Michael Gerson (15 May 1964-17 November 2022) was the White House Director of Speechwriting from 20 January 2001 to 14 June 2006, succeeding Terry Edmonds and preceding William McGurn.
Biography[]
Michael Gerson was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1964, and he was raised in an evangelical Christian family; his paternal grandfather was Jewish. Gerson served as a senior policy advisor at the conservative Heritage Foundation before working as an aide to US Senator Dan Coats and as a speechwriter for 1996 Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole. In 1999, Karl Rove recruited Gerson for George W. Bush's presidential campaign, and he served as his White House Director of Speechwriting from 2001 to 2006, coining the term "Axis of Evil". He left the White House in 2006 to pursue other writing and policy work. Gerson proceeded to write for Newsweek and The Washington Post, and he died of cancer in 2022 at the age of 58.