David Gergen: His New Challenge

by Alexandra Marks MPA 1991

It's GST — Gergen Standard Time — at least five minutes behind schedule. But as usual, the towering, dignified, and unassuming former presidential adviser is totally focused on the requirements of the moment. In this case, that means maneuvering out of a cab as he insists on carrying a journalist's computer, paying the driver, and thanking him. Then, he leans back in to be sure the crumbs from the cranberry muffin he ate for breakfast on the way between appointments in an already packed day are wiped clean from the seat before he leaves to meet a former ambassador to discuss the telecommunications revolution in China.

It is an ordinary moment in a typical day for David Gergen IOP '84, one of Washington's more gracious and seemingly ubiquitous public figures. In the last 30 years, he's been on the inside of three Republican and one Democratic administrations. He experienced firsthand the tragedy of Richard Nixon's Watergate, was one of the architects of Ronald Reagan's powerful and now controversial communications machine, and played the role of bipartisan-partisan ambassador and bridge-builder to the establishment in the fledging Clinton administration.

And when he wasn't helping to make policy, Gergen was observing and assessing the nation's leaders as a nationally acclaimed journalist and commentator for PBS and U.S. News & World Report. He's a man who loves being "in the arena," at the heart of the action, "in the trenches" — he takes to it, he says, "like a moth to a flame." But now the Washington wise man is ready to step back, at least partially, so that he can give back.

"Those of us who've had an opportunity to work in government and around this town have an obligation to share what we've learned, not only about our successes and things that have gone well, but also about the mistakes we've made — and I've made a lot of mistakes," he says, smiling over coffee at a cafe in Washington recently. "I've reached that stage in my life where it's important to begin to try to make sense of all of that and to try to impart to the next generation as best one can on the meaning of it all."

In January, Gergen accepted a five-year appointment as a professor of public service at the Kennedy School, a move he believes is in keeping with the deep-seated commitment to pubic service drilled into him by a stern, but loving father and his Southern heritage. From the school's perspective, he is the consummate political practitioner at the height of his game, able to bring real-world experience to help balance the students' more theoretical and academic pursuits. But more than that, Kennedy School Dean Joseph S. Nye, Jr., believes he is simply a "wonderful citizen," an apt symbol for the school's own mission.

"David has always had an old-fashioned view of public service that goes beyond partisanship, and I think that's what we stand for as well," says Nye.

In the classroom, the packed Wiener Auditorium in early May, Gergen's conversational tone and relaxed demeanor belie the intensity with which 90 students sit in rapt attention. The oversubscribed class is titled "The Arts of Political Leadership," but one student says it's really a lesson in "political wisdom." Indeed, as Gergen outlines the prerequisites of a healthy organizational structure and the required fail-safes necessary to deal with the inevitable crisis, he intersperses his own, sometimes painful political experiences. That gives weight, an invaluable psychological perspective, and immediacy to the class. He brings it to life.

"This has also shown me there really is a moral dimension to leadership," says third-year law student Peter Alderman. "I'd taken another class...where we just focused on campaign strategy and I felt there was no soul. It's interesting to hear that there are issues of policy that shouldn't just reflect your own desire to win, but the larger interests of the country. That was nice."

While Gergen applauds what he sees as "a new spirit of service" in America's young, he also has what can best be characterized as a sense of urgency about the need to revive on the national level a civic sense that champions sacrifice and pulling together for the common good. In an increasingly cynical and divisive political environment, it's one of the challenges that both he and the school face as the number of graduates going into the public sector continues to diminish each year.

Gergen's goal here is clear: he wants to train tomorrow's political leaders. He sees that as his service. And just as he emphasizes to his students the need for leaders to constantly reassess and examine their own strengths and weaknesses, he too, sheds a critical eye on his own behavior. In this first year teaching at Harvard, he says, he was not as good as he would have liked to be in channeling the student's conversations.

"I'm still learning what it is to teach. It sounds easy, but it's more difficult than I thought," he says. "How does one actually inspire people or open their minds and make a meaningful difference in their thinking? It's not just a question of assigning a certain reading or of lecturing."

One could argue that pedagogy runs in his veins. Gergen grew up, the youngest of four boys raised on a dirt road three miles from the Duke University campus, where his father was chair of the math department. It
was his father's actions, Gergen says, almost more than his words that taught him about sacrifice.

"He had very high aspirations for us in terms of our educational attainments, but didn't have the money to make that happen," he says. "So that when I was 18, he actually took a second job at night to put me through school — it always impressed upon me that when duty calls, when certain things are important to you, you work hard and sacrifice if you need to."

Gergen graduated from Yale. Then stayed on for another year to study international relations, thinking he might want to be a journalist or run for office. But he switched tacks and came to law school at Harvard.

When he graduated, he faced one of the most difficult questions before his generation — a question that he believes continues to have a profound effect upon our nation and how it is currently governed: whether to join the military during the Vietnam War.

"I think because of my southern roots and the family that I had that I really had to serve — that it was important not to duck it," he says. "There was nothing heroic about it, it was just that if you thought the war was a just cause, which I did, then you had to be there, put your money on the line as it were."

He signed up for the Navy, requested assignment to Southeast Asia, but never saw direct combat. After two and a half years, he was asked to join a group of young officers at the White House that was tasked with reforming the Selective Service.

It was his first taste of the White House. He called it a "wonderfully interesting experience." But it wasn't until after he mustered out of the Navy and was offered a job as a speechwriter in the Nixon administration that he really got caught up in the Washington power game. (It was a job which he was genuinely surprised to have been offered. He'd voted for Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and was more liberal on domestic issues than Nixon.)

