David R. Gergen
Editor-At-Large, US News & World Report
Former Advisor to Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, & Clinton
"Eyewitness to Power"
Sept. 22, 2000 

David Gergen: I am very much of the school that believes this country has made enormous progress in the last 40 to 50 years. I grew up in North Carolina at a time when I went to an all white high school at a time when we didn’t understand the story that I was told. The narrative that I understood was that blacks liked it that way. And then along came some black kids who had the courage to go out and do and to sit in and to march and to go on those bus rides and help to open our eyes to the fact that there was so much injustice. And they liberated my part of the country, our part of the country. They helped to tear down not only the walls between racists, but the wall between the South and the rest of the country. So that over the last 30 or 40 years, I have seen transformation in the Raleigh-Durham area where I come from in North Carolina, and indeed across much of the South, that has been just wonderfully striking. And I think a lot of that had to do with leadership. I was joined in the government in the beginning by a fellow named Terry Sanford, who was a governor of our state. I went to work for him when he was governor and worked in the civil rights area and then later on he became president of Duke and continued that kind of leadership. And I saw that first hand how transformative, to use a phrase from James McGergor Burns, how transformative an individual could be in positions of leadership. And I think we have made as a people, enormous strides over the last 30 or 40 years. And we are poised on what could be a new golden age for this country and for people all over the world. Our ideas, our core ideas of freedom and capitalism are spreading to other countries very rapidly. The revolutions that are taking place, coming from universities such as this one, not only in the information technologies but in the life sciences, I think are going to transform the way we live in the years ahead and bring some of the most important questions to the public arena that politicians have ever faced. And it’s also true that we as a people have such power now in the world. I think we sometimes don’t appreciate fully how far ahead we are from the rest of the world. I was in at a speech not long ago, when Larry Summers, the current Secretary of the Treasury, said there hadn’t been as much of a gap between the number one and the number two nations in the world in 500 years. And I called Paul Kennedy at Yale, who is a historian at Yale, and I said, "Is that true?" And he said, "No, that’s not really true. You have to go all the way back to ancient Rome to find a time when any country was as preeminent around the world as this one is, or through civilization as this one is today."

So we have enormous power in our midst to do good in the world. But I think our capacity to do good greatly depends upon our leadership, especially upon our public leadership and I think starting with the American presidency but it extends into other institutions, not only universities but non-profit groups, through corporations and indeed through churches and other religious institutions. I think individual leaders do make a difference. It’s worth remembering that the 20th century began with a similar air of triumphalism, a sense that it was going to be a century of prolonged peace, a century of great prosperity, a century of enormous breakthroughs in technology and science, and then the 50 years that followed were the bloodiest that we had ever experienced. We were plunged not only into two World Wars, but we had a depression that John Menard Caines compared to the Dark Ages. The number of democracies was cut in half between the First World War and the Second World War. In other words it’s possible to go backwards.

