David Gergen, consummate political insider, dies at 83

David R. Gergen, who helped craft and protect the image of four presidents as a senior White House communications adviser and who traveled the consummate political insider’s path of high-profile jobs in punditry and academia, died July 10 at a retirement community in Lexington, Massachusetts. He was 83.

The cause was Lewy body dementia, a progressive brain disease, his son Christopher said.

A conservative-leaning centrist, Gergen was a ranking official in three Republican administrations (Nixon, Ford, Reagan) and one Democratic (Clinton). He held top editing posts at magazines including U.S. News & World Report, where he was also a columnist; spent decades as a respected political commentator on CNN, NPR and PBS; and had prominent jobs at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute and the left-leaning Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

An institutionalist in an era of increasing distrust of institutions, the mild-mannered Gergen often used his media appearances to call for greater civility among those who enter public service. As early as 1994, he lamented the “breakdown of goodwill among elected politicians” and the character attacks and ad hominem ridicule that await someone entering public life in a media age that rewards attention-seekers.

“People’s reputations are broken much faster,” he said.

As his gangly 6-foot-5 frame loped through corridors of power and prestige, Gergen carried himself with an air of a genial Boy Scout and erudite professor. He spoke with the soft drawl of his native North Carolina and had an earnest belief in the usefulness of the political spinmeister, as he was often called, to sell presidential policies and magnify presidential power.

As a White House official, his understated, disarming personality and professed idealism toward public service seemed to win over many in the press — whose access he often controlled with a velvet glove — and to keep him in steady demand.

“To say that I rely on him is an understatement,” James A. Baker III, Ronald Reagan’s White House chief of staff, told The Washington Post in 1981. “He’s the best conceptualizer, in terms of communications strategy, that we have.”

Gergen cultivated friendships with political figures as varied as Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and Ross Perot, and he explained to Rolling Stone magazine that he was drawn foremost to “strong, charismatic leaders … people who have that extra dash of power and an inner strength about them.”

For years, Gergen was a fixture at elite conclaves and networking retreats of the influential and well-connected in politics, government policy, business and journalism. At the Renaissance Weekend symposium in South Carolina, in 1984, he befriended Clinton, then a little-known Arkansas governor who shared his interest in late-night schmoozing.

Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley said Gergen impressed many with his bonhomie, credentials and his silver-tongued conversation about the American political scene. Gergen’s “greatest skill was in communicating the modern presidency as a pundit,” he said.

“As a star pundit on CNN, he created the impression he was this guru, a political fix-it man and a wise man in the tradition of Dean Acheson and George Kennan,” Brinkley said, referring to major Cold War-era political advisers. “He had such a genial nature that there’d always be a lightbulb going off in the White House and someone saying, ‘Why don’t we bring Gergen in?’”

In the White House, Brinkley added, “Gergen’s significance was to calm the waters and offer a press perspective that could be adopted by presidents who often disdained the press. He was a stabilizing force that you need sometimes when you’re creating a team.”

Gergen’s entry into politics was fortuitous. As a Yale undergraduate, he was managing editor of the school newspaper, and after completing Harvard Law School and four years of Navy service, he was weighing a career in academia, politics and journalism.

A Yale friend whose father was close to President Richard M. Nixon persuaded him in 1971 to apply for an opening in the White House as an assistant to head speechwriter Raymond K. Price Jr. Gergen confessed that he had voted for Democratic presidential nominee Hubert Humphrey over Nixon in 1968 and was brought aboard anyway.

Gergen’s politics, by all accounts, were based on pragmatism more than ideology. He said he “began wearing Republican cloth” when he joined Nixon’s White House. He was never a registered Republican, according to his son, and later described himself as a “registered independent” who had consistently been a foreign policy hawk committed to social progress.

A quick study under mentor Price, Gergen proved his mettle in speechwriting, opposition research, damage control and other duties of the TV-age public-relations expert who seeks to defend the presidential image and to attack rivals. He rose to the top of the White House speechwriting shop and had a hand in drafting Nixon’s resignation letter in August 1974 as the Watergate crisis engulfed the presidency.

Gergen had a short stint as communications director and special counsel for President Gerald Ford, then attained greater prominence helping the Reagan campaign with debate preparation in 1980. He played a decisive role in shaping a key closing argument for Reagan, who asked voters during his televised debate against President Jimmy Carter: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”

In their book “Blue Smoke and Mirrors: How Reagan Won and Why Carter Lost the Election of 1980,” political columnists Jack Germond and Jules Witcover described the question as a “brilliantly simple conclusion.”

