David Frum

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David Frum : biography

June 30, 1960 –

David J. Frum ( born June 30, 1960) is a Canadian-American journalist who was active in the Canadian political arena, and later became active in American politics after emigrating to the United States. A member of the Canada-Israel Committee, and later AIPAC, he became a speechwriter for President George W. Bush. He is also the author of the first "insider" book about the Bush presidency.http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/frum-barbara His editorial columns have appeared in a variety of Canadian and American magazines and newspapers, including the National Post and The Week. He is a featured writer for The Daily Beast and Newsweek, which he joined after a brief stint as the founder of FrumForum.com (formerly NewMajority.com), a political group blog, and serves on the board of directors of the Republican Jewish Coalition and as vice chairman and an associate fellow of the R Street Institute.http://www.rstreet.org/about/staff/david-frum/

He is the son of the late Jewish Canadian journalist Barbara Frum.

Background

Born in Toronto, Canada, Frum is the son of the late Barbara Frum, a well-known journalist and broadcaster in Canada, and Murray Frum, a dentist, who later became a real estate developer, philanthropist and art collector.

Frum’s sister, Linda Frum, is a member of the Senate of Canada and also a member of the Canada-Israel Committee. Frum is married to the writer Danielle Crittenden, the stepdaughter of former Toronto Sun editor Peter Worthington. The couple has three children. He is a distant cousin of economist Paul Krugman.

At age 14, Frum was a campaign volunteer for an Ontario New Democratic Party candidate Jan Dukszta for the 1975 provincial election. 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 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."

He graduated from the University of Toronto Schools in 1978 where he was the school captain. At Yale University, he simultaneously earned Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees in history, graduating in 1982. He was in Directed Studies, a type of "Great Books" curriculum. According to The American Conservative:

Frum earned his Juris Doctor (J.D.) at Harvard Law School in 1987. He has described one of his study methods:

After graduating from Harvard, Frum returned to Toronto as an associate editor of Saturday Night. 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. During his tenure at the Journal, Frum "accepted the freelance assignment that would make his name: a 1991 cover story for The American Spectator attacking Pat Buchanan." From 1994-2000 he was a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. During the 1990s he attended "three or four" Bilderberg Group meetings as a guest of Conrad Black.

Following the 2000 election of George W. Bush, Frum was appointed to a position within the White House. Frum would later write that when he was first offered the job by chief Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson,

Still a Canadian citizen, he was one of the few foreign nationals working within the Bush White House. He filed for naturalization and took the oath of citizenship on September 11, 2007. He served as special assistant to the president for economic speechwriting from January 2001 to February 2002. He is credited with inventing the expression “axis of evil” which Bush introduced in his 2002 State of the Union address, since Frum’s wife, Danielle Crittenden, bragged about it in e-mails that were picked up by the media. Frum shortly afterwards resigned his position. Both he and the White House denied any connection to the incident. He later explained that he had coined the term “axis of hatred”, referring to terrorist groups and extremist governments, in the first draft of the speech and the phrase was changed to “axis of evil.”