Now why did we go backwards during those first years in so many significant ways? Well John Keagan, the British historian, has written that the political history of the 20^th century can be found in the biographies of 6 men – Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao Zedong, Roosevelt, and Churchill. And what’s noticeable of course about those six is the first four were all tyrants. And they did help to plunge the world into some pretty awful times and we lost millions of people around the world because of that. It’s been argued for a long time about whether individual leaders matter. Tolstoy thought they did not. In "War and Peace" he essentially argued that had there been no Napoleon, war would still have swept across Europe and into Russia. I think the 20^th century has made demonstratively clear that Tolstoy, on this particular issue, was wrong. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. puts it this way. He has a book on the cycles of American history and there is a wonderful essay in there about democracy and leadership, and it was one of the starting points for my own writing. But he poses the question this way, "In 1931 or 1932 a young Englishman was visiting New York City and at night he was crossing Park Avenue. He looked the wrong way and he was struck down by a cab. It almost killed him. He said he managed survive but he said later he felt like he was squashed like a gooseberry. Eighteen months later a young American was sitting in an open car in Miami when a crazed gunman came out and at point blank range fired, missed, hit the man next to him and killed him." Now the question that Schlesinger poses is this, "Suppose that young Englishman, Winston Churchill, had died when he was hit by that cab? And suppose that young American, Franklin Roosevelt, had died when that crazed gunman opened fire in Miami and instead hit the mayor of Chicago? Would history have been any different?" Well it’s hard to imagine. Neville Chamberlain or Lord Halifax giving voice to the British lion. And similarly it’s very hard to imagine John Nance Garner, Rossevelt’s vice president, the man who thought the vice presidency wasn’t worth a bucket of spit, guiding this nation through the depression and the Second World War. So individuals do matter. And I think the quality of our individual leadership matters. What I’ve been trying to do is sit back. I taught at Duke for a semester each year for about four years, and I recently had the privilege of going to the Kennedy School. And I’ve tried to bring together in classes discussions and readings about leadership. What does it take to be a leader? And I’ve tried to write some of those observations in this book, of things that I saw in the White House. And as I said in the introduction and the preface, I don’t claim to have a lot of brilliant, original insights in this. There is, a lot of this is common sense. You know that old fogum book about "Everything I Needed to Know in Life I Leaned in Kindergarten." There is a lot about leadership that one learns early in life, but we just forget over time that we need to be reminded about. But I think there is a lot about leadership that I think every CEO here will know is that it has a lot to do with common sense. So I am not trying to make large claims about academic brilliance or breakthroughs, but what I would like to do is share some thoughts about in particular one element of leadership that I found to be the one issue that struck me the hardest. I suggested in the book a number of other conclusions about leadership that I think are fairly straight forward – the need for a leader to have a central purpose for your enterprise, what are these worries you’re trying to take people, and in the American tradition for the American president I think it’s vital that that central purpose be rooted in traditional American values. And I think there’s no place better to go to find the central purpose of an administration than to the Declaration of Independence, that you find that our greatest leaders, certainly Washington agreed with this, and Jefferson had written it, but if you find the Lincoln. Lincoln grew out of the Declaration of Independence on his way to Washington for his inaugural he stopped in Philadelphia and he said, "I’ve never had a sentiment about politics that did not come from the Declaration." And you go right through Teddy Roosevelt trying to extend the promise of the Declaration to women; Franklin Roosevelt building the Jefferson memorial; Martin Luther King in 1963 on the march of Washington going to the foot of the Lincoln memorial. In his dream, 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, when he started talking about that he went back to the Declaration. That was the promise that we weren’t fulfilling. I think our great leaders have all had convictions that have been based and rooted in traditional American values, and they go astray when they try to violate those values, when they try to present a program. I thought the Clinton Health Care Program, for example, one reasons it went down, it was well-intentioned, but one of the reasons it went down was it went against the grain of the American psyche. It went against our sort of value system about being a country of individualists. We are not Canada. We are not Western Europe. We have a very different set of values. There is a wonderful book by Seymore Martin Lipsick called "American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword" which points that out.

So there is a need for conviction. There is a need for capacity to persuade. It’s very, very important, especially in a democracy. And yes there is an element of stagecraft that goes all the way back to the beginning of the republic. It goes back to George Washington. All the way through our history, our best leaders have had an element of acting in them and we shouldn’t apologize for that. Franklin Roosevelt once saw Orsen Wells and he said, "Orsen, you and I are the two best actors in our country." So I think there is an element and I don’t apologize for that. I do think we have too much spin today. I think our politics has gotten way out of hand and our political discussions have gotten way out of hand by the excessive amount of spin. And I personally, having been involved with some of that early on in the Reagan administration, because we thought we were trying to promote some policies with regard to Reagan, I feel that I contributed to that. It’s one of my greatest regret in politics that I feel I’ve contributed to some of that deterioration and we have to get the spin back in the bottle because it’s just totally out of hand now. It’s become a polite form of lying on the part of the government.

But I do think persuasion is important. I think a little stagecraft goes with that. I think you have to know, not only be able to persuade but you have to know the system. You have to understand how to make the system work and respect the other institutions of government. In particular in Washington you have to respect the Congress. You have to respect the press. I believe you have to respect the people who are your neighbors, who live in that city and have been there for years and years and years. The Ben Bradleys and the Sally Quinns and the Katherine Grahams are important people in that city, and to them your nose at them as say a Richard Nixon did or indeed a Bill Clinton did with the press, only invites trouble.

