Peter Wehner, a longtime conservative insider who has worked for several Republican administrations, is a senior fellow at the neoconservative-aligned Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) and a former advisor to President George W. Bush. A close associate of many prominent rightist individuals (including two key figures in the neoconservative advocacy world: the Weekly Standard’s William Kristol and Reagan administration Education Secretary William Bennett 1 ), Wehner has been a vocal proponent of the Bush administration’s conservative domestic agenda and militarist “war on terror” policies 2 —as well as Bush’s Iraq policies. In May 2008, Wehner characterized Bush’s Iraq plan as “working in terms of security, in terms of politics, and in terms of economics.… I don't see any reason why you'd get away from it.”3
During his time at the White House, Wehner served as one of the president’s key policy advisors. Wehner’s position as head of the Office of Strategic Initiatives, an in-house quasi-think tank created by Karl Rove, was characterized by the Washington Post as the “rarest of White House jobs.”4 According to the Post, Wehner was “paid to read, to think, to prod, to brainstorm—all without accountability. He recalls the words of White House senior adviser Karl Rove when he interviewed for the job: ‘He said my job is to bug him.’”5 Bush called Wehner’s frequent policy proposals on both domestic and foreign policy, which were widely circulated in and out of the administration, “Wehner-grams.” Former White House colleagues have highlighted the influential role Wehner played. Michael Gerson, a former Bush speechwriter, said that Wehner “developed a tremendous influence at the White House, not by being a policy implementer but by being an idea and argument generator."6
From his perch at the White House, Wehner’s principal role often seemed to be the administration’s attack dog. For example, in response to a 2006 column by conservative writer George Will that lambasted Bush’s Middle East policy as the “triumph of unrealism,” Wehner wrote a widely circulated rebuttal, arguing that Will’s views on the Middle East would “lead to death and destruction on a scale that is almost unimaginable.”7 Ignoring the violence in Iraq associated with the U.S. occupation and blowback from the push to establish Western-style democracies in the Middle East,8 Wehner contended that Bush’s “Freedom Agenda” would “assist in the rise of liberty and civic habits in the Middle East. That will take longer to achieve than the historical blink of an eye. And one thing we know for sure: we were never going to get there under a policy that looked away from, or even promoted, tyrannical regimes in the Arab world.”9
Wehner also attacked Will for insisting that Iraq should not be the focus of efforts to combat terrorism, writing, “Iraq is a central front in the war on terrorism because [terrorists] have made it so. Wishing it were not the case—even writing that it is not the case—won't change that reality.”10
When he left the Bush administration in 2007, Wehner took a post as senior fellow at EPPC,11 which is one of several institutes established by neoconservatives to promote an increased role for religion in public policy. Others include the Institute on Religion and Democracy and the Institute on Religion and Public Life. EPPC hosts a number of high-profile rightist ideologues, including George Weigel.
At EPPC, Wehner has continued his efforts to discredit opponents of Bush’s foreign policies. In an online-only article for the neoconservative flagship magazine Commentary, Wehner criticized conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan for arguing, after the Russian invasion of Georgia in August 2008, that the United States had “very little moral standing to protest an invasion of a sovereign country.”12 Sullivan’s “moral equivalency” between Iraq and Georgia was “indefensible,” wrote Wehner.13
Sullivan responded, “Just imagine if the press were to discover a major jail in Gori, occupied by the Russians, where hundreds of Georgians had been dragged in off the streets and tortured and abused? What if we discovered that the orders for this emanated from the Kremlin itself? And what if we had documentary evidence of the ghastliest forms of racist, dehumanizing, abusive practices against the vulnerable as the standard operating procedure of the Russian army—because the prisoners were suspected of resisting the occupying power? Pete Wehner belonged to the administration that did this. It seems to me that, in these circumstances, the question of moral equivalence becomes a live one. When an American president has violated two centuries of civilized norms, how could it not be, for any serious person with a conscience?”14
Wehner contributes to a number of right-wing and neoconservative media outlets, including Commentary’s “Contentions” blog, National Review’s “The Corner” blog, and the Weekly Standard. Topics of his articles have included his views of the presidential candidates, the benefits of Bush administration Medicare policies, the supposed successes of the “Freedom Agenda,” and fawning reviews of books penned by right-wing writers like Dinesh D’Souza.
Wehner’s track record includes employment under three Republican presidents and serving as a director at the now-defunct Empower America, a rightist advocacy group founded by William Bennett in 1993. According to his EPPC bio, Wehner was a speechwriter for Bennett (the secretary of education for Ronald Reagan), and later an assistant to Bennett in the Office of National Drug Control Policy, before joining the Bush administration.15
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Affiliations16
Ethics and Public Policy Center: Senior Fellow
Commentary: Contributor
Weekly Standard: Contributor
National Review: Contributor
Harry Walker Agency: Speaker/Client
Hudson Institute: Former Research Fellow
Empower America: Former Executive Director for Policy (1993-2001)
Government Service17
White House: Deputy Assistant to the President/Director of Strategic Initiatives (2002-2007); Deputy Director of Speechwriting (2001)
George H.W. Bush Administration; Assistant to the Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (1989-1990)
Department of Education: Speechwriter for William Bennett (1987-1988)
Education18
University of Washington: B.A., Political Science |