"Especially when you're young, the White House has its own emotional satisfactions just in being there," he says. "I found it enormously interesting and stimulating."

Then the damn broke on Watergate. Gergen said neither he nor any of his colleagues realized the perilousness of the situation in which they found themselves. As the allegations continued to pile up, Gergen's mentor left and he was put in charge of the speechwriting staff. [He was only 30 years old.] As the crisis around the cover-up of the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters unfolded around him, he stayed loyal to the president, persuaded that he was innocent, almost until the end.

Gergen now calls it a toughening, traumatic learning experience that taught him how fleeting friendship could be for some, as well as how deep and enduring for others. He also learned the importance of having his own self-worth, independent of the perceptions of others in Washington's fishbowl-like culture. And then, there are the insights that can only come from being in the middle of it when all hell breaks loose.

"It gave me a much better sense about crisis and how to handle it," he says. "And it deeply imprinted on me the notion that the government has to be very straight with people — the sins of Watergate revolved mostly around the cover-up and the lying to people after it was over."

After Nixon resigned, Gergen stayed on at the Ford White House, but not for long. After he left, he became a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington and managing editor of Public Opinion, a journal of ideas.

In 1980, he returned to the White House as President Ronald Reagan's communications director. It was in this role that he earned a reputation as one of the fathers of political spin. And within the context of that time, Gergen has no apologies. He says he watched the previous four presidents be judged failures, in part, because they'd lost control of their own message to the network producers in New York.

"Increasingly the media was characterizing [each president] and undermining him in a way that was difficult for anyone to govern," he says. "I felt that it was important for Reagan to reassert in a much more aggressive way his own message; he'd won the election, and he had the right to set the public agenda as best he could."

But what started out as an attempt to bring some balance, turned into something for which Gergen says he has "great misgivings." Spin became the rule; the need for a short-term headline replaced the fight for long-term achievement.

"And since I had some responsibility in helping to get that started," he says. "I felt I had some responsibility to try to help right the balance."

After he left the Reagan White House, he spent a year as a fellow at the Kennedy School's Institute of Politics in 1984. He started writing a column then, and soon became a regular feature in U.S. News & World Report, and a regular face on the "MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour." His goal was to be a constructive, responsible journalistic voice.

And he appears to have succeeded. Mortimer Zuckerman, the owner of U.S. News, calls Gergen "the fairest, most open-minded and most generous" of journalists.

"There's none of the nastiness about him that you often associate with a lot of attack journalists," he says.

And while some have criticized Gergen for stepping with ease between the political and journalistic forums, Zuckerman contends that makes him a "better public servant and a better journalist, understanding it vastly better from having been on the inside how policy and politics are intertwined."

After nine years in the world of journalism, President Clinton asked Gergen to step back onto the political side and join his new administration, which was suffering from a string of policy failures, fumbled nominations, and political gaffes. Gergen did, believing that as his father taught him, when a president of the United States asks for help, you give it.

The move still shocked Washington's political establishment and set Gergen up for what was probably the most painful journalistic attack of his career.

On Sunday, October 31, 1993, David Gergen stared out from the front of the magazine section of the New York Times. The piece by Michael Kelly was titled "Master of the Game." It not only characterized Gergen as a creator of spin, but made him the symbol of a cynical, dishonest Washington culture spun out of control — one obsessed with image at the expense of truth.

For Gergen it was a "deeply wounding" piece, and from his expression when it's brought up, it's clear it remains a source of pain. Gergen nonetheless says that Kelly is a "gifted journalist," although that piece he believes mounted to "character assassination." The most distressing part was that Kelly discounted the nine years Gergen had worked to bring balance and substance back into the Washington culture.

Kelly now admits he was harsh. If he was writing it today, he says, it would be a different piece. "I really do believe the central point was absolutely right [about the culture], but if I could go back and do that over again I would have liked to have given him more credit for basically being a decent, honest guy who did recognize [that spin] wasn't good for government — and that counts for something."

Gergen is also philosophical about the piece, noting that in deciding to go into public life today an individual becomes fair game. "You have to live with it," he says, simply.

But Gergen also works hard to counter that part of Washington that can be unnecessarily cynical and destructive. He's interested in making things work and is constantly reaching out for resources. As U.S. News & World Report editor Steve Smith says, "He's a fantastic listener — he spends most of his time hearing what's on people's minds."

You see it when he encounters his colleagues, friends, and even minor acquaintances in the street. He always responds reticently about himself, then launches into a thoughtful inquiry about the other's health, their family, and their work. It's as if an intent, genuine curiosity and concern accentuates his natural southern graciousness.

Smith says that gives him "an instinctive sense" of how the public is going to react to issues. It also inspires enormous respect in those who've worked closely with him for years, as well as in some of his newer, younger colleagues.

Justin Dillon met Gergen when he was a visiting professor at Duke several years ago. After Dillon graduated, he worked as a researcher in Gergen's Washington office. He says it was an invaluable experience.

"It's a rare job that allows a 22-year-old the chance to give input on significant issues, and it's a rare man who gives you that kind of job," says Dillon.

Gergen brings that same kind of respect to the students at the Kennedy School. He says they're constantly stretching and challenging him intellectually and that, he believes, can bode well for the future.

"These students have an enormous amount of talent," he says. "And if their commitment to service matches their talent, then we're in great shape."

Alexandra Marks MPA '91 is senior writer for The Christian Science Monitor.