I think it’s essential in addition to have a very, very strong team around you. The best presidents I have known have been the ones who have been humble enough but comfortable enough in who they are to appoint people who were better than they were in the jobs they were filling. You show me somebody who appoints weak people and I’ll show you a weak leader. Our best president, Washington…if you look at Richard Berkheiser, who’s a columnist but he’s also written a wonderful biography of Washington, points out that when Washington wanted to draft a public speech he would turn to James Madison and Alexander Hamilton for ideas. He could ask Thomas Jefferson to come up with a draft. Then he’d give it back to Hamilton and Alexander for rewrite. And if he ever needed additional help he had John Adamson over there in the vice presidency. Now that was a pretty good speech writing team. But he had wonderful advisors about him. That Washington Cabinet was a luminous Cabinet. Lincoln had, the first thing he did the night he was elected, was sit down and figure out who his Cabinet would be. And he appointed a really terrific Cabinet, well-balanced and representing different interests in the country. Our best presidents have done that over the years.

I think it’s really important for a president to be a good politician. And people undervalue that but this is about politics. And if you don’t like politics you probably shouldn’t be in this arena. And a person like a Reagan got off to a good start, which is vital, in part because he was a much better politician than people gave him credit for. He had that kind of "aw shucks" look but he was a pretty savvy politician. This is not something we should denigrate in our political leaders. If they don’t understand politics, they can’t make the system work. And yes, politics can get dirty. And yes, politics can be mean. And yes, it’s almost reached a nadir in our period. N-A-D-I-R, in this period, but it’s still…it can be a noble undertaking.

And finally, a president has to have a legacy. He has to inspire others to carry on. Bill Leuchtenburg is a wonderful historian at the University of North Carolina. One of his best books is called, "In the Shadow of Roosevelt," and it’s how seven presidents after Roosevelt carried on in his tradition, even so that Richard Nixon, in many ways, was the last liberal president in this country. He was closer to Roosevelt than he was to Reagan, in a lot of his domestic policies. People don’t appreciate that, but that’s true.

So those were some of the other lessons I tried to spin out, I tried to lay out in this book. (I should ban the word spin from my vocabulary.) But I wanted to come to the central point, and the one I try to bring to students in Cambridge and elsewhere, because I think it’s so central to what we teach the young, especially in universities. And that is the most important lesson. And it was a surprise for me. I grew up in an academic family. I grew up in North Carolina and my dad, as I said, was a math professor at Duke, who was chairman of the math department there for a quarter of a century. And I had the privilege of growing up in the shadow of that university. And while I was there, I grew up believing that you appoint the brightest person to the job and you’ll get the best results, that brains are what will make the difference in every job. And what I found was that in politics it’s not that simple. Capacity matters. It really matters that you know your way around the Oval Office. It matters that you know your way around the country. It matters that you know your way around the world. And I have some concerns about the Republican candidate this year not knowing his way around the world the way his dad did. I think his dad was better prepared. We could go on to those issues more if you want in a few minutes.

But in any event, capacity matters, but character matters more. Character matters more. I say that on a couple of grounds. One, the first president I worked for was Richard Nixon. I came in and had a fairly idealistic view of what he was about. I mean, I had heard the stories, but I came and joined him the first term. And there is no question that Richard Nixon had a very, very bright side. He was one of the smartest men I’ve met in politics. He was certainly, and I think he accomplished more good things for the country than some of his critics now acknowledge. And in his bright side, one of the things that I found was very attractive about him, was that he was the best strategist I’ve ever met in politics. He was a man who could go out on the mountaintop and look out over the horizon and see how the forces of history were changing things, and try to bend or nudge those forces in the favor of America’s national interests. That he was particularly good at. And he was good at strategy in part because he relentlessly worked and traveled the world to meet people, to build up an understanding of other cultures, to see how different other cultures were from this one and understand just how the world did work. He was a serious student of geopolitics. He would had been an excellent professor, so in some ways he was a frustrated teacher. But the other part of it was that he read. He read deeply. I have never met anybody in the presidency who so consistently wanted to read history. And he understood something that Churchill said. Churchill once said about his own life, that because he read so far back, he thought he could see farther ahead. And I believe that to be true. Nixon, when he was president, asked Pat Moignahan, who was serving as his counselor in the beginning, to give him a list of books that he might read because he often woke up 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning. He couldn’t sleep. He was anxious. He was restless. And I remember how much he…reading a book about Disraeli, Robert Blake’s "Biography of Disraeli" and how he talked about that so often. I’ve still got that book on my bookshelf. And how that influenced him. He wanted to be another Disraeli, in fact. Now you can misread history as we all know. I think he misread history sometimes with regard to de Gaulle. I think de Gaulle was too much his hero. De Gaulle was a great heroic leader in many ways, but doesn’t fit the American experience very well. He was not a small d, democratic. And I think Nixon worshipped him too much. But I do think that sense of strategy came from the fact that he read, and he read seriously. Harry Truman once said that "not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers." It’s a nice quote and it comes from a man, who was the only president…Harry Truman was the only president in the 20^th century who never went to college, but he read and he kept reading. And he was one of the best educated presidents we’ve had in this country because he read so much. You go back and read "The Buck Stops Here" or something. He dictated that shortly before he died. He died and his daughter finished it up for him. But it’s all dictated and it’s a history of the American experience. It’s just wonderful because if somebody just sitting here talking about what America was all about. I mean he has a long chapter on Andrew Jackson that just knocks your socks off. It’s just a really brilliant chapter.

