Mourning ‘Compassionate Conservatism’ Along With Its Author

Driven by his Christian faith, the kind that emphasizes caring for “the least of these,” as the Bible puts it, Mr. Gerson in a memoir summed up his philosophy as “a conservative respect for the institutions of family and community paired with a radical uncompromising concern for the poor and weak.”

That eventually led him to the scourge of AIDS then ravaging Africa. At Mr. Bush’s direction, aides developed a plan to devote billions of dollars to treatment, advised by Dr. Fauci, a renowned AIDS researcher long before he became a lightning rod for today’s right wing.

At the key meeting, Mr. Bush asked Mr. Gerson what he thought. “If we can do this and we don’t,” Mr. Gerson answered, “it will be a source of shame.” Mr. Bush agreed and persuaded Congress to finance the program, which over the last two decades has devoted $100 billion to curbing the disease.

“It’s been a huge success,” Mr. Biden said in his State of the Union address this week, crediting Mr. Bush. “He thought big, he thought large. He moved.” Mr. Bush plans to make a rare visit to Washington on Feb. 24 for a ceremony marking the anniversary.

Mr. Gerson’s vision of compassionate conservatism, however, has not endured with the same success. The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, transformed Mr. Bush’s presidency into a wartime administration and his decision to invade Iraq, with the resulting casualties and devastation, dispelled any sense of a compassionate time. Mr. Gerson, who helped craft the “axis of evil” address, never publicly expressed regret for his role in selling the war.

Mr. Bush returned to the theme late in his presidency, seeking immigration changes allowing millions to stay in the country. But he failed and in fact the conservative backlash helped fuel Mr. Trump’s later rise, which then transformed the party into a more combative culture war movement with little interest in the goals Mr. Gerson espoused. Through his column in The Washington Post, Mr. Gerson became a passionate critic of Mr. Trump.

But they were not easy years for him. He was hospitalized for depression and in 2019, from the same pulpit where he was remembered on Thursday, he delivered a raw and vulnerable sermon about being “stalked by sadness.”