David Frum
David Jeffrey Frum (/frʌm/; born June 1960) is a Canadian-American political commentator and a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush. He is currently a senior editor at The Atlantic as well as an MSNBC contributor. In 2003, Frum authored the first book about Bush's presidency written by a former member of the administration.[4] He has taken credit for the famous phrase "axis of evil" in Bush's 2002 State of the Union address.[5][6]
David Frum
- Canada
- United States
1987–present[2]
Coining the term "axis of evil"
3
Linda Frum (sister)[3]
Howard Sokolowski (brother-in-law)
Frum formerly served on the board of directors of the Republican Jewish Coalition,[7] the British think tank Policy Exchange, the anti-drug policy group Smart Approaches to Marijuana, and as vice chairman and an associate fellow of the R Street Institute.[8]
Frum is the son of Canadian journalist Barbara Frum.[9][10]
Early life and education[edit]
Born in Toronto, Ontario, to a Jewish family,[2] Frum is the son of the late Barbara Frum (née Rosberg), a well-known, Niagara Falls, New York-born journalist and broadcaster in Canada, and the late Murray Frum, a dentist, who later became a real estate developer, philanthropist, and art collector. His father's parents migrated from Poland to Toronto in 1930.[11] Frum's sister, Linda Frum, was a member of the Senate of Canada. He is married to the writer Danielle Crittenden, the stepdaughter of former Toronto Sun editor Peter Worthington. Frum also has an adopted brother, Matthew, from whom he is estranged.[10] The couple has three children.[12] His daughter Miranda died in February 2024, age 32, from complications of a 2019 brain tumor.[13][14][15] He is a distant cousin of economist Paul Krugman.[16]
At age 14, Frum was a campaign volunteer for an Ontario New Democratic Party candidate Jan Dukszta for the 1975 provincial election.[3] During the hour-long bus/subway/bus ride each way to and from the campaign office in western Toronto, he read a paperback edition of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, which his mother had given to him. "My campaign colleagues jeered at the book—and by the end of the campaign, any lingering interest I might have had in the political left had vanished like yesterday's smoke."[17]
Frum was educated at Yale University, where he took the Directed Studies program.[18]
Career[edit]
Early career[edit]
After graduating from Harvard Law School, Frum returned to Toronto as an associate editor of Saturday Night.[19] He was an editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal from 1989 until 1992, and then a columnist for Forbes magazine in 1992–94. In 1994–2000, he worked as a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, as a contributing editor at neoconservative opinion magazine The Weekly Standard, and as a columnist for Canada's National Post. He worked also as a regular contributor for National Public Radio. In 1996, he helped organize the "Winds of Change" in Calgary, Alberta, an early effort to unite the Reform Party of Canada and the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada.[20]
White House[edit]
Following the 2000 election of George W. Bush, Frum was appointed to a position as a speechwriter within the White House. He would later write that when he was first offered the job by chief Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson,
Books and writing[edit]
Frum's first book, Dead Right, was released in 1994. It "expressed intense dissatisfaction with supply-siders, evangelicals, and nearly all Republican politicians", according to a negative review by a Frum opponent, Robert Novak.[21] Frank Rich of The New York Times described it as "the smartest book written from the inside about the American conservative movement," William F. Buckley, Jr. found it "the most refreshing ideological experience in a generation,"[47] and Daniel McCarthy of The American Conservative called it "a crisply written indictment of everything its author disliked about conservatism in the early '90s."[19]
He is also the author of What's Right (1996) and How We Got Here (2000), a history of the 1970s, which "framed the 1970s in the shadow of World War II and Vietnam, suggesting, 'The turmoil of the 1970s should be understood ... as the rebellion of an unmilitary people against institutions and laws formed by a century of war and the preparation for war.'"[19] Michael Barone of U.S. News & World Report praised How We Got Here, noting that "more than any other book ... it shows how we came to be the way we are." John Podhoretz described it as "compulsively readable" and a "commanding amalgam of history, sociology and polemic."[48]
In January 2003 Frum released The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush, the first insider account of the Bush presidency. Frum also discussed how the events of September 11, 2001 redefined the country and the president: "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." His book An End to Evil was co-written with Richard Perle. It provided a defense of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and advocated regime change in Iran and Syria. It called for a tougher policy toward North Korea, and a tougher US stance against Saudi Arabia and other Islamic nations in order to "win the war on terror".
He published Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again in 2008. In 2012, his book Why Romney Lost (And What The GOP Can Do About It), attributed Mitt Romney's defeat in the 2012 U.S. presidential election to an economic message out of touch with the concerns of middle-class Americans and to a backward-looking cultural message. Frum's first novel, Patriots, was published in April 2012.[49] It is a political satire about the election and presidency of a fictional conservative American president.[50] In 2018, Frum published Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic, about the dangers posed by the Trump presidency to American democracy.[51] He was interviewed for the book on the New Books Network.[52] In 2020, he published a second volume about the Trump era and its consequences, Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy.
Appearances on public radio[edit]
Frum was a commentator for American Public Media's "Marketplace" from 2007 until his final appearance on October 12, 2011.[53] Frum has made numerous appearances on the weekly radio program Left, Right & Center on KCRW, the National Public Radio affiliate in Santa Monica, California. On the KCRW program, Frum presented the conservative viewpoint.[54][55]
Non-political views[edit]
Frum considers himself "a not especially observant Jew".[21] Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln are among his favorite historical figures.[93] Marcel Proust is his favorite novelist.[18]