So there was a lot about Nixon, and I could go through other things – his years in the wilderness, his inner steel, and the rest – that was bright. But when I first came into the Nixon administration, my mentor, a fellow named Ray Price, pulled me aside and said, "This fellow has a very bright side and if that bright side succeeds, he can be a very significant president. But he also has a dark side, and if that side succeeds, they’ll be hell to pay." And that turned out to be fairly prophetic, because Nixon did nurse these wounds. I don’t know where they came from. Bryce Harlow, who is familiar here to this center, who came down here for Ken Thompson on more than one occasion and was a mentor for mine, said in one of the Miller Center publications that somebody must have done something terrible to Nixon when he was young because he did have this kind of paranoia about life. He always saw barbarians at the gate trying to crowd in on him, trying to do him in. His whole theory was that you’ve got to do them in before they do it to you. And he lashed out so easily at people and there were people on the staff. The staff was divided between those who were appealing to the brighter side, the Moignahans, the Len Garmens, the Ray Prices, the Bill Sapphires and other, Arthur Burns, versus those who played on that dark side and exploited it. And what he did as that dark side took hold, he allowed places within the White House, there were compartments within compartments there, to be criminalized and to be sort of rogue criminal elements floating around the White House. And that eventually brought on Watergate. I don’t know whether he ordered Watergate. I see no evidence he did. I believe he didn’t, but it’s irrelevant to me because I think the people that carried out Watergate, the break-in, thought that’s what he wanted. And they thought that’s what he wanted because he allowed that sort of criminality to take hold in different parts of his White House. And that all came, and eventually of course, it brought him down. He could not control the demons inside him in the end, and they brought him down. And it was my first lesson that a man who was as capable as Nixon was, was brought down by character. And character really was destiny in his case, as Eric Light has told us 1000 years ago. And then you come, now these two men would not like to be in the same sentence with each other…Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon. There is a parallel, not in the degree of criminality. Bill Clinton is not a criminal. But there is a parallel in one sense and that is that Bill Clinton is similarly blessed with an extraordinary amount of talent. He’s the smartest man I’ve seen in that office since Nixon. Bill Clinton was the kind of fellow that you would walk in and be talking to him in the office, there’d be two or three people in the office, and it would be very intimate a conversation. And when you would start talking, he would be talking a little bit, but he would be filling out a New York Times crossword while you were talking. And now I found that a little daunting. In fact I found it insulting. I mean you would be talking about what’s going on in Houston and he would be asking about "who was that character in the second act of Aida." It was awkward but he was really bright. He reads people. It’s one of the reasons I was attracted to him early on. First time I met him was ten years before he became president. He was reading a book about Japanese work standards and how the Japanese train their employees versus American work standards. And he really wanted to have a serious talk about it. And I never met him when he wasn’t reading a book or thinking about a book he’d read somewhere. He was the best tactician we’ve had. He was not a strategist. He didn’t think long term, but he was extraordinary in the short term. And that’s how he out-maneuvered Newt Gingrich and everybody else in Washington, because he did. And of course he’s verbally very dexterous and he used that tactical knowledge and understanding very shrewdly. He’s a synthesizer more than an original thinker. I probably am guilty of something of the same thing, but the fact is that he was a brilliant synthesizer and he could put together things very well. And when he came to Washington I voted for him. After voting for a string of Republicans, I voted for Clinton in ’92 because I thought the country needed domestic reform and needed to be bipartisan in nature, and I thought he represented that. I’d known him for a long time. And I thought he represented the great hope for change in a very positive way. And in many ways I think he did bring change. And I think he deserves more credit than he generally gets from his critics. And yet in the end he couldn’t manage those fault lines. And of course it brought on him, along with the overzealous help of some of his enemies, it brought on these terrible times we went through for a year and a half in this country. I believe in the end that Bill Clinton would have been better off if had he been elected four years later. He did not think he was going to be elected in 1992 when he first ran. He thought that was a trial run. We could talk more about that if you’d like. But he thought he would come back and win in 1996. Now if that had happened, I believe he would have been more mature. I think his efforts to live a somewhat different lifestyle would have been more successful. You would have had those habits more ingrained. I think he would have been clearer headed about what he was trying to achieve. And I think his marriage would have been more settled. It was not settled when he got there. The rules of engagement, the rules of understanding in the marriage would have been better settled. And in fact, I think he would have built up habits of character that would have served him better four years later and maybe we could have escaped this sort of process we went through in the last few years. But there’s no question to me. If there was any doubt after the Nixon experience about how much character mattered, the Clinton experience settles it to my way of thinking. And it does demonstrate to me ‘yes, capacity matters, but character matters more.’ And I add just one brief note on that.