The Reagan line resonated with a public weary of “stagflation,” a combination of high inflation and stagnant economic growth that dogged the Carter years, and the “better off” question became an enduring rhetorical device used by both major parties to make a case to voters for a change.

After Reagan’s victory, Gergen was rewarded with the job of communications director. Based on his extensive study of the first 100 days of every president from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Carter, Gergen advised the president’s staff to avoid divisive social issues and foreign policy entanglements and, instead, “to keep a simple focus and go strong on the economy. Don’t come up with other mischief.”

Ed Rollins, a top deputy in the White House political affairs office, told the New York Times that Gergen was the critical component to a media operation that did not run smoothly at first.

“Gergen really understood sound bite,” Rollins continued. “He understood how to pick a story, how to get a story that somebody was working on and change it, how to get the reporters to call the people you wanted them to call and make the story come out how you wanted. He understood that you had to be proactive about it, as opposed to just letting you guys” — the journalists — “do your job and us just reading about it in the paper the next day.”

To give the White House the narrative advantage on any story, he instituted “spin patrols” designed to promote the message of the day. His selective leaking to journalists — a tactic he had employed regularly since the Nixon years — earned him the nickname “the Sieve” and provoked the mistrust and sometimes the ire of administration hard-liners who saw the press as the opposition.

For years, Gergen was a contender in a guessing game about the identity of Deep Throat, the anonymous government-insider source for Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein when they reported their groundbreaking Watergate stories. (Deep Throat was later revealed to be the FBI’s No. 2 official, W. Mark Felt.)

At the Reagan White House, Gergen grew close to some network television journalists. He might, for instance, give them a sneak peek at a presidential speech to curry favor or create a made-for-TV moment that would humanize the president.

During one news conference televised live, he arranged for first lady Nancy Reagan to interrupt the proceedings — and a question on defense spending — to present the president with a one-candle birthday cake for his 72nd birthday.

“The carefully staged drama cast Reagan as the good-guy president and members of the press, particularly the front-row television correspondents, as all part of his happy little White House family,” White House reporter Lou Cannon wrote in The Post.

“Newspaper reporters out of range of the cameras in the White House briefing room,” Cannon continued, “became a Greek chorus whose only role was to laugh or applaud an exchange of one-liners between the Reagans and the television correspondents.”

Gergen also sought opportunities to show the president in full command mode, working to persuade reluctant members of Congress.

In April 1981, he coaxed Reagan, a former movie star, to make use of a dramatic entrance to help secure passage of an economic recovery plan that included politically controversial tax and domestic spending cuts.

Soon after being released from the Washington hospital where he had been recovering from an assassination attempt, Reagan — at Gergen’s behest — delivered a warmhearted and rousing speech in favor of the recovery plan before a joint session of Congress. Dozens of Democrats took part in a standing ovation. The measure, after months of often-heated negotiation, passed.

Gergen drew intense legal and media scrutiny in 1983 when he appeared at the center of what Time Magazine described as a “miniscandal” — the discovery that Reagan’s campaign had three years earlier managed to obtain illicitly a briefing book detailing Carter’s debate strategy.

Thousands of pages of the documents were found in Gergen’s office files, under the label “Afghanistan,” although he denied involvement. Either way, he said, “we didn’t really use the stuff.” A House subcommittee report contradicted that claim, but the probe fizzled out soon afterward.

Gergen, who called himself a “pro-choice, high safety net man,” found himself increasingly distrusted by the anti-abortion, small-government conservatives who held significant clout in the Reagan White House. That he was well-liked by reporters only exacerbated tensions with co-workers, and he left in 1984.

To his dismay, Gergen later found equally suspicious adversaries on the left when he joined Team Clinton in 1993. By ideologically driven colleagues, he said, he was viewed as a talented opportunist of no fixed principles. That sentiment was misplaced, he added.

“Let me make it clear,” he told the Times after going to work for Clinton, “that I am proud that I worked for Ronald Reagan. He did a great deal for this country: brought inflation down, won the Cold War, created a lot of jobs. But there were also things that were not addressed in the 1980s, such as the pressing social problems and the declining standard of living for the middle class, and I think those things need to be undone.”

Outside the White House, Gergen parlayed his communications skills and connections into a long career as a political analyst, most visibly as a stalwart on PBS — where he was a gentle sparring partner of the center-left commentator Mark Shields on “The NewsHour” in the late 1980s and early 1990s — and later as a guest pundit on CNN.

