THE BELIEVER.

The Judson Welliver Society is a bipartisan, sporadically serious, and generally impious club of ex-White House speechwriters. Its founder and president-for-life is the former Times columnist William Safire, who once wrote speeches for Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon. Welliver, a former newspaperman, was the first "literary clerk" ever to be placed on the White House payroll; he wrote speeches for the subcompetent Warren G. Harding and the ineloquent Calvin Coolidge. The members of the society that carries his nearly forgotten name get together every year or so to remind one another of the maddening yet elating experience of watching the most powerful men on earth rewrite their otherwise perfect sentences.

The December, 2002, meeting of the Welliver Society took place at the headquarters of the Motion Picture Association of America, two blocks from the White House. Jack Valenti, the former Lyndon Johnson aide, who was then the M.P.A.A. chairman, provided his dining room for free, which is crucial to any gathering of writers, especially those with money. In attendance that night were writers who had served every President since Harry S. Truman, including Theodore Sorensen, who wrote for John F. Kennedy, and much of the recently decommissioned Clinton speechwriting team. White House speechwriters on active service are not offered membership in the Society, but they are invited to the dinner, mostly to be put on the spot. So there was a good deal of anticipation when it came time for Michael Gerson, then President Bush's chief speechwriter, to address the group. By 2002, it had become the cross-party consensus that Gerson was almost Sorensen's equal in skill and rhetorical ambition. ("George W. Bush's first week as President of the United States began with a speech that, taken as a whole and judged purely as a piece of writing, was shockingly good," Hendrik Hertzberg, a former speechwriter for Jimmy Carter and not a Bush enthusiast, wrote in this magazine in January of 2001.) Gerson has provided Bush with striking expressions, such as "the soft bigotry of low expectations," to describe how prejudicial perceptions affect minority students, and his invocation of the American dream, in June, 1999, when then Governor Bush announced his candidacy:

The success of America has never been proven by cities of gold, but by citizens of character. Men and women who work hard, dream big, love their family, serve their neighbor. Values that turn a piece of earth into a neighborhood, a community, a chosen nation.

Unlike most speechwriters, who tend to be segregated from policymaking, Gerson has always been an influential figure in the White House, in part because he shares Bush's belief in the power of faith--both men are evangelical Christians--and because he possesses a preternatural ability, his friends say, to anticipate Bush's thinking. There is a "mind meld" between the two men, Bush's counsellor Dan Bartlett told me, adding, "When you bring a West Texas approach to the heavy debates of the world, there has to be a translator, and Mike is the translator."

Gerson is known to his friends for his pre-ironic sensibility, and for his soft heart; I once saw him close to tears when he spoke about AIDS patients in Uganda. But he is also a capable operator. In 2002, a senior White House official told me, Gerson outflanked Dick Cheney, who didn't want Bush to declare unambiguously his support for a Palestinian state, as Gerson had urged him to do--and as Bush did, in a speech that Gerson wrote. Gerson is also unashamedly guileless in his search for heroes; when he came to Washington, in the late nineteen-eighties, he would sometimes park outside the home of George F. Will, hoping to catch a glimpse of the conservative columnist. And, even in the Bush White House, he is known for his piety. On display in his office is a book called "Standing in the Need of Prayer," photographs of African-Americans praying. He told the National Journal's Carl Cannon, last year, that the book "moved me no end." Cannon then noted, as if in wonderment, "Gerson really speaks this way."

At a Welliver dinner, the remarks of ex-speechwriters tend toward carefully calibrated irreverence; current speechwriters aren't expected to gripe or to disclose confidences. But at the 2002 event, Gerson spoke with immoderate earnestness. According to several people who attended, Safire asked Gerson to tell the group something it didn't know about Bush. Gerson, in a quavering voice, responded with a story that left some of his audience nonplussed. He described a call that he got moments after Bush finished addressing a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001. Bush thanked Gerson for his work on the speech, to which Gerson replied, "Mr. President, this is why God wants you here." Gerson then related Bush's response, as evidence of his thoughtfulness. "The President said, 'No, this is why God wants us here.' "

An uncomfortable silence filled the room, and then one of Bill Clinton's speechwriters said, in a stage whisper, "God must really hate Al Gore."