 12. Gerson brought Bush an outline for a speech focusing on “the nonnegotiable demands of human dignity.” “No,” Bush told him. “We’re gonna talk about Iraq.”
It was an important speech. It would be his best chance to make the case to the international community that a move against Iraq was necessary. Domestically, it kicked off a coordinated administration publicity blitz that included strategic leaks to the press and administration officials arguing the case on television talk shows, all meant to prove that Iraq was a threat. Scully, who had taken a leave of absence in July to promote his book, briefly returned to work on the speech, temporarily reassembling the troika. Gibson, the Clinton holdover on the NSC staff, also contributed. “I’m not totally there yet,” he told Gerson, referring to the case for war against Iraq. “Then you’re probably the perfect person to write the speech,” Gerson replied. “If you can convince yourself, you can convince the country.”
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