Word: frum
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There's a telling anecdote in David Frum's new memoir of his year as a White House speechwriter for George W. Bush. Early in the presidency, Frum--who later received credit for the deathless, and perhaps senseless, phrase "axis of evil"--submits a speech. The President eviscerates it. Frum asks why. "The material he had hacked out," Frum writes, "seemed to me the headline story of the event. Bush shook his head at me. The Headline is: BUSH LEADS...
...wait a minute. Let's go back to Frum's anecdote; a metaphor may lurk within. Frum doesn't say what the speech was about, and he doesn't specify what Bush cut from the text--this is only a tell-some memoir. But one can assume that Bush has cut the details of the policy. And that fits too: there has been a vaporous quality to Bush's boldness. He traffics in headlines. The policies themselves are often not entirely baked. A case in point: Frum's "axis of evil" and its accompanying doctrine of pre-emption, which Bush...
...their hands on nuclear, biological or chemical weapons--and he wanted to warn rogue states not to help them do it. So in January the Defense Department drew up an assessment of the danger and channeled it back to the White House, where two speechwriters, Michael Gerson and David Frum, came up with what they thought was the perfect rallying...
...Here: The 70's: The Decade That Brought You Modern Life (For Better or Worse) (Basic Books; 418 pages; $25), David Frum revisits, with a good deal of wit and a surprising ambivalence, what he calls "America's low tide." Popular memory tends to conjure the '70s as the bummed-out, banalized aftermath of the '60s, which were the authentic circus. Frum has a more interesting take. He considers the '60s, for all their noise and flash, comparatively inconsequential. "But the 'social' transformation of the 1970s was real and was permanent," he says. It left a country more dynamic, tolerant...
...time, the '70s seemed fairly awful--oversexed in a brainless way, infected by a fatal mix of narcissism and paranoia. Presidents (Nixon, Ford, Carter) seemed either crooked or clueless. Yet, in Frum's analysis, the hideous '70s were a fulcrum and a rite of passage that changed almost everything and brought us, for good and ill, to where we are. He's right. Much has been gained on the journey. But Frum does not sufficiently reckon what has been lost...