Larry Sabato, founder and director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, called him a “natural for the news media, especially television” after his years steeped in presidential politics.

“His calm, sensible approach was the perfect addition to a network’s coverage of any big development,” Sabato added. “He could draw on history and apply it to current circumstances. While Gergen set the standard for punditry for several decades, the 1980s and 1990s especially, the media parade moved on to much more strident figures. But he fit his time beautifully and will be well remembered for it.”

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Entry into politics

David Richmond Gergen, the youngest of four brothers, was born in Durham, North Carolina, on May 9, 1942. His father was a mathematics professor and department chairman at Duke University. His mother managed the home and was involved in campus and community organizations.

His upbringing was demanding. “My father had these very high ideals — they were impossible,” an older brother, Kenneth Gergen, who became a noted social psychologist and professor at Swarthmore College, told Rolling Stone. “Home was highly competitive, with four boys who were tremendously energetic and striving.”

Gergen graduated in 1963 from Yale with a bachelor’s degree in history, worked on North Carolina Gov. Terry Sanford’s progressive biracial initiative known as the Good Neighbor Councils and completed his Harvard Law degree in 1967. For much of his Navy service during the Vietnam War, he was stationed on a repair ship based in Japan as an engineering damage-control officer.

After his years with Nixon and Ford, Gergen became managing editor for the American Enterprise Institute’s new magazine, Public Opinion.

Gergen left the Reagan administration in January 1984, worn down by infighting with hard-right Republicans over control of messaging and his press-friendly ways. Gergen went out on the lecture circuit, had a fellowship at Harvard’s Kennedy School and, in 1985, began a three-year run as managing editor of U.S. News.

Gergen then assumed the role of editor at large, giving him the freedom to focus on columns in which he often appeared sympathetic to the powerful and dispensed political advice.

Cheney’s “stature grows each year,” he wrote in 1992, noting the defense secretary’s role in persuading Congress to sweeten military retirement benefits. The next year, Gergen complained about Clinton’s “lurching to the left too often, emphasizing tax increases over spending cuts” but nevertheless judged him to be “one of the most gifted, dedicated men ever to serve in the Oval Office.”

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A return to the White House

Gergen, who had kept up with Clinton over the years, was named counselor to the president in June 1993 as the White House struggled to recover from organizational missteps and political controversies in its early months.

News accounts cited the largely youthful staff’s belligerent or clumsy media responses to such controversies as the White House travel office firings and a $200 haircut that Clinton received aboard Air Force One.

With the White House suffering from low approval ratings and fraught relations with the media, Gergen tried to steer the Clinton presidency toward image correction. That included having Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton make friendly overtures to the press, such as inviting reporters in small groups for intimate White House dinners.

To improve Clinton’s standing with Republicans in Congress, Gergen urged the president to move to the center of the political spectrum. That included helping to put together, with Clinton’s backing, a legislative coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats to support the North American Free Trade Agreement, which some in the Republican administration of George H.W. Bush had helped write.

That legislative success was, as one unnamed friend told The Post, “the first tourniquet that allowed the White House to have breathing time” amid a tumultuous first year in office.

However, Gergen said he felt himself increasingly marginalized by rival power centers, including the president’s wife, and frustrated in his efforts to exert himself meaningfully in domestic and foreign policy discussions. He left the White House months before the GOP won control of the House and Senate in the 1994 midterms.

He served on the faculty of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government from 1999 to 2023 and in 2000 helped found its Center for Public Leadership, which he led for much of that time. Gergen’s books included “Eyewitness to Power: The Essence of Leadership, Nixon to Clinton” (2001) and “Hearts Touched with Fire: How Great Leaders Are Made” (2022).

In 1967, he married Anne Wilson, a family therapist. In addition to his wife and son, survivors include a daughter, Katherine Gergen Barnett; two brothers; and five grandchildren.

At the start of the Reagan administration, when Gergen had his first brush with national attention, he revealed that he was “very much drawn to action.”

“It’s part of the reporter instinct,” he said. “You want to see it, you want to experience it, you want to be part of it. I think that’s part of the fascination of being in Washington.”

He recalled sitting in the balcony and looking down at Reagan during the joint session of Congress in 1981.

“When the president went up to the Hill to speak, after he was shot, I was just elated,” he said. “My emotions move easily, and I was enthralled by that occasion. I did have shivers when he spoke. It was one of the most moving moments I’d seen.”