Michael Gerson, adviser and speechwriter to George W. Bush and then a Washington Post columnist and author, died today after a long battle with cancer. His passing will no doubt draw a lot of reflection on his work and on the Bush era, on great lines and on the role of the speechwriter. But for me, what always stood out about him was personal and not professional.
I got to know Mike when I was a domestic-policy staffer in the Bush White House. I knew him first only at some distance, as the person Bush would listen to even after everyone else thought some question was settled. If he hadn’t spoken up in a meeting, the president would make sure to insist he did. His advice was never political but always something more like moral, and Bush appreciated it just for that reason. The president didn’t always adopt Mike’s views, of course, but he always heard them and he always knew they came from a deep well of conviction and compassion. And when Mike’s side lost the argument, there was always a decent chance it wasn’t really over.
But then at some point in 2005, I was given the chance, in addition to the work I was already doing, to essentially be Mike’s staffer in the advisory role he had taken on within the White House after leaving the job of chief speechwriter. He was a counselor to the president, able to involve himself in a variety of projects and internal debates, and I got to go along for the ride.
The most extraordinary facet of that unusual experience was just getting to know Mike himself. He was a man of deep Christian faith and intense moral convictions, and he had enormous respect for the office of the presidency and for public service in American life more generally but very little patience for cynicism, fatalism, or small-mindedness. The impatience sometimes got the better of him, and Mike was frequently outraged at the unwillingness of people around him to act in the service of the good when they could. But without fail, his outrage was rooted in concern for people overlooked or left behind. We didn’t agree about everything, Mike’s conservatism was not identical to mine, but I was profoundly impressed — literally, in the sense that I was shaped and formed — by the example he set of how to hold politics to a high moral standard.
Mike’s character was actually his secret as a writer. He certainly had an extraordinary way with words, but his distinct voice was always a function of his moral clarity, and his willingness to articulate both his faith and his love of what was lovely in his life. (On the latter front I think, for instance, of the column he wrote after sending his son to college, which I would challenge any parent to read without tears.)
We remained close after the White House, as Mike became a columnist and writer in his own voice. I would see him every few weeks, often with a few other good friends, to talk about politics and deeper things. His combination of respect for the presidency and insistence on moral standards in politics obviously made him intensely hostile to Donald Trump in recent years, but his writing also increasingly took up religious questions, which mattered most to him. Mike was at work on a book about historical models of effective religious engagement in public life when health problems intervened.
And in some ways, it was his courage in this final phase that was the most impressive side of him I’ve known. His afflictions rivaled Job’s — Mike had long had serious heart problems, but these were then compounded by cancer in his kidneys, lungs, and bones, and then further compounded by Parkinson’s. Yet through it all, Mike’s faith only grew stronger, his mind and pen were sharp as ever, and his sheer strength of character never wavered.
I saw him in the hospital earlier this month, and found him utterly full of gratitude — for his family and his friends, and for the life he has had the opportunity to live. He was intensely proud of his two sons, and proud too of the work he had done. But on that front, it wasn’t so much White House speechwriting that he emphasized as writing geared to helping people toward religion.
The contrast between that final conversation and my earliest experiences with Mike was really striking. When he had some power in the world, he was moved by righteous anger at injustice to the weak. But when he was powerless himself, he was moved by gratitude for the good in his life. Neither is easy to pull off, and the combination is a kind of testament to the power of faith.
There is much to say about Mike Gerson as a public person, his influence and reach. But to me what stands out even more is the private example he set as a man living a life of deep faith and goodness while surrounded first by the temptations to self-aggrandizement that inevitably come with being near power and then by the temptations to self-pity that understandably come with being burdened by illness so intensely for so long. Mike could resist both temptations for the same reason — because he loved God and knew that God loved him.
He made a difference. And I’ll miss him terribly.