Bush Speechwriter Resigns

The Bush administration is facing a future without one of its most influential backstage figures today after Michael Gerson, the evangelical Christian who coined the phrase "axis of evil" and wrote most of the president's scripted words, announced his resignation.

Mr Gerson was originally brought on board as a speechwriter, to craft memorable phrases for a president prone to verbal gaffes. But his sway with Mr Bush soon exceeded his job title, and he is widely seen as having been one of the key architects of the administration's "freedom agenda", providing a religious underpinning for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

The White House said the reasons for Mr Gerson's departure were personal, and not related to the recent shake-up in which Mr Bush's chief of staff, press spokesman and treasury secretary were replaced in an effort to combat plummetting approval ratings. But Karl Rove, the president's deputy chief of staff and strategic mastermind, conceded that the resignation would leave a hole at the centre of the administration.

"There's no way to replace him," he told the New York Times. "He is a once-in-a-generation. He helped take the president on his best day and represent what was in the president's spirit and soul."

Mr Bush has not entirely overcome his rhetorical awkwardness when speaking without a script - the characteristic that caused mirth during his first campaign, when he told one crowd of supporters, for example, that "more and more of our imports come from overseas". Shortly after arriving at the White House, in an address on the importance of education, he told his audience: "Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?"

But 42-year-old Mr Gerson, named last year by Time magazine as one of America's 25 most influential evangelical Christians, wrote resonant speeches tinged with religion that sometimes made the president sound statesmanlike.

"Grief and tragedy and hatred are only for a time," Mr Bush said at the National Cathedral in Washington shortly after the September 11 attacks, reading words written by Mr Gerson. "Goodness, remembrance, and love have no end. And the Lord of life holds all who die, and all who mourn." The boyish speechwriter, later promoted to senior adviser, was also responsible for changing the phrase "axis of hatred" to the controversial and more moralistic "axis of evil", to describe the "rogue states" of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.

He told Mr Bush that 9/11 was "why God wants you here" and, in an initiative that found more support across the political spectrum, lobbied his boss to push forward with plans to spend $15bn on fighting Aids and other diseases. "The bottom line is that we're the richest nation in history, and history will judge us severely if we don't do this," he told the president.

In an interview earlier this year with the New Yorker, Mr Gerson, who wrote many of his speeches in a Starbucks near the White House, said he thought the Iraq war would be seen differently in three years' time. "This is not some Don Quixote thing for the president," he said. "This is an odd time to be sceptical about the advance of freedom, given the advances we've made over the past 50 years. There are 3bn people now who live in democratic countries."

Announcing his resignation yesterday Mr Gerson said he had been planning to leave for months, but had wanted to wait until the political situation had stabilised. "This was a case where many good things are coming together at the White House, and it, to some extent, makes it easier to leave," he said. He planned to concentrate on writing, he added.