David J. Frum (born 1960) is a Canadian-born conservative and journalist active in the both US and Canadian political arenas. A former economic speechwriter for President George W. Bush, he is also the author of the first "insider" book about the Bush presidency. His editorial columns have appeared in a variety of Canadian and American magazines and newspapers.

Background

Born to a Jewish family in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Frum is the son of the late Barbara Frum, a well-known veteran journalist. His father, Murray Frum, was a dentist who later became a multi-millionaire as a real estate developer. David Frum's sister, Linda Frum is a journalist. David Frum is married to writer Danielle Crittenden, the stepdaughter of former Toronto Sun editor Peter Worthington.

At age 14 he was a campaign volunteer for a socialist candidate, taking an hour-long bus/subway/bus ride each way to and from the campaign office in western Toronto. He would read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, a paperback edition his mother had given 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.

He graduated from the University of Toronto Schools in 1978 where he was the School Captain. He then attended Yale University in 1982 where he earned a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts. While at Yale he was in the Directed Studies program, a type of "great books" course. He went on to Harvard Law School in 1987. Frum has described one of his study methods while at law school:

When I was in law school, I devised my own idiosyncratic solution to the problem of studying a topic I knew nothing about. I'd wander into the library stacks, head to the relevant section, and pluck a book at random. I'd flip to the footnotes, and write down the books that seemed to occur most often. Then I'd pull them off the shelves, read their footnotes, and look at those books. It usually took only 2 or 3 rounds of this exercise before I had a pretty fair idea of who were the leading authorities in the field. After reading 3 or 4 of those books, I usually had at least enough orientation in the subject to understand what the main questions at issue were — and to seek my own answers, always provisional, always subject to new understanding, always requiring new reading and new thinking.

He served as an editor on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal from 1989 until 1992, and then as a columnist for Forbes magazine in 1992-94. From 1994 through 2000 he was a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Public Policy Research.

Following the election of George W. Bush in 2000, Frum was appointed to a position within the White House. Still a Canadian citizen, he was one of the few foreign nationals working within the Bush White House. He served as Special Assistant to the U.S. President for Economic Speechwriting from January 2001 to February 2002. He filed for naturalization and took the oath for citizenship on September 11, 2007 .

Frum strongly supported John Roberts, George W. Bush's nominee for Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court. However, like many conservatives, he opposed the nomination of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court, on the grounds that she was insufficiently qualified for the post, as well as insufficiently conservative.

David Frum now speaks on behalf of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank, as well as the Fraser Institute, a like minded think tank based in Canada. On October 11, 2007, Frum announced on his blog that he was joining Rudolph Giuliani's presidential campaign as a senior foreign policy adviser.

Writings

His first book, Dead Right, was released in 1994. He is the author also of What's Right (1996) and How We Got Here a history of 1970s published in 2000.

In January 2003, he released The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush, the first insider account of the Bush presidency. Frum is widely cited as having authored the phrase "axis of evil," which he discusses in his book. In fact, though, his original phrasing was "axis of hatred". As the title suggests, Frum also discusses how the events of September 11, 2001 redefined the country and the President. Frum writes, "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."

Frum's latest 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. Furthermore, it called for a tougher policy with North Korea, as well as advocating a tougher U.S. stance against Saudi Arabia and other Islamic nations in order to "win the war on terror" (the book's by-line). Fareed Zakaria critiqued it in a New York Times Sunday Book Review essay, writing that "To transform the world, you do actually need to engage in it."

Frum writes a weekly column for Canada's National Post newspaper and is a commentator for American Public Radio's "Marketplace." His writings appear frequently in the New York Times, Italy's Il Foglio, and the Daily Telegraph. He also writes a blog, David Frum's Diary at the National Review Online Web site.

Political views

On abortion, Frum has stated that he "is not pro-life" and "think[s] abortion ought to be legal in the first trimester and generally illegal thereafter", but believes in state-by-state regulations on the matter.

Frum has been a consistent and vocal critic of Republican presidential candidate John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate on the ground that Palin is unqualified to assume the presidency. Speaking of Palin's performance during the campaign, Frum has stated, "I think she has pretty thoroughly -- and probably irretrievably -- proven that she is not up to the job of being president of the United States."

Non-political views and interests

Frum has written in his blog that he enjoys reading history (among his favorite historical figures are Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln), particularly histories of The American Civil War (he has also visited Civil War battlefields). In fiction, "Marcel Proust is my all-time favorite novelist, the one I could read and re-read endlessly."

Criticism

Frum has been accused of misrepresenting Canadian crime statistics in order to incorrectly portray crime in Canada as increasing while the crime rate in the United States is dropping.

Bibliography

• An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror (with Richard Perle), 2004 (ISBN 1-4000-6194-6)
• The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush, 2003 (ISBN 0-375-50903-8)
• How We Got Here: The 70's: The Decade That Brought You Modern Life--For Better or Worse, 2000 (ISBN 0-465-04196-5)
• What's Right: The New Conservative Majority and the Remaking of America, 1997 (ISBN 0-465-04198-1)
• Dead Right, 1994 (ISBN 0-465-09825-8)
• Ghostwriter for Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else ("I ghostwrote it, but the research & concepts are all his," Frum has written.)

References

External links

• David Frum's website
• David Frum's Diary blog at National Review Online
• "Proud wife turns 'axis of evil' speech into a resignation letter", Matthew Engel, The Guardian, February 27, 2002
• A critical review of An End to Evil by Pat Buchanan, The American Conservative, March 1, 2004
• A critical review of An End to Evil" by Gary Kamiya, Salon.com'', January 30, 2004
• Video interviews/discussions with Frum on Bloggingheads.tv
• NYTimes Magazine interview

Videos

• Conservatives and the World Online conference where David Frum defends US policy in Iraq and the Middle East but predicts the end of Republican dominance of the White House. Part of the conference Conservative Predominance in the U.S. : A Moment or an Era ? Videos and texts online.