David Frum is a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. A contributing writer for a number of rightist outlets (including the National Review Online, the Weekly Standard, the Wall Street Journal, Canada's National Post, and Britain's Daily Telegraph), Frum's articles typically offer ad hominem critiques of liberals and Europeans, espouse conservative social views, and push hawkish foreign policies—or a combination of all of the above. His July 11, 2007, National Review Online blog entry ("David Frum's Diary"), for example, carped:
"I will never take Europeans seriously again (not that I took them so seriously in the first place) when they complain about the American gun lobby. I just discovered that the local tobacconist in the small touristy French town in which we are currently stopping has sold my 13-year-old son and his 10-year-old cousin 25 Euros worth of roman candles, bottle rockets, firecrackers, and miniature explosives shaped like tanks. And a lighter. Parfaitment legal."
A fervent supporter of the Iraq War and of a hardline, Israel-centric U.S. policy in the Middle East, Frum frequently uses his columns to reinforce the neoconservative-championed argument that the United States and the West are in an existential conflict with Islam. In a March 2007 opinion piece for Foreign Policy, Frum took issue with President Bush's characterization that the problems in Iraq were basically the result of a handful of terrorists. He wrote: " Events appear to have confirmed the worst fears of the great political scientist Samuel Huntington. In his landmark 1993 article, 'The Clash of Civilizations,' the Harvard professor wrote, '[The] centuries-old military interaction between the West and Islam is unlikely to decline. It could become more virulent.' A decade before President Bush argued that democracy promotes peace, Huntington had observed, 'In the Arab world ... Western democracy strengthens anti-Western political forces.' As they turn against the Iraq War, Americans seem also to have rejected the sunny assumptions about the Middle East upon which it was founded. Bush argued that terrorism was the work of a tiny handful of extremists, repudiated by the vast majority of Middle Easterners. His fellow Americans no longer believe him. More and more are coming to believe that Islam really is inherently hostile to democracy and the West. Civilizations are clashing. Paul Wolfowitz has lost. Sam Huntington has won."
Frum, born in 1960 in Toronto, Ontario, had an early exposure to high-profile journalism from his mother, Barbara Frum, a well-known Canadian media personality who appeared regularly on CBC radio and television. After graduating from Yale University in 1982 and Harvard Law School in 1987—where he served as president of the local Federalist Society chapter—Frum went on to work on the Wall Street Journal editorial board from 1989 to 1992 and as a columnist for Forbes magazine from 1992 to 1994. During 1995 to 2001, Frum worked at the Manhattan Institute, where he served as a senior fellow. With the election of George W. Bush in 2000, Frum joined the administration as a special assistant to the president for economic speechwriting, a post he held until early 2002. (For more on Frum's background, see "David Frum: Biography," Canadian Media Research Consortium.)
Frum's work at the White House gained media attention in early 2002 after his wife, the anti-feminist writer Danielle Crittenden, bragged to some friends in an email that her husband came up with the phrase "axis of evil." The email eventually circulated to a number of press outlets. Wrote Crittenden in the email:
"Dear all,
"I realize this is very 'Washington' of me to mention but my husband is responsible for the 'Axis of Evil' segment of Tuesday's State of the Union address. It's not often a phrase one writes gains national notice—unless you're in advertising of course ('The Pause that refreshes')—so I'll hope you'll indulge my wifely pride in seeing this one repeated in headlines everywhere!!"
Reported Slate.com: "[We contacted] Crittenden to confirm that she wrote the e-mail. She asked why Chatterbox wanted to know. Chatterbox explained that he was writing about it. Crittenden asked why Chatterbox was writing about it. Chatterbox explained that it was newsworthy. 'I don't see why it is newsworthy,' she replied. 'You are asking about personal correspondence with friends and family. I'm disturbed that anyone would forward personal correspondence to you, and frankly, I think it's wrong of you to write about it.' Sounds like a confirmation!" ("David Frum's Axis of Evil," Slate.com, February 5. 2002).
In 2003, Frum published his best-known book, The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush, which offered a firsthand account of the Bush presidency and the influence of the 9/11 attacks on the country and the administration. "George W. Bush was hardly the obvious man for the job. But by a very strange fate, he turned out to be, of all unlikely things, the right man," wrote Frum.
In 2003 Frum co-authored, with Richard Perle, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, which defended the invasion of Iraq and promoted U.S.-backed regime change in Syria and Iran. The authors also promoted more aggressive U.S. policy toward North Korea and Saudi Arabia and derided the UN for being weak and bureaucratic while heralding the United States as the force that can bring peace to the world. They wrote: "A world at peace; a world governed by law; a world in which all peoples are free to find their own destinies: That dream has not yet come true, it will not come true soon, but if it ever does come true, it will be brought into being by American armed might and defended by American might, too."
The book, which appeared as the U.S. invasion began to morph into a bloody counterinsurgency campaign, called into question the rosy prognostications offered by neoconservatives and Bush administration hawks. According to Frum and Perle, however, the problems were a result not so much of the actions of foreign actors, such as the Sunni insurgency, but rather attempts by the "realists" in the State Department and the CIA, and by senior retired and active-duty military officers, to change the approach in Iraq and elsewhere in the region. Perle and Frum lamented: "We can feel the will to win ebbing in Washington; we sense the reversion to the bad old habits of complacency and denial."
Commenting on the book, Fareed Zakaria wrote: "Frum and Perle want transformation from 30,000 feet, without the moral taint of compromise. They scorn the diplomats who must deal with foreigners, not to mention the foreigners themselves" (Fareed Zakaria, "Showing Them Who's Boss," New York Times, February 8, 2004).
In November 2006, Vanity Fair published an article by David Rose that listed a number of "the [Iraq] War's remorseful proponents," those supporters of invading Iraq who had shifted their views and/or withdrawn their support of the Bush administration after the situation in Iraq steadily declined. These included Perle, Kenneth Adelman, Michael Rubin, Michael Ledeen, Eliot Cohen, Frank Gaffney, and Frum. Rose reported that, "To David Frum ... it now looks as if defeat may be inescapable, because 'the insurgency has proven it can kill anyone who cooperates, and the United States and its friends have failed to prove that it can protect them.'"
But Frum took issue with the characterization of his thoughts, proclaiming on the Huffington Post that there was "nothing remorseful" about his views. " It's true I fear that there is a real danger that the United States will lose in Iraq. And yes I do blame a lot that has gone wrong on failures of U.S. policy." Nevertheless, he said, "My most fundamental views on the war in Iraq remain as they were in 2003: The war was right, victory is essential, and defeat would be calamitous."
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Affiliations
American Enterprise Institute: Reader's Digest Resident Fellow
Manhattan Institute for Public Policy Research: Senior Fellow, 1994-2001
National Post: Columnist since 1998
Weekly Standard: Contributing Editor since 1995
National Review Online: Daily Contributor, "David Frum's Diary"
Forbes Columnist, 1992
Wall Street Journal: Assistant Editor, 1989-1992
Yale University: Visiting Lecturer, 1986
National Public Radio: Former Contributor, Morning Edition
Government Service
Special Assistant to the U.S. President for Economic Speechwriting: 2001-2002
Education
Yale University: B.A., M.A.
Harvard Law School: J.D.
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