Character is partly this question of integrity, which is such a critical part of it. Ellen Simpson said, in introducing Gerry Ford at the Kennedy School a year ago, and Ford the most honest man I’ve known in politics. She said about Ford, "In politics if you have integrity, nothing else matters. And if you don’t have integrity, nothing else matters." I think there is a lot of truth to that. So that part of the character issue is very important.

But there is another part which goes to judgement and temperament, which I want to briefly talk about because it goes to some of these same issues. It’s always been a bit of a mystery, I think, for a lot of us, especially those of us who sort of grew up in the university atmosphere, why a Jimmy Carter who was so bright, and so clearly wanted good things for the country, and indeed, I think, has made very clear since he left office that he is a saint. I have an enormous admiration for this man and his personal capacity. I have had a chance to be with him several times in the last few years and there is a luminous quality about Jimmy Carter that is just very impressive. And yet he was a very ineffectual president. And along came just after him a man who was nowhere near as bright, who had nowhere near the formal education, and was treated skeptically by his opponents as an "amiable dunce." And yet Reagan turned out to be a better leader. Now you can disagree with him on his policy. And you probably disagree and think that he was way off track with his conservatism, but as a leader I would submit to you that he was better. James McGregor Burns, who was no Reagan fan in terms of his politics, believes and I believe that Reagan was the best leader since Roosevelt. Maybe Burns doesn’t go quite that far, but he ranks him right up there. And so the question why is it that a man who is so bright as Carter is not as good a leader as Reagan, who was not as bright? And it goes to this other aspect about it. Reagan was bright enough to know his way around. Some people think he was not. And it’s true at times he was very dreamy. He could be very disengaged, and he got into a lot of trouble a couple of times. I think the budget deficits in part came because he wasn’t paying enough attention. The scandal of Iran contra came because of that…and those were really the worse parts of his presidency. But if you look at the general thrust of his presidency - changing the minds of the country about a lot of things, moving us toward an entrepreneurial economy, pacing the end of the Cold War, bringing on just a whole new sense of confidence in the country - the things he did accomplish. You have to say it started with his capacity, but it went to his temperament, that element of his character. So it goes back to this fundamental point that I would like to end with and then I’ll stop, and that is that I think we ought to be teaching our young people, "Listen you’ve got to understand the world. You’ve got to read deeply. You’ve got to study deeply. It’s really important for the decisions that lie ahead for your generation. But it’s equally important that you develop your own self, the rest of your self, that you become a whole person, that you develop your character, that you develop the habits of behaving in your relationships with others. And not assume that just because you’re Phi Beta Kappa, you’re God’s answer to the world. That there are other elements here that are very, very important and that people in this country need to be treated with respect if they don’t have the same education that you do, if they don’t have the same privileges in life that you do. That you have to relate to them and realize that we’re all in this together. That you had the privilege of a great education whether you be at UVA or Duke or Harvard or wherever you may be, but that you relate to people in ways that treat them with the decency and respect that our great leaders have." I think that if we can help our young people see that, I really believe we can raise a generation of leaders who will bring us to what I would like to think would be a Golden Age, but we still have a lot of work to do.