David Frum - Background

Background

Born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Frum is the son of the late Barbara Frum, a well-known journalist and broadcaster, 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. 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 a New Democratic Party candidate. 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:

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As a columnist for the Yale Daily News in the early ’80s, he joined his liberal editors in a campaign to urge the university to seize control of the Yale Literary Magazine, at the time owned by a 25-year-old alumnus named Andrei Navrozov. According to the New York Times, Navrozov had acquired “the financially troubled magazine” in 1978 and “turned the modest undergraduate journal into a handsome journal with a national circulation.” Frum and his allies said they simply wanted the Lit returned to the undergraduates. But Navrozov detected a political subtext to their efforts, the existence of which the Times, in its coverage of the Lit controversy in 1981, confirmed. “Privately, these same people talk about Mr. Navrozov’s politics,” the newspaper reported, “his ‘raucous, antiliberal, new cold war’ politics. . . ." A Yale near-contemporary, John Zmirak recalls, “Frum had made himself well-known among the amazingly intolerant leftist students of early 1980s Yale by loudly espousing Reaganite foreign and budgetary policy.” That notwithstanding, “there was a sense” that attacking the Lit “was a good career move,” an unnamed ally of Navrozov told Toronto Life in 2001, “a sense—and a resentment—that was trying to establish himself as the acceptable conservative voice on campus—not with other conservatives, but with the powers that be.”

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

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. —David Frum (January 1, 2008), National Review

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,

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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.

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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.”

While serving in the Bush White House, Frum was "one of the most vociferous voices . . . calling for war in Iraq," and "wrote in 2003 about the Iraqis 'welcoming their liberators.'"

Frum strongly supported John Roberts, George W. Bush's nominee for Chief Justice of the United States. However, like many conservatives, he 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.

On October 11, 2007, Frum announced on his blog that he was joining Rudolph Giuliani's presidential campaign as a senior foreign policy adviser.

Frum was a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, a neo-conservative think tank, from 2003 until March 25, 2010, when his paid position was terminated and he declined to accept the offer of a non-paying position. Media reports noted that the termination came three days after Frum's strongly worded criticism of the Republican strategy on health care reform, but Frum said that the AEI had not cited his criticism as the reason for his termination. It was also suggested that he was fired for criticizing Fox news, saying "Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we are discovering we work for Fox.”