David Frum

His father's parents migrated from Poland to Toronto in 1930.

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.

The couple has three children.

He is a distant cousin of economist Paul Krugman.

David Jeffrey Frum (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.

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 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."

Frum was educated at Yale University, where he took the Directed Studies program.

After graduating from Harvard Law School, 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.

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.

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,

"I believed I was unsuited to the job he was offering me. I had no connection to the Bush campaign or the Bush family. I had no experience in government and little of political campaigns. I had not written a speech for anyone other than myself. And I had been only a moderately enthusiastic supporter of George W. Bush ... I strongly doubted he was the right man for the job."

While still a Canadian citizen, he was one of the few foreign nationals working within the Bush White House.

Frum served as special assistant to the president for economic speechwriting from January 2001 to February 2002.

Conservative commentator Robert Novak described Frum as an "uncompromising supporter of Israel" and "fervent supporter of Ariel Sharon's policies" during his time in the White House.

He has taken credit for the famous phrase "axis of evil" in Bush's 2002 State of the Union address.

Frum formerly served on the board of directors of the Republican Jewish Coalition, 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.

Frum is the son of Canadian journalist Barbara Frum.

Born in Toronto, Ontario, to a Jewish family, 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.

Frum is credited by his wife with inventing the expression "Axis of Evil", which Bush introduced in his 2002 State of the Union address.

During Frum's time at the White House, he was described by commentator Ryan Lizza as being part of a speechwriting brain trust that brought "intellectual heft" and considerable policy influence to the Bush Administration.

Shortly after the September 11 attacks, Frum hosted pseudonymous Muslim apostate and critic of Islam, Ibn Warraq at an hour-and-a-half lunch at the White House.

While serving in the Bush White House and afterward, Frum strongly supported the Iraq War by furthering the conspiracy theory that Saddam Hussein was in league with the terrorist group Al-Qaeda.

In later years, however, he would express regret for that endorsement, saying that it owed more to psychological and group identity factors than reasoned judgment:

"It's human nature to assess difficult questions, not on the merits, but on our feelings about the different 'teams' that form around different answers. To cite a painful personal experience: During the decision-making about the Iraq war, I was powerfully swayed by the fact that the proposed invasion of Iraq was supported by those who had been most right about the Cold War—and was most bitterly opposed by those who had been wrongest about the Cold War. Yet in the end, it is not teams that matter. It is results. As Queen Victoria's first prime minister bitterly quipped after a policy fiasco: 'What wise men had promised has not happened. What the damned fools predicted has actually come to pass.'"

He also later acknowledged that it remains unclear how the US "could have delivered better success in Iraq" in terms of replacing Saddam with a "more humane and peaceful" government.

Frum left the White House in February 2002.

Commentator Robert Novak, appearing on CNN, claimed that Frum was dismissed because his wife had emailed friends, saying that her husband had invented the "axis of evil" phrase.

Frum and the White House denied Novak's allegation.

Frum opposed the nomination of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court of the United States, on the grounds that she was insufficiently qualified for the post, as well as insufficiently conservative.

In 2003, Frum authored the first book about Bush's presidency written by a former member of the administration.

He filed for naturalization and took the oath of citizenship on September 11, 2007.