THE AXES OF DAVID FRUM

I wrote this feature for a supplement in the Toronto Globe and Mail. These days David Frum writes for the Atlantic and is a regular on CNN, offering up the viewpoint of a reasonable conservative, one dismayed and disillusioned by the rise of Donald Trump. Back in 2003, though, he was much more strident supporter of the Republican Establishment--those unacquainted with his backstory would never guess he was born in Toronto, his mother Canada's best-known television-news anchor, his father a powerful real-estate developer. When I wrote this piece, The Right Man, David Frum's not-quite-tell-all of his brief time as a speechwriter for George W. Bush, had taken up a months-long residency near the top of the best-seller list. In this piece I reach out to presidential speechwriters who offer up their perspectives on Frum's work and, more to the point, his decision to leave the his White House post and rush into print a book that is by turns a hagiography of Bush and a self-serving and almost certainly exaggerated account of his influence on the often out-matched POTUS.